Organisational Politics 101
A field guide to seeing the political game, understanding the players, and choosing how you want to engage.
By Shirisha Nagendran · ICF PCC Executive Coach
A Note Before We Begin
For a long time, I prided myself on not being political. In my mind, politics was what other people did. The ones who played games, managed impressions, built alliances for their own advancement. I was not that person. I did good work, I said what I thought, and I trusted that the system would recognise both.
It took me longer than I would like to admit to understand that this was not integrity. It was naivety dressed up as integrity. The two are not the same, and confusing them is costly.
What I eventually learned is that every organisation has a formal system and an informal one. Ignoring the informal system does not make it go away. It just means it operates on you without your participation. The people who navigate organisations well are not necessarily the ones who are most political. They are the ones who see clearly, and then make deliberate choices about how to engage. That distinction is what this guide is about.
What Organisation Politics Actually Is
The word "politics" carries weight in most workplaces. When people use it, they usually mean something distasteful: manoeuvring, impression management, credit theft, the kind of behaviour that rewards cunning over competence. That is one version of organisational politics. It is real, and it is worth naming. But it is not the whole story.
Organisational politics, in the broadest sense, is the informal system through which influence moves. Every organisation has a formal structure: job titles, reporting lines, official decision-making processes. And every organisation has an informal one: the relationships that actually shape decisions, the conversations that happen before the meeting, the unwritten rules about who speaks and when and how. Political literacy is the skill of reading and working with both.
Most technically excellent people learn the formal system well. They are promoted on the strength of their work, their outputs, their domain knowledge. What they often do not learn is the informal one. Not because they are naive, but because nobody teaches it, because learning it requires a kind of observation that sits outside the usual markers of professional progress, and because many people with strong ethical values recoil from anything that smells of manipulation.
The cost of that recoil tends to be significant. Good ideas go nowhere. Projects stall at approval stages that should have been navigated in advance. Credibility built on excellent work does not translate into influence. The person who is excellent but politically blind is often overtaken by someone less skilled but more attuned to how the system actually works. That is a frustrating reality. It is also a workable one.
Researcher Gerald Ferris defined political behaviour as "the use of interpersonal influence to affect organisational outcomes." The question is never whether politics exists in your organisation. It is what kind of politics, and whether you want to understand it or be managed by it.
The Spectrum
From constructive to destructive
Not all political behaviour is the same. Understanding the full spectrum matters because the conversation about politics tends to collapse everything onto the destructive end, which makes the entire territory feel off-limits to people with ethical values. It is not.
Advocating for your work
Making the case for what you are building, to the right people, before decisions are made about it. Not self-promotion for its own sake. Strategic communication: ensuring that the people who matter understand what you are doing and why it is valuable.
High integrityBuilding genuine relationships
Investing in understanding what matters to colleagues and leaders, not to manipulate them, but to work with them more effectively. Relationships built on genuine interest and mutual respect are the most durable form of influence there is.
High integrityTiming communication strategically
Knowing when to raise something and when to hold it. When a decision is already made, the conversation about whether it should have been made differently is rarely productive. Choosing the right moment is not dishonesty. It is basic effectiveness.
High integrityCredit theft and information hoarding
Taking ownership of work or ideas that belong to others. Restricting information access to maintain personal power. Both are common. Both erode trust and collaboration over time, and both create the kind of political environment that everyone complains about.
Low integrityUndermining and coalition building against
Subtly or explicitly reducing someone else's credibility, visibility, or opportunities. Organising relationships to block rather than to advance. These tactics exist. Naming them clearly is the first step to not accidentally participating in them, and to recognising when they are being used against you.
Low integrityJeffrey Pfeffer at Stanford found that the most consequential factor in who gets ahead in an organisation is not competence alone but political skill: the ability to understand others, to build networks, to communicate in ways that land. His argument is uncomfortable. It is also empirically well-supported. The goal of this guide is not to make you more political in the destructive sense. It is to give you the map that Pfeffer describes.
The Formal Structure vs the Real One
The org chart tells you who has authority. It does not tell you who has influence. Those two things overlap, but they are not the same, and the gap between them is where most political confusion lives.
