S2E7. Make It About The Business, Not The Politics - The Chaos of Scale

Every growing business will experience politics, tension, and interpersonal drama. The problem isn’t that people disagree—it’s when decisions start being driven by alliances, self-preservation, and turf wars instead of what’s best for the business.  

In this episode of The Chaos of Scale, Andy Golding explores why politics naturally emerge as organisations grow, how ambiguity fuels self-serving decision-making, and what leaders can do to keep teams focused on outcomes instead of agendas. 

Drawing on real-world examples, strategic decision-making frameworks, and the principles of Transactional Analysis, Andy unpacks how high-performing teams create healthy tension without letting it become destructive conflict.  

If your organization feels slower, heavier, or more complicated than it should, politics may be quietly getting in the way. This episode will help you cut through the noise and bring every conversation back to the one thing that matters most: what serves the business best.  

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Transcript

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Every company has politics and interpersonal drama. It is a naturally occurring product of deeply different humans working together. And I don't think that politics and interpersonal drama are a problem. I actually think that they hint at constructive friction and people giving enough of a damn about what they're doing to have strong opinions and voicing differing or dissenting beliefs. Where politics and interpersonal drama become a problem is where we start to make business decisions based on alliances and bullying instead of making business decisions about the business and what serves the business's purpose, goals, and objectives. Always and uncompromisingly, we have to make it about the business, not the politics. Hello and welcome to The Chaos of Scale, the podcast dedicated to helping scaling businesses navigate the human side of growth. I'm your host, Andy Golding, and today we're talking about politics, drama, and circumventing them by making it about the business. As always, I promise to leave you with at least one thing to think differently about in how you show up and work with others, and at least one actionable step to help you be a rad or even more rad human at work. You know the drill. If you find value in this episode, please like, subscribe, share, and consider leaving a review. Politics and drama are not something that we consciously build into our businesses, but they are always going to crop up, and sometimes in surprising and unexpected places. They don't need to become big, massive things. They're a naturally occurring phenomenon in business. People clash, ideas clash, it happens, it's unavoidable. The question really needs to be when it does crop up, how do we navigate it effectively and constructively? As a scaling business grows in surface area, complexity and pressure scale accordingly. People might begin getting territorial and protective, and what often happens is the legacy thinking and ways of working of the old guard start to clash and interfere with the newer additions to the team who are joining the business as it is now, where the old guard is often holding on to the way things used to be. This change, shifting priorities, this evolving organizational landscape, and increasingly intense pressure to deliver are often a recipe for people to step on each other's toes. The guiding question really needs to be: what's the best decision for the business? But we often start with questions like, how's it going to land? Whose spaces am I stepping into? What does this mean for me and my team? And there are subtle shifts in thinking, but they're important ones because what's happening in that moment is we're moving from focusing on organizational progress to focusing on safety and positioning. And to some extent, there will always be a degree of positioning and image engineering that we're doing in business. That's just natural. It's always going to be around. But when that positioning and image engineering starts to get in the way of making it about the business, we have a problem. A lot of the time, especially at scale, the way that we're working, how we're acting, how we're making decisions is in this environment and coming from this pressure, ambiguity, and a lack of clarity. And we've spoken about it before, in scaling environments, ambiguity is everywhere. Priorities are shifting, context isn't always evenly distributed, and people are often making decisions without complete information. And when that's happening, it's really easy for people to start filling in the gaps themselves. As Brene Brown says, in the absence of data, people start to make up stories. And when we fill in the gaps, we do it in a way that protects us, benefits us, or serves us best. That's we're physiologically hardwired to do that from a survival perspective. But when we start to fill in the gaps with information that protects us or serves us, things start to get a little bit complicated because suddenly the way that we make decisions stops being neutral. Decisions become loaded and self-serving. We're making the decision about what protects us and what serves us best, not about what serves the business best. I was recently faced with an interesting question in a very political business situation. Somebody said to me, Would you side with that person? And I took a breath and said, I side with the business. If this person's course of action is what serves the business best, then I would go for it. If their course of action does not serve the business or the business's purpose, goals and objectives, then no. It's not about me siding with this person. It's about me siding with the business and what drives our objectives and our goals forward. But then the question becomes what serves the business? It's so easy to dismiss purpose statements and mission statements as fluffy and soft. But I would argue that their strategic value is in guiding people to make good decisions when the CEO or C suite isn't in the room. Everyone, every single person throughout your business should be empowered to make meaningful business decisions that strategically enhance your business, and they should know enough to make these decisions independently. This is how you avoid entropy as you scale. This is how you keep that entrepreneurial, startup, fast-moving, fast-paced contributor mindset. People have to have enough clarity about where we're going as a business to make the right decisions to keep moving in that direction. But in order for them to make good decisions, they need this crisp, clear insight into what the business actually aims to achieve. The goals, the strategy, the objective. And if you're a leader, I caution you to beware your own curse of knowledge here. Strategy, goals, objectives may be dead obvious to you because they influence every action you take and every decision you make. But that clarity degrades the further down you go into the business. And that you have to be intentional about making sure people know how to make good decisions for the business. There's a famous, but admittedly possibly overshared story of Southwest Airlines. And Southwest Airlines' purpose when Herb Kelleher founded the organization was to connect people to what is important in their lives through friendly, reliable, and low-cost air travel. And these are their guiding decision markers, or at least in the back in the day, they were their guiding decision makers. And anything that they did, any business decision that they made, had to tick the boxes of friendly, reliable, and low cost. So as the story goes, there was some market research done, and it came out that people wanted Southwest Airlines to