Dear Leaders,

By now, two things are clear.

Merit gets you in the room. Politics determines how high you go once you’re there. And the power driving those outcomes isn’t necessarily on the org chart — it flows through relationships, informal structures, and contexts you must map.

You already know how to play this game.

Not perfectly. But better than you admit. You’ve navigated a difficult board member before. You’ve gotten a budget approved that probably shouldn’t have been. You’ve positioned a failure as a learning in a way that somehow enhanced your credibility. You’ve watched a rival overplay their hand and quietly benefited from it.

You’ve been doing this for years. You just haven’t called it what it is.

The goal of this article isn’t to introduce you to organizational politics. It’s to make you deliberate about something you’ve been doing instinctively — so that you stop leaving results to luck, mood, or the shape of any given Tuesday.

The executives who navigate power most effectively aren’t the most ruthless. They’re simply the most intentional.

Here’s what intentional looks like in practice.

Every organization has an official power structure — the org chart — and an actual one. We covered that last time. What we didn’t cover is that the actual power structure isn’t monolithic. It shifts depending on who’s in the room, what’s at stake, and what phase the organization is in.

A company in growth mode elevates different people than a company in crisis. A board navigating a succession elevates different voices than a board rubber-stamping a CEO’s agenda. A firm that just went through a merger runs on entirely different informal rules than it did eighteen months ago.

Before you make any significant political move, ask yourself: whose game am I in right now?

This isn’t abstract. It means: who actually sets the terms of evaluation for this decision? What do they value? What are they afraid of? What would success look like to them — not to you, not to the company in theory, but to the specific people whose judgment is operative right now

Executives who skip this step make decisive moves based on the wrong read. They play the game that existed before the last reorganization. They optimize for the CEO’s former priorities when the board has already started writing a different story.

Read the current game. Not the one you remember.

Every political move you make draws on relational capital. Influence, access, the benefit of the doubt in ambiguous situations — all of it is borrowed against a balance you’ve built over time with specific people.

Many executives manage this account accidentally. They make deposits when things are going well — shared wins, favors returned, genuine moments of trust — and withdrawals when they need something. The problem is they rarely audit the balance before making a withdrawal.

The executive who calls in a favor with a board member they haven’t spoken to in eighteen months is about to experience the financial equivalent of bounced check. They ask. The balance isn’t there. And now they know it.

The discipline is straightforward, even if the execution isn’t: make deposits before you need to make withdrawals. Stay in contact with the people who matter to your career not when you need them, but consistently enough that when you do need them, the relationship doesn’t feel transactional.

This isn’t cynical. The best versions of these relationships are genuinely mutual — you’re useful to them too, which is what makes them durable. But don’t confuse genuine with accidental. Intentional relationship investment is still investment.

The executives who always seem to have goodwill available aren’t luckier than you. They’ve been making deposits while you weren’t paying attention.

A practical calibration: for the twelve people whose opinion most directly shapes your career trajectory right now, when did you last add value to them without needing anything in return? If you can’t answer that quickly, you’re probably living on whatever balance you accumulated years ago.

That balance depletes. It doesn’t compound on its own.

Here is one of the most consistent patterns among executives who move quickly through organizations: they treat formal meetings as ratification events, not decision events.

The actual decision — who’s aligned, where the resistance is, what objections need to be neutralized — happens in the conversations before the meeting. The meeting is theater. Important theater. But theater.

If you’re walking into a significant presentation, a budget review, or a succession discussion and your first contact with key stakeholders is the meeting itself, you are already behind. Someone else has already been working the room. And they didn’t tell you.

The pre-meeting isn’t manipulation. It’s respect. It signals that you value the other person’s perspective enough to hear it privately — where they can be candid — rather than forcing them to react publicly, where they can’t. You give them the gift of not being surprised. In return, you get information that you can actually use.

What does this look like in practice?

Two weeks before a board meeting: individual calls with two or three directors. Not to lobby. To listen. “I want to make sure I’m addressing the right things. What are you most focused on right now?” The answers will reveal more than any briefing document.

Before an executive committee review: a conversation with the one person most likely to object. Not to preempt them, but to understand their concern well enough to either address it or know that you can’t. Either way, you’re better prepared.

Before a significant hire or budget ask: identify whose implicit endorsement moves things fastest and earn it before the formal process begins.

You are not circumventing the process. You are doing the work that makes the process function.

There is a version of this that is dishonest. Framing results in misleading ways, obscuring failure, overstating contribution — that’s not positioning, that’s fraud, and it tends to work right up until it doesn’t, at which point it collapses in spectacular fashion.

What we’re talking about is different.

