The Politics of Your Job: Building Trust + Subverting DevOps Hierarchies (Respectfully) with Joshua Zimmerman

Pulling the Strings

Politics is everywhere in your organization. No, not THAT kind of politics – the kind that happens when you need something and can’t get it, or when you get good at something and people start noticing. Actually, politics happens just about whenever decisions get made. Joshua Zimmerman says that kind of politics is rooted in people, and with the right mindset, you can use politics to make things better in your organization – for you and your entire team.

Joshua is a DevOps manager and organizer who thinks you could benefit from understanding and navigating the political landscape of your organization so you can help shape it. In fact, his presentation at DevOpsDays Chicago 2023 was all about that, and we were so impressed, we invited him on the podcast.

After listening to this episode, we hope you’ll be able to figure out how decisions get made where you work, define your political structure, and leave with a few tools you can use to gain leverage with your team to make better decisions together.

Highlights:

• Helping unpack the term “politics” in the context of your job
• Why org charts aren’t great for determining the real structure of your org
• Why trust matters more than authority (and how to sniff out both in your org)
• How to build lasting trust in your team and org
• How to subvert hierarchy to get what you need (without making anyone mad)

Speakers:

• Ben Ford, Developer Relations Director at Puppet
• Joshua Zimmerman, SRE/DevOps Manager

Links:

• Find Josh on LinkedIn, Mastodon, and Twitter
• Watch Joshua’s talk at DevOpsDays Chicago 2023 (2:26:00 – 2:54:30)
• Find Ben in the Puppet Community Slack as binford2k and on Mastodon

Find Us Online:

• puppet.com
• Pulling the Strings on Apple Podcasts
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Read the episode transcript