The news cycle seems to be dominated by discussion of politics. Regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum, the talk of politics is inescapable and is probably going to lead to you being displeased with your fellow man. Luckily, we work in IT, so we can avoid politics.

BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA!

Politics goes way beyond the outcome of elections. Politics is not about which party won or lost this or that vote, not in IT. Politics, at it’s root, is about the process of decision making. If there’s one thing that we do in IT, it’s make decisions. Which database management system should we choose? Do you get a training budget? If so, do you get to go to PASS Summit? SQL Cruise? Or are you just supposed to spend it on online courses? Have we done a failover test on our DR system? Should we? Who is testing the backups to ensure we can do a restore?

All these are necessary decisions that are a big part of IT. All these decisions directly involve politics. Whether you love or hate politics, and whether your think you are a political creature or not, and whether you wish to be or not, you are absolutely involved in the politics of your team, your department, and your organization.

With this in mind, you get to choose how you approach the politics within your sphere. If you lose a decision, do you resort to violence to get the decision to go back your way? If someone disagrees with you, even if they’re wrong, are you going to shout them down in meetings? Or, are you going to approach the politics around you the same way you troubleshoot problematic code or a production outage? Despite whatever passion you bring to the job, of course the right way is the logical and dispassionate approach. Why? Because, being the one to begin shouting doesn’t mean you’ll be the last one shouting. In fact, it frequently means that people stop listening to you.

Let's make sure that we focus our passions appropriately and influence the politics around us in a way that reflects well on us and helps us get our way.