All politics in a team come from one thing: when it’s not clear what will make someone stay or leave, succeed or fail. If success is based on relationship rather than performance, politics fill the void. Joe asks: imagine how effective a soccer team would be if you stayed not because of how you played but because of how much the owner’s wife liked you.
When criteria are unclear, anxiety gets misdirected. Instead of channeling energy into the work that matters, people channel it into managing relationships, protecting territory, and reading the room for threats. Politics is just misdirected anxiety — or as Brett suggests, perhaps correctly directed anxiety in a poorly defined system.
Clear goals, principles, and behavioral norms create the kind of safety that eliminates politics. People need to know what they have to do to be successful, and that they won’t be fired on a whim.