3 min read
Office politics is not the corruption of good work. It is the operating system good work runs on, and pretending otherwise is not integrity. It is an information failure you have chosen to keep.
Salim has been at his firm for eleven years and says the phrase “I do not play politics” the way some people say they do not drink. There is pride in it. There is also a fifty-two-year-old man who has watched four people from his cohort move into the leadership floor while he explains to his wife, again, that the system rewards the wrong things.
The system does reward the wrong things sometimes. That is a separate argument. What is happening to Salim is narrower and more fixable. He has decided that understanding how decisions actually get made is morally equivalent to manipulating them, and so he has opted out of learning the one skill his job silently requires.
Jeffrey Pfeffer at Stanford has spent a career on this and his conclusion is unpopular enough that people quote it badly. Power is not distributed according to merit. It never was. It accumulates around people who understand where it sits and are willing to move toward it. That is not a recommendation. It is a description, in the same way that gravity is a description. You can disapprove of gravity. You will still fall.
Refusing to understand power is not the same as refusing to abuse it. One is a moral position. The other is a blindfold you chose and then called a principle.
Here is the distinction that resolves most of the discomfort. Politics is the process by which a group of people with different interests, incomplete information and limited resources arrive at a decision. That process exists in every organisation ever formed, including the ones run by saints. What people actually object to is a specific corruption of that process: credit theft, information hoarding, coalitions built on fear. Those are real and they deserve the contempt. But they are not the process. They are a failure mode of it.
That is the reframe. If it is enough, you can stop here and you will already read your next meeting differently. What follows is the harder question, which is what you do on Monday.
Start with the map, not the moves. Most people who decide to “get better at politics” go straight to tactics and it shows, badly, within a fortnight. The competent version is boring and almost entirely observational. Who actually signs off, as opposed to who is listed as the approver. Which two people talk before the meeting so that the meeting is a formality. Whose objection kills a proposal and whose objection is noted and ignored. Which relationship in the room is older than the org chart.
None of that requires you to do anything. It requires you to stop looking away. Ronald Burt’s work on organisational networks found that the people who consistently get opportunities are rarely the ones with the most connections. They are the ones positioned between groups that do not otherwise talk. That position is available to almost anyone. It is invisible only to people who have decided in advance that looking is beneath them.
Salim is not a bad strategist. He is an excellent one, in the one domain he permits himself. He can map a client’s decision chain across four stakeholders in a single call. He simply refuses to point that instrument at his own building.
The cleanest people in an organisation are not the ones who do not see the game. They are the ones who see it completely and still choose their moves carefully.
Salim can map a client’s decision chain across four stakeholders in one call. He has never once pointed that instrument at his own building.
The way you read a room is a pattern, not a talent. Seeing it is what turns the next eleven years into something other than a repeat of the last eleven.
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