Every organisation
runs on two systems.
One is on the organisation chart. The other is where decisions actually get made, where influence moves, where careers accelerate or stall.
Most professionals spend their entire careers only seeing one of them.
Political literacy is the ability to see both.
What This Is About
Understanding the system that no one teaches you
Power in organisations does not announce itself. It does not appear on slides or in job descriptions. It lives in relationships, in timing, in the unwritten rules about who gets heard, who gets credit, and who gets left out of the room where it matters.
Understanding how that system works is not about becoming political. It is about becoming fluent. Seeing clearly what is actually happening around you, and making deliberate choices about how you engage with it.
That is what political literacy means. And it is a learnable skill.
Who This Is For
Senior leaders who are technically excellent and politically underprepared
Professionals who keep getting blindsided by decisions that seem to come from nowhere. Women navigating organisations that were not built with them in mind. Leaders moving between cultural contexts where the unwritten rules have changed entirely.
And anyone who has ever done everything right and still found themselves on the wrong side of a decision they never saw coming.
What You Will Find Here
Three ways to get better at this
The Political Literacy Hub
Frameworks, research, and long-form thinking
How power actually moves through organisations. Free, substantive, and built to give you tools you can use.
Explore the hub →Work With Shirisha
Work through your specific situation directly
From a single session to a sustained three-month engagement, the work is precise, analytical, and focused on the system you are actually navigating.
View all engagements →Fluent: Newsletter
Becoming politically literate at work
Published on Substack. The felt experience of navigating the things the frameworks describe.
Read Fluent →Shirisha Nagendran is an executive coach and the leading voice on political literacy in the workplace.
She spent the first seven years of her career being technically excellent and politically naive. The cost of that gap was real, and it was prohibitive. Understanding how organisations actually work, not how they are supposed to work, changed everything.
She brings 22 years of experience across corporate leadership and executive coaching, working with senior leaders navigating complex organisational landscapes across the UK, the US, and internationally. She holds an ICF PCC certification and has more than 1,500 hours of client coaching.
Her work sits at the intersection of organisational behaviour research, gender and leadership, and the political complexity faced by leaders navigating global organisations across cultures and geographies.
Comprehensive Power Literacy Guides
The guides. Start here.
Long-form, research-backed thinking on how power and influence actually move through organisations. Free, substantive, and built to give you tools you can use.
Organisation Politics 101
A field manual for seeing the political game, understanding the players, and choosing how you want to engage with it.
You spoke up. It was authentic. So where did it go wrong?
Why speaking your mind backfires, and practical tools for speaking in ways that actually land.
Is the 360 Feedback Process Being Used Against You?
How to read whether a feedback process is being used developmentally or politically, and what to do about it.