Chapter 4

Political management skills: acquiring power to make things happen

In most organisations, you can find smart people and you can find nice people. You can even find people who are both smart and nice. But they are not necessarily the best or most successful managers. There are plenty of smart, nice people with high intelligence quotient (IQ) and high emotional quotient (EQ) who are eking out a quiet existence in the backwaters of the organisation. They are much liked but little used. Meanwhile, people who are not as smart or not as nice seem to levitate magically upwards through the organisation to positions of ever greater power.

The missing element for the smart, nice people is political quotient (PQ) skills: political intelligence. ...

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