Navigating Organizational Politics Without Playing Games
Organizational politics has a bad reputation, and I understand why. I’ve felt that resistance myself because I don’t do manipulation. I want to speak the truth, do good work, and lead my team well. What I’ve learned, though, is that refusing to understand the dynamics inside an organization doesn’t protect you from them.
Organizations are made of people, and people make decisions through relationships, competing priorities, limited information, and influence. I’ve also learned the hard way that performance does not speak for itself. You can be doing great work and still miss the opportunity to influence decisions that affect your team if you haven’t built the relationships and trust to be part of those conversations.
In this episode of The Real Work of Leadership, I’m talking about navigating organizational politics without playing games. I’m getting into what healthy organizational influence looks like, where I’ve gotten it wrong myself, and why understanding how your organization actually works is part of leading effectively.
0:31 – Why organizational politics isn’t automatically manipulation
2:46 – The resistance to “doing politics” and what Elisa had to rethink
5:55 – What healthy organizational influence actually looks like
9:22 – Communicating in a way that matters to the person listening
12:05 – Why strong performance alone doesn’t create organizational influence
15:50 – Building support before the formal meeting happens
18:25 – Moving from finger-pointing to solving the actual problem
20:55 – Using listening tours to understand what’s really happening inside an organization
22:00 – Identifying influence, authority, and who will be affected by a decision
26:14 – The added dynamics women face when advocating strongly at work
28:01 – Where organizational politics crosses the line into unhealthy behavior
32:03 – Understanding the system you’re leading in before making a major recommendation
Mentioned in Navigating Organizational Politics Without Playing Games
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Elisa Hawkins: Leadership theory is easy. Leading actual people while you're managing up, putting out fires, thinking strategically and still trying to hit the number is something else entirely. Hi, I'm Elisa Hawkins and welcome to The Real Work of Leadership. We're getting into the conversations, decisions, organizational dynamics, and real life pressure that come with leading a team and being responsible for the results.
This episode, we're going to talk about navigating organizational politics. And listen, this is one of those messy bits that almost no one talks about. Organizational politics is not automatically manipulation. You know, it is the reality that decisions are made through people, priorities, relationships, influence, power, all those things. And refusing to understand that reality does not protect you from it.
Like, real talk, y'all. This is something that you need as leaders to really understand how to navigate, because organizations are made of people, and people make decisions through relationships, competing priorities, limited information, and influence. And if you are not navigating that, and if you are just sitting back on the results of the work of your team, that is not going to help you navigate.
That's not going to help you be in the rooms where decisions are made that are going to affect your team. I've seen it happen way too many times. You have a team that starts running a project that affects your team and you don't get called in until the end when now you have to implement it, but nobody asked you what was going to affect the team, what was going to affect this project because there were certain things that your team simply couldn't do.
Believe me, I have been through this. So you need to understand how to build those relationships within your organization and build those partnerships. And no, not everyone is going to like you necessarily, you're not going to like everybody necessarily, but what's important is understanding how each of you as leaders and your team can help each other get to the goals that we need to achieve for the organization.
Because each team may have different sets of goals, but it's all in furtherance of the organization. So let's start with the resistance that I know I have felt because I don't do politics. I don't do manipulation. I actually, one of my counterparts said to me one time, "Elisa, you are the most real person in this organization." So he was referring to the fact that a lot of people are not truly real.
They are actually manipulating and they're not telling the truth or what have you. And here's the thing, that may or may not have been true, but what I did was I spoke the truth. Now, that bit me in the ass more times than I'd like to count because when speaking the truth, I wasn't actually speaking the truth in relation to how it would affect other teams. So I wasn't making that connection.
I maybe wasn't being. I may have been clear in what my opinion was telling me or what the data was telling me. I wasn't being clear on what this meant writ large, for the teams as well as the organization itself. So I could speak truth all day. It doesn't mean that anybody was listening to me. I want to talk about that and how you kind of navigate that because the politics, and especially in the world we're living in right now, it's a dirty word, right?