You execute a successful restructuring. The outcomes are tangible — cost savings achieved, team stabilized, business unit performing. But how does that get interpreted? Does the board see a disciplined operator who saved the business? A cost-cutter who squeezed the organization? A leader who demonstrated the judgment to make hard calls early? Or someone who inherited a mess and cleaned it up?

Same facts. Four different narratives. Only one of them serves your trajectory.

Positioning means deciding which narrative is both true and most useful — and then making sure it’s the one that reaches the people who matter. This requires active effort, because the absence of a clear narrative doesn’t create neutrality. It creates a vacuum that others fill, usually in whatever direction serves their interests, not yours.

Executives who don’t do this tell themselves they’re above it. They’re not above it. They’ve just ceded the framing to everyone else in the room.

Silence is not humility. In a room full of people interpreting your work, silence is abdication.

The practical discipline: for any significant outcome you deliver, spend ten minutes asking — how will this be interpreted by the people who most influence my next opportunity? Is that interpretation accurate? If not, what’s missing from the story they’re likely to tell themselves?

Then provide what’s missing. Proactively. Before someone else provides their version.

Timing is the most underrated variable in organizational politics, and the one most resistant to systematizing because it requires judgment that only comes from experience.

But there are patterns.

Organizations have rhythms — strategic planning cycles, budget cycles, board calendars, leadership review seasons. Political capital deployed at the right moment in these rhythms is worth three times what it buys at the wrong moment. An idea floated during budget season, when everyone is protective and anxious, will die. The same idea, positioned as a strategic priority ahead of the planning cycle, becomes infrastructure.

There are also windows — moments when the organizational context creates unusual opportunity. A leadership vacuum. A strategic pivot. A competitive threat that creates urgency. The executives who rise fastest are often those who recognized a window before the consensus did and moved while others were still deciding whether to move.

And there are moments to wait. When someone more senior is visibly overextended and fragile, pressing your agenda makes you look opportunistic. When the CEO is navigating a board conflict, inserting yourself into that dynamic is almost never the right move. When an initiative is struggling and you have reservations, voicing them loudly in the wrong context doesn’t make you a truth-teller. It makes you someone who kicks people when they’re down.

The question to carry with you: is this the right moment for this move? Not is this a good idea — that’s a lower bar. Is this the right moment?

Good timing turns a good idea into a career-defining move. Bad timing turns the same idea into a liability.

Most executives spend almost no time thinking about this. They focus on building support and treat opposition as an unavoidable byproduct of decision-making.

That’s fine, mostly. You will make enemies. Not everyone will be your advocate. This is not a problem.

But there is a category of opposition that is worth managing carefully: the person who is not just opposed to your idea but motivated to see you fail. The person who has enough informal influence that their sustained opposition creates meaningful friction. The person whose antagonism, if left unaddressed, will compound over time and eventually find its moment.

Most of the time, these situations develop gradually and from misunderstandings that were never resolved. A perceived slight that was never addressed. A moment where someone felt undermined and never said so. A competition for a role where the person who didn’t get it was never given a dignified path forward.

The most sophisticated political move available to you is often the most uncomfortable one: go directly to the person you sense is hostile and have the conversation you’ve both been avoiding.

Most people, when given that opening, will either tell you something useful or defuse significantly. A small percentage will not. But at least then you know who you’re dealing with — and you’ve demonstrated that you’re not afraid of the conversation. That itself is a form of power.

After all of this — the relationship investment, the pre-meetings, the positioning, the timing — there is one practice that separates the executives who consistently navigate power well from those who occasionally get it right.

They debrief themselves after every significant political moment.

With genuine reflection: what did I read correctly? What did I misread? What was I told that I should have followed up on and didn’t? Whose reaction surprised me, and what does that tell me about how they see me?

Political intelligence isn’t innate. It accumulates.

Over time, this builds something that is nearly impossible to teach directly: a calibrated sense of the room. The ability to walk into a meeting and within minutes know where the real tensions are, who has already decided, who is persuadable, and what the meeting is actually about — as opposed to what’s written on the agenda.

That sense of the room is worth more than almost any individual tactic in this article. And it only comes from paying attention long enough to actually learn.

The game exists. You’re already in it. The only question is whether you’re playing it with intention or stumbling through it with talent.

Talent gets you surprisingly far. Intention gets you further — and keeps you there.

None of what we’ve covered here requires you to become someone else. It doesn’t require ruthlessness, or cynicism, or a tolerance for manipulation that you don’t currently have. It requires you to take the informal dimension of organizational life as seriously as you take the operational one.

The executives who plateau aren’t usually outperformed. They’re out-navigated. By people who understood that the job was always two jobs: doing the work, and ensuring the work is understood, positioned, and connected to the people and conversations that shape what happens next.

You’ve been doing the first job for years.

Time to take the second one just as seriously.

Onward,

Hamza