Every organisation has two structures running simultaneously. The formal one is visible: job titles, reporting lines, the names on the boxes in the hierarchy. The informal one is not drawn anywhere, but it is often more consequential. It is the network of relationships through which information actually travels, decisions are actually shaped, and reputations are actually built.
Understanding informal structure means learning to see four types of players that the org chart will not show you.
Information Brokers
People who sit at the intersection of multiple networks. They are not always the most senior people. They are often the chiefs of staff, the long-tenured executive assistants, the project managers who have worked with every team. They know what is happening across the organisation, and they control the flow of that information. Influence moves through them.
Trusted Advisors
People whose opinion carries disproportionate weight with a decision-maker, regardless of their formal role. Every leader has them. They are not always obvious from the outside. Understanding who they are, and what they value, is genuinely consequential. A proposal that does not land with a trusted advisor often does not land with the leader, even if the leader is the one in the room.
Connectors
People who introduce others, who build bridges across functions, who are known and trusted across silos. They hold social capital, which is a real resource. They can make introductions, carry your reputation forward into rooms you are not in, and provide context about you before you show up. Relationships with connectors are worth investing in genuinely.
Shadow Decision-Makers
People who are not formally part of a decision but whose agreement is required before it can move forward. Common in consensus-driven cultures and in organisations with strong functional silos. The meeting you present in is often not the meeting where the decision happens. The shadow decision-maker was consulted before you arrived.
Power Mapping
Seeing where influence actually lives
Power mapping is the practice of identifying the key players in your organisational context, understanding what kind of power they hold, and understanding their interests. It sounds clinical. It is actually just structured observation.
Positional Power
Formal authority. Comes with the role. The ability to approve, reject, allocate resources, and make decisions. Easiest to see. Not always the most influential type in practice.
Expert Power
The authority that comes from being the person who knows the most about something. Can exist at any level of an organisation. Often very significant in technical environments where decisions require specialist knowledge.
Relational Power
The authority that comes from trusted relationships. Who someone knows, who trusts them, whose calls they return. The most durable form of power and the hardest to see from outside. It accumulates over years of consistent behaviour.
Informational Power
The authority that comes from controlling access to information. Who knows what is happening? Who knows what is coming? In organisations, knowledge is power in a very literal sense. Information brokers hold this type disproportionately.
A basic power map asks: who are the key players relevant to my work or my goal? What kind of power does each one hold? What are their interests and concerns? Who influences them? The purpose is not to manipulate. It is to stop being surprised by how things work.
What happens in your organisation when someone proposes a significant change? Who needs to be on board before it can move forward? Who can stop it? Who is consulted informally before any formal process begins? The answers to those questions are your informal power map. Most people cannot answer them when they first try. That gap in awareness is where political blindness lives.
How Decisions Actually Get Made
Most formal meetings are not where decisions are made. They are where decisions are announced. The actual decision happened earlier, in a sequence of informal conversations that most people either did not know about or were not included in.
The Pre-Decision Conversation
Before a significant decision reaches a meeting, someone has usually sounded out the key stakeholders. They have tested the idea, identified potential objections, and either modified the proposal or secured enough support to withstand objection. When you arrive at a meeting to discover a decision has already been made, this is what happened. The question to ask is not why you were not included. It is how you build the relationships and credibility to be included next time.
No One Senior Should Be Surprised
One of the most consistent political mistakes I see is allowing a senior person to be caught off-guard by something they should have known about. Being surprised, in a meeting, in front of others, is experienced as a loss of face. The person who caused the surprise rarely benefits from it. The rule is straightforward: no senior person should hear something important for the first time in a room full of other people. If you have news that affects them, tell them directly first.
The HIPPO Effect
The Highest Paid Person's Opinion (HIPPO) has disproportionate influence on decisions in most organisations, regardless of whether that opinion is the most informed one. Understanding this is not an endorsement of it. It is a map of reality. Working with that map means thinking about how to give the senior person a way to agree, rather than arriving with a position that requires them to change their mind publicly.