But really politics is about competing priorities, but really navigating and understanding and negotiating with each other within the organization on what is going to be the best for the organization and our teams writ large. So we may have different approaches to how this one goal is going to be met, but that's okay. We can have different approaches, we can have different skill sets, and it's how we navigate that and partner with one another throughout that, that is going to be at the furtherance of our team, our culture, and ultimately the organization as a whole.
Because if all we're doing is fighting with one another, because we're operating in our own eye, if you will, what's best for me, instead of looking at it as what is best for our team, what is best for the organization, and really having those discussions and negotiating through that, that's really what we have to do. We can agree with, you know, some values, but then challenge the conclusion.
You can reject manipulation without ignoring the organizational dynamics because they do exist. And that is just the absolute truth. They do exist and ignoring them is not going to help you in any way. So what does healthy look like there? It's understanding who influences the decision, knowing what each stakeholder is accountable for.
Recognizing where there are competing priorities, because believe you me, there are going to be competing priorities. So recognizing that those are going to be, and then digging in to that. You know, it's going to be building trust before you need something. We say this so much in sales. We say this so much when we talk about finding great mentors or, you know, great coaches or asking, for instance, for someone to give you a recommendation.
When you ask for something for somebody, you should have well built a partnership and relationship and checked in and cared about what's on their plate and keep that relationship and partnership going. Not because you need something, but because it's the right thing to do. When you're asking for somebody, for instance, to give you a recommendation on something and you haven't had a conversation with them in months or years, how do you think that ask is going to come across?
And you building these partnerships and relationships, it's not because you eventually know that you're going to need something one day, it's because it is the right thing to do because the better you know what other organizations within the organizations, right, what other teams that are responsible for something completely different than your team is.
Whether it's talking about the product or operations or sales, marketing, customer success, whatever it is, those tiny micro organizations within the organization, everybody has a different set of priorities and goals. They have different responsibilitie. And if we do not understand the challenges that they are facing, if we do not understand that, and we're not open to listening and having good conversations and building those partnerships, then that leads to us as an organization and as leaders constantly in fighting with one another.
Believe me, I've seen this way too many times. So you need to recognize what each leader is accountable for, what is their priority, and they're going to recognize that there's going to be competing ones out there. You have to build that trust before you need something. Building trust within your organization is critical. Building trust, not only you building trust with your counterparts, but then building trust with you too.
It goes both ways. And you have to communicate in language that matters to the listener. So we all have been trained, if you're in sales, you've been trained on whether it be the disc profile or those or other profiles out there in terms of like when you're on with a prospective customer or a current client, if you are on with them, everybody is going to receive information differently, they want it delivered differently, just as your individual teams, we talked about that.
The same thing goes for your partners throughout the organization, your leadership partners throughout the organization. So communicating in a language that matters to them is super important. And knowing when and where and how to raise a disagreement. Let me tell you something. Slack is not the place to do that. Slack is not the place to go because I have seen this happen too many times.
All of a sudden, there are Slack messages going off. Your notifications are going off. You might be on a call and there is something happening on Slack because I unfortunately did not disconnect my notifications from my Apple Watch, and so I would be on a call and all of a sudden I'm getting Slack notification after notification and notification.
If you are asking for something and if Slack messages start going, like you're 10 deep into a Slack message, it's time for you to pick up the phone or get on a huddle on Slack or get on a Zoom call or whatever video communication that you have. It's time for y'all to get on a call and start hashing it out because it can be hashed out in five minutes versus things being misunderstood because they often are when people start popping off, as I like to call it, on Slack.
But also where you raise. So we talked about Slack, but it shouldn't also be in a large team setting when you haven't had previous discussions, and that especially shouldn't happen if you're disagreeing with your leader on something. That is the number one thing to not do. Disagreeing with your leader is perfectly okay, but you should do that in private. Then it shouldn't be the first time they hear it.
So I really want to make that distinction. It shouldn't be that you are calling somebody out, because I've seen this happen a lot, calling somebody out, blaming another leader or that leader's team for something when you have never even talked about any of this information with them prior. It's okay to talk about it if it's the subject and you've already had the chat, so now y'all are going to hash out and you're going to explain to your, you know, whoever the leader is on the call that is leading this discussion, now we need to talk about it.
