One of the biggest problems in OD is office politics.

People split into factions, pull their organizations apart, make gaps to charge through, and generally act in ways that show a total lack of emotional intelligence.

Here are ten ways to make the organization work, keep people competitive, and still let success shine:

1. Promote the best. There is a tendency to promote the pushiest, the strongest, the one who people are afraid to stand up to. We should be promoting the best, the most capable, and the one who shows best results. There is increasing evidence to show that those who are best at self-promotion are usually not the best performers in holding, guiding, and building the vision of the organization. It is finding that vision that really distinguishes performance.

2. Promote networkers, not dividers. Internal politics requires that alliances are built and that means creating factions. Networking requires a genuine ability to understand all within the organization and build genuine relationships.

3. Promote emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is not about weak emotions, it is using the maximum  emotional intelegance in the best way to create the most authentic relationships, and is proven to have real bottom line results.

4. Create culture across the organization that is truly open and does not blame. Happiness and balance at work is a central tenet of new work: real, authentic communication that allows us to talk in a 360° way.

5. Build education programs that replace the need for internal politics with real business education.

6. Understand what and who causes internal conflict and confront them. Well-performed interventions are very effective.

7. Look at the internal structures: how and why are you promoting; is the organization itself causing people to fight each other? This can be resolved by good organizational design, and clear promotion guidelines.

8. Self-elective promotion: allow candidates to put themselves for promotion. This allows a trial period, of say six months, where if they do not perform as required they get knocked back again. This can be hardened up with an exam based on company and general business skills and psychometric testing.

9. Internal politics can be very harmful and stressful, as bad as sexual harassment, real education about why unhealthy competition destroys organizations, and education on the positive the flip-side, in how to compete in real terms pays massive dividends. A positive action program may seem far-fetched, but so was sexual harassment in the 1970s.

10. Finally, the desire to end office politics and instead to be excellent to one another is a keystone of Intelegance. No relationship: raising children, marriage, friendship, or work can truly succeed where the effort is to gain the upper hand rather than promote the relationship, in this case the workforce…

I hope that in the next decade success and results will become the main criteria for career advancement…