Harsh prided himself on staying out of office politics. He said this at least once a month, usually after someone else got a project he wanted or a promotion he expected. I don’t play those games. He said it like a badge. It was a blindfold.
While Harsh was not playing, three things happened. His colleague Meena built a relationship with the VP of product and was invited to present at the quarterly business review. His peer Sandeep volunteered for a cross-functional initiative that gave him visibility to the CEO. His junior Ria started attending the pre-meetings where agendas were set before the actual meetings happened. Harsh attended only the actual meetings. He contributed well. His contributions were absorbed into decisions that had already been shaped in the rooms he wasn’t in.
Office politics is not manipulation. It is the study of how decisions actually get made in organisations where humans with different priorities, insecurities and ambitions share resources. Jeffrey Pfeffer’s research at Stanford demonstrates that political skill is the single strongest predictor of career advancement, outperforming both technical competence and raw performance metrics.
Refusing to understand office politics doesn’t make you ethical. It makes you uninformed about the system that determines your outcomes whether you participate or not.
The word “politics” in Indian corporate culture carries a specific moral charge. It’s synonymous with manipulation, sycophancy, chamchagiri. This conflation is the problem. Understanding who influences decisions is not sycophancy. Knowing when to present your work for maximum impact is not manipulation. Building relationships with people who control resource allocation is not corruption. It is how organisations function.
Three political skills that require zero compromise of integrity. First: know who makes the decisions that affect your work. Not who should make them. Who does. Second: ensure your work is visible to those people before the evaluation moment, not during it. Third: build relationships with people across functions, not just within your team. Cross-functional allies create career insurance that same-team relationships cannot provide.
Harsh eventually learned this. Not from a book. From watching Ria get promoted into a role he’d been expecting. Ria’s work was good. So was Harsh’s. The difference was that people who mattered had seen Ria’s work before the decision was made. They hadn’t seen Harsh’s.
What decision affecting your career has been made recently in a room you weren’t in?
Harsh stayed out of office politics. Office politics didn’t stay out of his career. careers.deliberx.com