Dear Leaders,

Last week, we named something most executives already sense but are uncomfortable accepting: merit gets you in the room. Politics determines how high you go once you’re there.

The response was the strongest of any topic I’ve written about. And it surfaced two specific concerns.

First: I know this exists, but engaging with it feels dirty.

Second: I know I need to develop this, but I don’t know how to do it without compromising who I am.

Both concerns are legitimate. And both stem from the same problem.

The visible version of organizational politics — backstabbing, manipulation, ruthless self-promotion — is corrosive enough to contaminate the entire concept. It exists. But it is neither the only way nor an effective way to operate.

There is another way to operate. Ethical, sustainable, highly effective, and absolutely necessary.

Conflating the two is a costly mistake high-performing executives make for years, often at the expense of their careers. Refusing to acknowledge it is equally costly. It limits your influence to the formal authority of your role and nothing beyond it.

We’ll get to the how. First, let’s clarify what we’re actually dealing with.

Pull up your company’s org chart. There’s a hierarchy, titles, and reporting lines. A clean, logical structure that shows you who is accountable to whom.

That chart isn’t wrong; it’s just not the whole story.

The org chart shows you formal authority: the power that exists by institutional design. It tells you who has the sanctioned right to make certain decisions, allocate certain resources, and direct certain people.

What it doesn’t show you is how and where decisions are actually made. Who shapes the thinking before the meeting starts. Whose objection quietly kills an initiative. Whose endorsement makes something move at twice the speed. And who holds influence that has nothing to do with their title and everything to do with relationships, information, or history.

That invisible layer is where organizational life actually takes shape.

Most of you already know this. You’ve seen it in action. A CFO who nominally reports to the CEO but effectively shapes the strategy. A Chief of Staff with no direct authority who controls access to everything. A retired founder with no operational role who, with one phone call to the board, could reverse a decision made at the executive committee level.

Here’s the conceptual shift that underpins everything else.

We think about power as a possession. We have it or we don’t. We accumulate it. We lose it. It’s in a title, a budget, or a team size.

Not quite.

Power isn’t a possession. It’s relationship between people in a specific context.

What that means in practice: the same person can be extraordinarily powerful in one context and nearly irrelevant in another. A COO with deep operational authority has enormous power inside the business. Put that same person in a board meeting about long-term strategic direction, where the CEO and external directors are shaping the narrative, and their power diminishes significantly.  Nothing about the person changed. The context did.

Power is always contextual and always relational. And it flows; it isn’t static.

This matters because executives who think about power as a fixed possession make a specific set of mistakes. They assume that accumulating titles and resources is sufficient. They don’t invest in the relationships and contexts where influence actually hold weight. They’re well-positioned on the org chart and under-positioned in the actual decision-making environment.

The executives who navigate this well think about power differently. They ask not just how much authority they have, but in which contexts their influence actually holds weight, and in which contexts they are effectively invisible.

Those are more useful questions.

Power in organizations has distinct forms, each with different sources, different durability, and different strategic implications.

1. Formal power is authority by design. It comes from the role itself: budgetary control, decision rights, organizational accountability. It’s the most legible form of power because it’s documented. It’s also the most fragile, because it exists only as long as the role does.

Executives who rely exclusively on formal power tend to be effective when things are going well and surprisingly exposed when they aren’t. When the structure shifts — a merger, a leadership change, a board-driven reorganization — their influence evaporates quickly.

2. Relational power is influence through trust. It comes from the quality and history of relationships with the people who hold influence in specific domains. Not networking in the superficial sense. Genuine credibility with individuals who hold authority, shape narratives, or control access. A tenured managing director who has the CFO’s trust has more practical influence over capital allocation decisions than a newer executive with a larger team.

Relational power is slower to build than formal power and significantly more durable. It survives reorganizations, extends across companies, and compounds over time in a way that formal authority never does.