That's okay. But it shouldn't be the first time that your counterpart's hearing about it, first time your leader's hearing about it, because that does not breed trust. What that breeds is somebody is just, you are just calling someone out for something that shouldn't be called out for if you hadn't had a discussion with them. You need to make the distinction, if you will, that performance is not the same as organizational influence.
I have actually made this mistake because I thought as a sales leader that, you know, hey, I came in, team was at 52%. I got them within nine months, they were achieving 105% to goal, so completely turned around the team. And I did a lot of other things, I won't dive into all of that, but I wasn't. I thought that that performance itself was going to speak for me. Spoiler, it did not.
Because what I wasn't doing was communicating appropriately with my counterparts and my leader the things that I had discovered on, you know, where the pivot, like, "Hey, what are some challenges we're facing? Here's what I've identified. Here's how we're solving it." I did not communicate effectively all of the other things that I was doing behind that, because it wasn't just about the improvement of the goal, right, the performance to goal.
It was about everything that I was doing to build a culture on that team, to build a culture of not only performance, but teamwork, because when I came in, the culture was so damaged, everybody was in fight or flight mode, they were backbiting each other. It was not a great culture. And I totally turned that around, so. But I never communicated all of the team building that I did everything that happened to lead to the complete change in performance of that team.
So you really have to think about how you are talking about the influence that you are having, but also it should always be about your team, right? You can talk about, "Hey, this is what I identified, so I worked with a team, they were great," and you need to 100% talk up your team, but you also need to insert what you found, right, and why you made the changes that you did.
And those are something that you should talk about, not only with your leader, you should talk about that with your peers, you should talk about that with your cross-functional partners, right? Because your team, there might be, when you're having discussions with, say, you're. Say you're in sales, you're leading a sales team, and you're having discussions with your marketing team, with the marketing team, you're having discussions with the customer success leaders, you know, and you ask questions, "Hey, what can my team do better?"
Because there's always ways to improve things, right? So that's what I mean, is that when you're constantly talking with and partnering with people to understand, that builds organizational influence for yourself, for your team. And you need to think about the people and the stakeholders you do not directly control. Like, think about the people on customer success. Yes, you may be, you know, working with the leader, you may be.
You know, but are you speaking with any of the customer success managers, the individual contributors that are, you know, hey, they're responsible for growing the accounts if you're in new business sales that you send over to them, right? So this is what you need to think about the building that influence across, up, and through. A lot of the common mistakes I've seen, and I have also made myself, is that I was waiting until formal meetings to build support instead of, hey, taking 15 minutes to get on a call and talk through or get on a biweekly call, chat through certain things that we're seeing.
You know, I've seen. I've never done this myself because this is actually one thing that I've never done. I always handle this privately, but I've seen this happen with another counterpart of mine, is surprising an executive with a disagreement in a large meeting. That's never a good thing to do. Career suicide, actually, if you do that, just FYI. But then assuming like, some of the things I've also seen is assuming that everyone shares the same definition of success.
I, myself, have made this mistake too, because everybody doesn't share the same definition that you do or that your team does. So, understanding what their definition of success is, the goals that they are, you know, tasked with, their responsibilities, right. Hey, what are they accountable for to their leadership group? That is supremely important. And I've seen most people do not do that well, honestly. They really don't.
And this is something I've seen so often, because especially when we're talking about marketing, sales, customer success, sales will blame marketing because they're not getting enough leads. Marketing will blame sales because they're not speaking about the product effectively or following the script. Customer success blames sales because they are closing business before it's actually won, or they're talking about what we can do and what we can and cannot do in the wrong way, yada, yada, yada.
Like, you name it, I see more pointing fingers between marketing sales and customer success or account management, whatever you want to call it, than ever. Trust me. And this is something that I am on a mission to change. I'm going to be talking about cross-functional collaboration specifically with marketing and, and sales and sales and customer success and future episodes, so stay tuned for that.
But we have to stop looking at another function's resistance as incompetence too. Like, everybody looks at people and, oh, they're incompetent. Like, everybody wants to point fingers. Stop pointing fingers, because that does not help anybody. If there's a problem, say, well, what's the problem, how it's a problem, how it's affecting the business, and then what is your proposed solution for it?