start serving salads on board. They were serving crisps and bagged treats, but people wanted salads. So the team took this information to leadership and to Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines, and they said, look, this is what the people want. And Herb said, okay, cool. Does it help make us and keep us friendly, reliable, and low cost? Well, serving salads on board, does it make us friendlier? Does it keep us friendly? Yeah, I would say it does because you know, salads, food, people like these things, so we could tick the friendly box. Would serving salads on board help to keep us reliable? Probably not, because now we have to manage the cold chain, we have more logistics of food coming on board, the food needs to be made, we need to make sure that it is fresh because it has a very short lifespan. So, no, it doesn't take the reliable box. Does it keep us low cost? Well, no, because that it adds cost to now start selling a perishable or very perishable food on board. So it takes one out of our three boxes, therefore we don't do it. And it's that kind of clarity and framing that really helps people to make good decisions. So we know we need to make it about the business and we need to give people the right information to make good decisions about the business. But business is all interpersonal interactions and relationships. So, how do we, in addition to giving people clarity of strategy, how do we ensure that we set up our relationships and our interactions to make disagreement safe and to help keep decision making non-personal and really about what serves the business? There's a really useful framework that helps to make sense of this dynamic, and that framework is called transactional analysis. At a high level, transactional analysis suggests that we tend to show up in one of three states in our interactions with others: parent, adult, or child. So you have two people showing up as parent, adult, or child. The parent state is quite directive, it's often controlling, it's the this is how we do things energy. Child state is a bit more reactive, it can be defensive, emotional, and possibly even a bit withdrawn. And then there's the adult state. Adult state is grounded, rational, and focused on problem solving. And of course, we want our interactions with others to be in this adult to adult plane. And in a calm and well-functioning environment, this is a lot easier. But in scaling companies, which are generally neither calm nor well-functioning, they're chaotic, and it can often lead to people showing up in parent or child more of the time. When you have people interacting in parent and child states, you often get, so one person's in parent, one person's in child, you often get compliance, box ticking, possibly resistance or even tension. But what you don't get in a parent-child interaction is clear, strategic, constructive progress and ideation that scaling businesses need. We need to be fast moving, make decisions, move along, get it done, not tick a box, not resistance, not just like, oh, we'll get it done for the sake of getting it done. We need to get it done for the sake of moving things forward and strategically advancing the cause. We want adult-to-adult interaction because that's where we get to kind of step back from ego and emotion. And we come back to this belief that everything is figure outable. We focus on the problem itself. Where parent-child interaction is often instructive, child-child interaction is often destructive. An adult-adult is constructive and expansive. So when you have people interacting in parent-child, you get something instructive. When you have child-child, it's often destructive. An adult-adult is constructive, which is the plane that we want to be operating on. Adult adult is where we ask better questions, like what outcome are we even trying to achieve here? What information are we working with? What does success actually look like here? In an adult-adult interaction, we can challenge the thinking without challenging the individual. Imagine a meeting where we have different functions pulling in different directions. Marketing wants to invest in brand, sales is focused on short-term pipeline, finance is trying to manage cost. This tension is completely normal. It's to be expected. It's a healthy tension in an organization. But in a political environment, each function is defending its own position. People will start to dig in, and it becomes more about winning the argument than solving the problem. And you end up with a lot of noise, but very little forward momentum. This is a turf war, not a business meeting. But when you approach that same conversation with that same tension, that necessary and healthy tension of competing and conflicting objectives, this adult-to-adult perspective puts business first, the perspective and the tone shift. You can come back to the simple question of what are we trying to achieve here? How do we make it about the business? What is the best decision for the business? And once you're aligned on that, that we're making it about the business, conversations become so much more constructive. You can absolutely still disagree, you can challenge each other, but you're doing it in service of the business, not your own position or opinion. And this is really important because not only does this obviously help make better business decisions, but don't underestimate the cost of politics. In a highly political environment, decision making slows down, energy gets drained, trust starts to erode because people are defending their turf more than making it about the business. They're watching their backs, making sure that they're protected rather than making good business decisions. And in a highly political environment, the people who are most motivated by impact, the ones who just want to do great work and move things forward, they start to disengage. They didn't join to navigate politics, they joined to build something. So when politics starts to creep in, how do we bring it back? It starts with a really simple but powerful reset. And here's your action item from today's episode. In moments where there's tension or disagreement, or even just a sense that things are getting a bit muddy, ask the room, ask the meeting, what's best for the business? What serves the business best here? And you could even take it one step further and check in how are you showing up in that moment for yourself? Am I approaching this moment from an adult state? Am I staying focused on problem solving? Or am I maybe slipping into parent or child trying to control the situation or just defend my position? That awareness alone can really shift the dynamics of the entire conversation. And it's a deeply human moment, an acknowledgement of, hey, we're all humans here, we're not perfect, but we are trying to do some amazing things together. So let's find the most constructive ways to do that. If things are feeling heavier, slower, and more complicated than they should, it could be more than just the chaos of scale. That could be politics creeping in. And the way through politics isn't complicated, but it does require you to be intentional and it requires the teams that you work with to be intentional as well. You have to keep bringing it back to the business. Keep grounding your conversations in what actually moves things forward and keep showing up in ways that invite clarity and not conflict. Make it about the business, not the politics. Because in the chaos of scale, there is already enough noise. You do not need politics adding to it. If you enjoyed today's episode, please like, subscribe, and leave a review. If you know someone who could gain something from this episode, please consider sharing it with them. Until next time, remember business growth is messy, but the human side doesn't have to be.