Office Politics by John Seeley

Office politics: Creating success by eliminating the office chatter.

There’s one in every office. The person that has to gossip, spread rumors and in general talk, talk, talk. If you have encountered this and you don’t want to completely alienate them from you, there are several things that you can do.

First is prevention. You can’t necessarily stop talkers from talking, but you can prevent them from talking to you, or at least minimize their effect on you.

If you know that the person will come to talk at certain times, make sure you’re unavailable at those times. If you have a door to your office, close it and put a sign on the door saying “Do not disturb, in conference.” If you don’t have a door, you can use your phone as an excuse to cut short or prevent a conversation. Just pick up the phone when you see the person, and say you need to make an important call.

Another way is to blame the Management, or upper management for not “wasting time” with personal conversations.

You can always say you are under a deadline to finish something, when they come in. You can always politely say you have to complete certain projects by a certain time and therefore you can’t talk.

In “War Games” the movie, the computer learns that the only way to win is not to play the game. The same applies here. It’s important that you don’t participate in conversations with people that you don’t want to. You train people every day how to treat you. You need to be consistent in how you deal with people. If you talk once to them, they will feel it’s ok to talk to you whenever they feel like it. If on the other hand you set the “boundary” of keeping strictly business communication, then they will get the message.