And believing the strength of the idea should be enough. Boy, have I made this mistake, y'all. I am telling you, I have had a great idea, and I would just pop off with it and think that would be enough. I didn't explain how I came to this idea. Why. I didn't explain the why behind it, the how it would be great. And I did not effectively communicate it. So if you have an idea, think through it, jot down.
It doesn't have to be deep, you don't have to build out a 20-page deck, but believe, believe in the strength of your idea and then prove it and communicate it clearly why you think it's a great idea and be okay with, some people are going to poke holes in it and they should. Because what you think may be a great idea, it may be a great idea, but it could be improved upon. So, think about that. And then you're only building relationships.
This is another mistake I see a lot, is only building relationships when you need approval, when you need to get something done. Let me tell you, that is not how to do that, because you need to be building these relationships consistently and effectively throughout your journey. And it can't be just because you might someday need something, right? You have to come to this.
One of the things that I say to new leaders or leaders that are going into a new organization, and this is certainly something that I have learned from some mistakes that I've made in going into a new organization that didn't trust me, I'm new to them, they didn't, trust me. And what I didn't do was build those relationships and influence and actually go in and have interviews. I would go in and have the interviews, but I wasn't really listening maybe in a way that I needed to, right?
I wasn't asking m- more deep questions to dive further in. And that's something that you need to do. You've got to go on a listening tour, and when I say a listening tour, instead of an interview, it needs to be a listening tour. You need to listen, and then you need to go in, pull the data, and maybe you need to do another listening tour because you need to compile your notes, you need to think through them.
And you need to listen to what people are saying, because everybody is affecting different points within the organization. And if you're not understanding and listening to what's actually happening, you are not going to be able to clearly plan strategically to fix certain things. You're not going to be able to effectively build partnerships to really fix those certain things and build that trust and that layer within the organization.
So I very much am, like, really, really advising that listening tours and building relationships and partnerships throughout the organization is so supremely critical as a leader. And then I really want to talk about, too, understanding who actually has influence with authority and who has influence without formal authority, right? Because there's a lot of people that are going to influence, much like the customers that we talk to, like, today, there is a buying committee.
It is not one individual making one decision. There is typically a buying committee. Same thing goes within organizations when you're making decisions within them. There are going to be people who have influence but don't have the formal authority, and then there's going to be people who actually have the authority who are making the decision. Like, don't get me started on the RACI chart, because I feel like we need to improve upon the RACI chart.
It was not built with sales in mind. It was built with project work in mind, but we need to really understand who has the influence, who is making the decisions. We need to understand who is going to be affected by the outcome. I've certainly seen this in my case where I'm brought in to talk about a decision that's already been made. And then when I start asking questions because it's directly affecting the sales team, it's directly going to affect revenue, and I start poking holes in it, people get a little hurt on that.
But had they brought me in at the start of a project or the start of something so they could interview me, ask questions, seeing how this was going to affect the team and potentially affect revenue, then they wouldn't have had to put the project on hold. Because believe me, that happened, because when I started going in and saying, "Well, hey, this is going to affect A, B, C, and D, which is going to affect, maybe millions of dollars in revenue. We need to think about this differently."
You need to think about who is affected by the outcome. And each person is protecting something like, "Hey, this is. They're holding onto it." People are very territorial. You need to think about that. Think about that people are going to be territorial. You know, you're going to be territorial of your team, let's face it. We're all human. We are. We spend most of our time in our organizations with our team, supporting our team, serving our team, right?
So, understanding that each person is going to be protecting their team, each person is going to be protecting their resources too, right? Because their team's time is a vital resource, especially if you're trying to do 10 different things with only a few people that can support it. We've gotta think about a lot of that. And then think about what information or risk might they see that I don't? When you're talking, they might see risks that you don't.
And that's the reason it's so important to have vital conversations and ask all these questions. And hey, what I love to say, Brene Brown, let's get into the rumble. I love rumbling on things because not just one person has the best idea. Like, when we come together with a different set of perspective, different minds, different knowledge bases, different sets of eyes and ears, and can really communicate and talk about a specific project or challenge or whatever it may be that we're facing as a leadership team, then that's where we can get to the other side of what is going to be the best for our teams and the organization, right?
