Leveraging Office Politics: Gain Influence & Reduce Destructive Conflict

Office politics aren’t always a bad thing. Ignoring them is, though!

Every office, regardless of size, is going to have its share of office politics. It’s how managers and supervisors handle the situation that matters most.

Join us to learn how you can effectively navigate and leverage the ups and downs of office politics to gain better collaboration, plus higher productivity from your employees. Don’t let drama, rumors or backstabbing hold your team back. In this dynamic, 60-minute program you’ll learn how to:

• Better identify the signs, symptoms, and effects of office politics
• Assess your own political skills and ways to improve them
• Defuse tense situations with colleagues or among employees
• Use office politics to improve communication and collaboration
• Improve the culture in your department to better the organization
• Boost your political influence in your organization

Program Highlights

What Drives Office Politics in Today’s Workplace

• Characteristics of today’s workplace and definition of “office politics”
• Forces driving political behavior
• What makes a work environment toxic?
• Advantages and disadvantages to politicking

Understanding the What, When, Who, How and Why of Office Politics

• Political games people play and how to survive, thrive, and win
• Difference between harassment and politics, including your rights and obligations
• Identification of political competencies

Putting an End to the Negative and Promoting the Positive

• Recognizing your organization’s culture and applying cultural intelligence
• Role of emotional intelligence in attitudes and interactions
• Assessing your own political acuity
• Ways managers can better model positive political behavior
• Influencing effective practices in your organizations

Live Question & Answer Session – Have your questions answered by the expert!

Program Benefits

When most people hear ‘office politics,’ they assume it’s something negative. In this dynamic program, managers and supervisors will learn how to identify and stop destructive office politicking, and learn how to also leverage it to exert more influence and foster better collaboration.

About the Speaker

Michelle Coussens is a resourceful, resilient, and relentless business professional with demonstrated success in building new programs, driving short-term efficiencies, and improving long-term effectiveness all through innovation, rigor, and courageous leadership. She has extensive experience in a variety of industries, as well as in consulting, education, and not-for-profit organizations.

• For more than ten years, Ms. Coussens has owned and operated Plan B Consulting. Services span speaking, training, and assistance in preparing strategic and business plans, project management, leadership, ethics, diversity & inclusion, operational excellence, and other related topics. In addition, she facilitates business meetings and retreats and conducts market analysis and competitive intelligence for various types of organizations worldwide.
• Michelle is on the faculty of the American Management Association where she teaches numerous different strategic planning, management, and analytical seminars to business professionals around the world and is also on the business faculty at College of DuPage. She also has developed and taught courses for NeighborWorks© America since 2005 and has served as a consultant to numerous community development organizations both within and outside the NeighborWorks network. In addition, she develops and leads business education webinars for Progressive Business Executive Education (now Premier Learning Solutions), as well as ethics and diversity classes and webinars for the Real Estate Institute. Through her business, she has published more than 150 monthly issues of her newsletter, Planning Possibilities, which is currently distributed worldwide to over 4,500 clients and contacts.