Ninety-seven percent of employees are affected by office politics, according to Fast Company magazine. Forget about eliminating office politics: try redirecting the negative energy. What’s key: present a united front to the backbiters and closet grousers.

What managers can do:

• Identify/gain agreement on and strictly enforce rules of behavior that discourage politicking. GDS clients are familiar with these protocols: don’t triangulate, don’t recruit supporters to your point of view, resolve it or let it go, don’t accuse in absentia, no hands from the grave, etc. Embed these organization wide.
• Role-model what you preach. Implicit messages— the subtle messages that come from actions—pack more wallop than all the speechifying. Power plays and politics at the top tell others: We get what we want by playing these games; so can you. Outlaw politics at the top. The wise will follow.

Vincent Pender, managing director, Johnson & Johnson, Consumer, Ltd. has spent the past four years building his UK-based operation into a fiercely competitive high-performance organization. He has learned important lessons along the way, which GDS Insights captures in excerpts from a recent interview.

GDS, Quality Progress magazine, and Kepner-Tregoe, Inc. have teamed up for a national study on project teams. With more than 1,900 responses returned, our survey should yield significant insights into the quality and performance of project teams. Stay tuned for the results. . . .

Here are field notes from a recent assignment led by GDS consultant Mark Landsberg.

Presenting Situation: The top divisional team of a healthcare company was led by a strong-willed, secretive general manager who preferred minimum contact with the company’s president. Little financial transparency . . . conflict with corporate accounting . . . divisional CFO felt compromised . . . team members put off, felt at risk . . . mounting inquiries from corporate . . . divisional performance off . . . business as usual . . . team members finally contacted president to raise concerns. The G.M. became history.