And then also think about where could resistance come from. There's always going to be the negative Nellies. You, you probably are going to be able to identify them, but why are they negative Nellies? Have they been burned on things in the past? You've got to think about this in a thoughtful way. It can't be just, "Oh, they're just being a negative Nellie and oh, they're just always..."
You can't do that. Like, you have to really thoughtfully approach it from their perspective where you can. And I really want to talk about women in this, because as women, I know I have certainly seen this throughout my vast career, we are going to be judged differently for advocating strongly. Actually, I was just on a call with a leader, and she was actually told, because she had raised a question that nobody thought about after the meeting, and everybody was pretty much embarrassed that they hadn't thought about this.
And after the meeting, she was told by a male leader that she should speak less. This is happening in 2026. We need to understand. And it's not for us to be angry about, it's just the reality of it. So I'm not saying take yourself smaller. Absolutely not. I'm not advocating for that. But you need to understand the reality of advocating for something strongly. You can say the exact same thing, and your male counterpart can say the exact same thing.
It's going to be viewed in two different ways. We'll talk more about that. But I really want you also not to be putting your heads down and letting performance speak. Women, please do not do that. No. Let your performance speak, but you also need to be advocating for yourself. You also need to be strategically thinking about who knows what you're doing because it's not just about the performance.
It's about, hey, the grit behind the performance, how you got there, because you strategically are performing very well. Why are you, right? And the answer is also not disengagement. It's to become. And to make yourself small. It is not any of those things. It's to become more intentional and more strategic. And politics, I've seen this happen so many times. Politics becomes unhealthy when information, access, or relationships are used to undermine people.
I've seen this happen. It has happened to me. So, I really want to be very clear that you can draw that boundary, and you can also call that out. And relationship building, stakeholder alignment, and influence are all legitimate leadership work, but unhealthy politics and using against people or trying to call a team out for something to make your team look better without appropriate information or thinking you do, those are not good things to do.
And I'm going to tell a story about this, because this in particular happened when I was an executive leader, I was leading the revenue organization, and I was having consistent calls with the leaders on customer success. And one of the things that got brought to me was that there's a lot of problems with your teams and how they're talking about our product or that they are closing things too soon. A lot of different issues.
So, I said, "Okay, well, let's do this. If you can compile a spreadsheet for me, and I need you to send me specific examples, you know, include notes from the CSM, include if you have any video calls, because all of our calls are recorded, you know, if you could send me just a few examples of this and I will review it and then I will build some coaching and training around this so this doesn't continue to happen."
Because again, my spirit was in partnership because when sales and customer success are aligned and we're bringing on board great customers that customer success can grow, then that benefits all of us, right? Well, that became a let's shit on sales. And when I started diving into all of the details, almost zero instances and the notes that were in, I mean, it was like a let's shit on sales fest.
And I dug into the calls because I'm like, "Jeez, what is our sales team doing?" And I started digging into the calls. Out of 10 instances, I found one instance that I had to coach to. So then that became a different conversation. And there were a few people that actually were inaccurate in their description of the situation. So that became a whole other conversation that I had to have with the leadership of the team because I'm like, "Hey guys, I am here to be your partner. I'm here to help us improve, but it can't be let's point fingers."
It can't be let's fight each other because that does nothing good for our organization. And that's just an example of what I had, but I've seen the other thing, I've seen sales teams on customer success. I just want to say this, you do not have to become political in the worst sense of the word at all, but you do need to understand how your organizations work, what drives the leaders, what drives those teams.
And you cannot lead effectively in a system you refuse to see. That's what I really want to impart here is before your next major recommendation, identify the decision maker, the influencers, the affected stakeholders, and the objections likely to surface. Build those partnerships. Do what you need to do and really do it with an open mind, listening and an open heart, and understanding everybody is under a different set of pressures.
And so how can we all come together? And it's not, again, leadership is messy bits, right? So, it's not going to necessarily go great all the time, but really and truly understanding the system in which you're navigating and the leaders and the humans and everything going into everything is supremely important. Dynamics are dynamics and humans are humans. And the quicker we are all able to lead that way, the better off we all will be. Thanks so much. See you next time.
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