3. Structural power is influence through position in the information and decision-making flow. Some roles, regardless of their formal authority, occupy positions of informational advantage. Chiefs of Staff. Heads of Strategy. Senior advisors who are in every important meeting. These people shape decisions not necessarily by making them but by controlling what information reaches the decision maker, in what frame, and at what moment.

Executives who understand structural power invest in being in the right conversations — not the visible ones, necessarily, but the ones where interpretation happens before the formal decision gets made.

4. Narrative power is the ability to shape how situations are interpreted. At the executive tier, ambiguity is constant. Markets shift. Strategy pivots. Organizational performance is rarely cleanly attributable. In that environment, whoever provides the most credible interpretation of what’s happening — and what it means — holds enormous influence.

Once you become the trusted interpreter of ambiguity for boards, investors, and leadership teams, you wield a type of power that does not appear anywhere on the org chart and is extremely difficult to displace.

Of the four types, narrative power has the highest ceiling at the most senior levels – and is the one high-performing executives most consistently underinvest in.

Understanding the types of power is necessary. Understanding how power flows is what allows you to operate within it.

Power doesn’t flow through the hierarchy the way authority does. It flows through networks — informal relationships, recurring coalitions, shared histories, and trust that exist independently of reporting lines.

Watch any major organizational decision closely enough and you’ll see the pattern. The formal process — the committee, the vote, the executive review — is usually the ratification of something effectively decided earlier, in smaller conversations, between people whose alignment was secured before the meeting began.

This isn’t corruption. It’s how human systems manage complexity.

When the stakes are high and the outcome is uncertain, people don’t wait for the formal process. They do the work ahead of it. They test ideas, build coalitions, and understand objections before they’re voiced publicly. By the time the formal decision is finalized, the real decision has often already been made.

Executives who understand this invest in those smaller conversations. They don’t show up to present at a board meeting — they’ve already spoken with three of the five directors in the two weeks prior. They don’t launch a major initiative at the executive committee — they’ve already identified where the resistance is and addressed it privately.

They aren’t circumventing the process. They’re doing the relational work that makes the process function.

Here’s what matters most for your development as an executive.

The informal power structure isn’t random. It has patterns. It is learnable. And once you start reading it, you cannot stop seeing it.

Some of these patterns are consistent across organizations:

None of these appear on the org chart. All of them shape who actually drives decisions.

What happens when executives dismiss this entire domain?

It isn’t that you lose the game. It’s that you end up playing a different, smaller game — one where your influence is limited to the formal authority of your role.

That is a significant ceiling.

At the most senior levels, formal authority is table stakes. Every executive has it. What differentiates you isn’t the authority you hold — it’s the influence you build beyond it. The relationships that give you early information. The narrative credibility that shapes how your work is interpreted. The structural positioning that puts you in the conversations where interpretation takes place before decisions are made.

The executives I’ve worked with who most underestimated this were often the most technically accomplished. They built careers on doing the work exceptionally well and were rewarded for it consistently. They genuinely believed, at a deep level, that the quality of the work was the primary variable.

And then they found themselves in succession conversations where they weren’t the choice. Or in board reviews where someone with a less impressive track record was perceived as more strategic. Or watching a peer — someone they’d outperformed on every measurable dimension — ascend to a role they had assumed would be theirs.

The work was never the problem. The map was.

Understanding power — its types, its movement, its informal structures — isn’t the end goal. It’s the prerequisite.

What we’re building toward is the ability to operate effectively within the actual system, not the theoretical one. To know which relationships to invest in and why. To understand how decisions take shape before they become formal. To position yourself in the rooms and conversations where influence is built, not just exercised.

None of this replaces performance. The executives who navigate power most effectively are almost always people of genuine substance, because credibility is the foundation on which political intelligence is built. Without it, the entire structure collapses.

But substance without this map is an incomplete operating system.

In the next letter, we move from understanding power to developing the perceptual skills that make everything else possible.

The map is only useful if you know how to read it.

Onward,

Hamza