Larry D. Lauer

“If I didn’t have to deal the politics in my institution I could really make a difference with what I learned at this institute.”

That what was I was hearing after each marketing and communication summer institute I chaired for professionals in higher education. Based on my many years experience I found myself responding by telling them they should plan to spend at least half their time dealing with internal politics. I said that, but then quickly realized that this was a topic that we rarely discuss in our classrooms and conferences.

All this led me to writing a little tongue-in-cheek book about university politics called Learning to Love the Politics (www.case.org/books). What surprised me was that people outside of higher education started telling me that this was the biggest problem they faced in their organizations as well.

The book simply analyzes various leadership styles, anticipating typical barriers to supporting a more sophisticated marketing and communication program. It further describes typical situations and behaviors, and then it adapts grassroots politics techniques to deal with them.

The book further argues that internal politics are best handled within a framework of an “education strategy.” This simply means finding ways in one-on-one conversations and meetings to educate opinion leaders about the effectiveness of your work, and the specific benefits to them of supporting it. This sounds obvious, but few of us actually do it because it requires thinking ahead and organizing our work into brief easily explained categories.

Loving internal politics might be a stretch for many of us, but it is actually a subject matter that can be mastered. There are effective strategies and tactics and they clearly demonstrate how losing a few battles can actually lead to winning the day!