I've experienced some form of office politics at every company I have gone to.
The first corporate job I had, it was accounting vs. operations and HR. Accounting had a reputation for being jerks and difficult to work with and I was transferring from HR into Accounting. Yikes! HR director tried to warn me about the department.
He told me not to try to change anything. Don't make suggestions. Stay under the radar. Learn as much as I can.
Did I listen? No, of course not.
My first week in accounting, the VP's favorite launched a campaign to discredit everything about me and even went as far as to accuse me of purposefully withholding copies of A/R documents to make her job more difficult. She was a great communicator and the bosses favorite, but she was so negative and very difficult for me to be around. The other two girls in our department went along with her crap for a while up until the Boss's favorite got promoted to a position above my supervisor. Than all the sudden all the gloves were off.
I went from being the new girl to the one everyone came to talk to when everything got real.
I left that company because it was toxic and there was only so far I could go.
I went to a construction company afterwards and it was amazing. I thankfully got a boss that was very relieved to have talent at a reasonable salary and I was eager to learn and he was happy to teach. For the most part I really loved that job but there was only so far I could advance at that company. I like to think there weren't any office politics because the leaders were secure with their position and did not feel a need to tear me down or anyone down for that matter.
I moved onto a very large company with over 6,000 employees. I worked in central accounting so we had about 80 accountants and there were six on my team. Our supervisor was a little “unpolished” and was great at a lot of things a supervisor should be good at, but also fell trap to many of the pit falls one can fall into when you just don't know any better and haven't gotten in trouble for it yet. She did have a favorite on our team and that person was very intelligent, very communicative and ridiculously toxic. It was a rough feeling when I would get cut down in meetings by this toxic person and I couldn't say anything to my supervisor about it because I was afraid they would take the toxic person's side or think I was blowing it out of proportion.
My saving grace was another teammate that came to me and told me that she felt like she was also being attacked by that person. I started speaking up after that. I had to cause a few waves in the corporate structure but my colleagues respected me and even thanked me for addressing the issue. And after making my supervisor aware of it the blows started to subside a little. If I had stayed I may or may not have become a supervisor. I remember feeling uneasy because I was having to push through those boundaries in order to set up a healthier work environment but at the same time I realized it wasn't an environment I wanted to keep working in.
My current company has a great work culture but I'm not good at playing office politics at this one.
You live and you learn. My advice is to pick the companies you really want to work for and do some research on them before you bother applying. Pay attention to red flags. And if you can't, if you're a victim of circumstance like I am in this round, do everything you can to learn from it so that you do not bring those same problems into your next job.
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