In most organisations, consensus does not mean everyone agrees. It means no one objects loudly enough to block the decision. Building consensus is the process of ensuring that objections are surfaced and addressed before the formal decision, not during it. The leader who calls for consensus in a meeting and then proceeds regardless of dissent is not building consensus. They are performing it. Recognising the difference between the two is useful.
Alliances and Coalitions
Building alliances is not manipulation. It is the recognition that most meaningful work in organisations requires others, and that relationships with others require investment before they can be drawn on.
An alliance is not a friendship, though genuine friendships at work are valuable. It is a mutual investment: you understand what someone else is trying to do, they understand what you are trying to do, and you look for opportunities to support each other's work where your interests align. This is not transactional in a cold or cynical sense. It is how organisations actually function at their best.
Coalition building for change is a related but distinct skill. When you want to shift something in an organisation, a policy, a practice, a direction, you need enough people to share the concern and be willing to act on it. The process of building a coalition is the process of having many individual conversations, understanding each person's interests, finding the overlap between their concerns and yours, and assembling that into a shared position. It is slow. It works.
Identify
Who is affected by this, and who has a stake in the outcome?
Listen
Have individual conversations. Understand each person's interests and concerns before addressing them collectively.
Find Ground
What does everyone actually care about? Where do your interests genuinely align?
Act Together
The coalition holds because it is built on shared interests, not just agreement in the room.
Linda Hill at Harvard Business School found that new managers consistently overestimate how much formal authority drives results and underestimate how much influence through relationship and coalition is actually required. This does not change at senior levels. It gets more pronounced. The more senior the role, the more the work is done through others, and the more important the quality of those relationships becomes.
Gendered Political Dynamics
Political behaviour is not perceived the same way across genders. This is documented, consistent across cultures, and relevant to anyone navigating a professional environment. It is also one of the least discussed aspects of political literacy, because naming it can feel like an invitation to see yourself as a victim. It is not. It is a map of a real terrain.
The research is clear on several points. Women who display assertive political behaviour, advocating strongly for their positions, being direct about their ambitions, building coalitions for influence, are more likely to be perceived negatively than men displaying the same behaviour. The label that lands more often is "difficult," "aggressive," or "not a team player." The same behaviour in a man tends to be described as "decisive," "confident," or "strategic."
Damned if you do, diminished if you don't
Navigating, not solving
This section is not here to tell you what to do with this information. It is here to name a dynamic that many people already feel, and that gets very little open discussion. The goal is clarity. What you do with that clarity is yours.
Choosing Your Engagement
Political literacy does not require you to become political. It requires you to see clearly, and then to make a deliberate choice about how you want to engage with what you see.
The Observer
You understand the political dynamics around you, but you choose not to engage directly in the informal system. You do your work, build your expertise, and accept that influence through informal channels is not your primary mode. The cost: good work is sometimes invisible. The benefit: you know the choice you have made.
Low engagementThe Navigator
You engage with the informal system deliberately, drawing clear lines around what you are and are not willing to do. You build relationships, time your communication thoughtfully, understand who needs to be on board before decisions are made. You play with awareness, without becoming the game.
Deliberate engagementThe Architect
You actively shape the political environment: building coalitions for change, advocating strategically, using your understanding of the system to alter it. This is the most demanding stance and, when done from genuine values, the most potentially transformative.
Active shapingThere is no right answer here. The right stance depends on your values, your context, and what you want from your professional life. What is not available to you is the stance of being unaffected by politics. That stance does not exist. You can only choose whether to engage with awareness or without it.
Politics is not something that happens to other people. It is the water you are swimming in.
I want to be honest about where I stand on this. I am not a political operator in the strategic, calculated sense of that phrase. I am someone who had to learn, often the hard way, that ignoring the informal system was not integrity. It was naivety dressed up as integrity. The two are not the same, and I spent too long confusing them.
What I have learned, and what I try to help clients with, is the difference between understanding a system and being shaped by it in ways you did not choose. Political literacy gives you the map. What you do with it is still entirely yours.
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