E.Ed.22 - The Political Strategy You Pretend You Do Not Need
The Business and Leadership Coaching Company
July 2026 | Series: Senior Leader | Edition: 22 | Theme: Strategy
Read Time: 7 Minutes
You prefer to believe good work speaks for itself. In most organisations, it does not, not loudly enough on its own.
There is a particular discomfort that surfaces the moment the word political enters a conversation about your own career. It carries a connotation you have spent years actively distancing yourself from, manipulation, self-interest, the version of organisational life you find genuinely distasteful. So you have built your approach instead around competence, around the belief that strong, honest delivery will be recognised and rewarded on its own merits, without you needing to actively manage how you are perceived.
This belief is not naive, exactly, it is simply incomplete. Competence and performance are necessary and it has never, on its own, been sufficient at the level you now operate at. Every decision about resourcing, sponsorship, promotion, and influence in your organisation is made by people interpreting incomplete information through their own relationships, perceptions, and political considerations, whether you participate in that reality or not. Declining to engage with it does not remove you from its effects, it simply removes your voice from a conversation that continues regardless.
The Leadership Squeeze you experience daily; board expectations above, team performance below, peer politics laterally, is itself evidence that the organisation is a political system, not merely a rational, meritocratic one. Pretending otherwise at your own level, while clearly seeing it everywhere else in the organisation, is a specific and costly blind spot, one that leaves you navigating the squeeze reactively rather than with any deliberate strategy of your own.
There is a useful reframe available here, worth sitting with directly. A political strategy is not, fundamentally, about manipulation. It is about deliberately managing how accurate, truthful information about your contribution, your judgement, and your intentions actually reaches the people who need it to make good decisions about you. The alternative to having a political strategy is not neutrality, it is simply ceding that information flow to chance, or to colleagues considerably more comfortable managing it than you currently are.
Consider how decisions about you actually get made, honestly, in rooms you are not in. Someone references a project you led, with whatever accuracy or inaccuracy their memory or motive supplies. Someone forms an impression of your readiness for the next step from a fragment, a comment in a meeting, a reputation passed along secondhand. Without any deliberate management on your part, your career is being narrated by other people, working from incomplete information, and you have simply opted out of having any say in what that narrative actually contains.
This is precisely where The Inner Chamber earns its place, distinct from any sense of scheming. A confidential space to think through, honestly and without judgement, who actually holds influence over your next move, what those people currently believe about you, and what specific, truthful information would close the gap between that belief and reality, is not manipulation. It is the same strategic discipline you would apply, without hesitation, to any portfolio decision inside your actual remit.
There is a specific blind spot worth naming directly: confusing political strategy with insincerity. The two are not the same, and conflating them is precisely what has kept you disengaged from this work. A political strategy built on truthful information, deliberately and consistently shared with the right people, is not dishonest. It is simply honest information that has finally been given somewhere reliable to travel, rather than left to arrive, distorted or not at all, by accident.
Imposter syndrome, technically retired from your formal pain point list but still present in how this avoidance often feels from the inside, frequently hides underneath the discomfort with political strategy. Engaging deliberately with how you are perceived can feel, in the moment, like admitting the perception might not currently be accurate, might not currently reflect your actual capability. That admission is not a weakness. It is simply the accurate starting point any genuine strategy has to begin from.
A practical first step is considerably smaller than the discomfort suggests it needs to be. Identify the two or three people in the organisation whose perception of you most directly shapes your next opportunity. Ask, honestly, what each of them currently believes about your strengths, your readiness, your trajectory. Where that belief is accurate, reinforce it deliberately. Where it is thin or outdated, decide, specifically, what truthful information would close the gap, and find a genuine, non-engineered way to make sure it reaches them.
There is also a peer dimension worth being honest about. Lateral politics, the relationships with peers who are simultaneously colleagues and, in some organisations, competitors for the same eventual opportunities, are uncomfortable to navigate deliberately, and avoiding that discomfort by simply not engaging strategically with peer relationships at all tends to leave you isolated precisely where alliance and mutual advocacy would serve you best.
None of this requires becoming someone you currently find distasteful, the self-promoting operator you have spent a career deliberately not being. It requires a considerably smaller, more honest shift: treating the accurate communication of your actual contribution and capability as a legitimate part of leadership, rather than an unseemly distraction from the real work, which it has never actually competed with, only quietly lost to by default.
Your competence has never been the question. What has been missing is a deliberate strategy for making sure that competence is accurately seen, by the right people, at the moments it actually matters, rather than left to travel, or fail to travel, however the organisation' s informal political currents happen to carry it without your involvement.
The organisation you are navigating is, and has always been, a political system as well as a rational one. Pretending otherwise has not protected your integrity, it has simply ceded the conversation about your own trajectory to people considerably less invested in getting it right than you are.
There is a useful weekly habit worth pairing with this shift, a short, private review of every meeting where you held back a view you actually had. Naming those instances honestly, even just to yourself at first, tends to reveal a pattern faster than abstract intention ever does: a particular type of meeting, a particular stakeholder, a particular kind of risk that consistently triggers the instinct to stay quiet. Once the pattern is visible, it becomes considerably easier to interrupt deliberately, one specific meeting at a time, rather than trying to will yourself into a generally braver disposition that rarely survives contact with the next genuinely uncomfortable room. Over a few months of this kind of honest tracking, the gap between your private strategic thinking and what the organisation actually hears from you tends to close measurably, not because her judgement improved, but because you finally gave it somewhere to go.
It is also worth distinguishing, honestly, between political strategy and the kind of self-promotion you have always found genuinely uncomfortable to watch in others. The distinction sits in intent and accuracy. Self-promotion, at its worst, inflates or distorts contribution to manufacture an impression that exceeds reality. A political strategy built on truthful information does the opposite, it simply ensures an already accurate picture of your actual contribution reaches people who would otherwise never see it clearly. Holding onto that distinction firmly tends to make the whole practice considerably easier to engage with honestly, because it removes the false choice you have been operating from for years, between either staying silent with integrity or speaking up and compromising it.
There is a final point worth holding onto when this feels uncomfortable in the moment. The people who already navigate organisational politics most skilfully are rarely the loudest or the most calculating, they are simply the most deliberate about making sure accurate information travels to the right rooms. You do not need to become a different kind of leader to do this well. You need only to extend the same rigour you already apply to every other strategic question in your remit to the one question you have spent a career deliberately avoiding, which is how you yourself are actually perceived, and what truthful correction that perception might currently need. That extension of rigour, applied consistently, is the entire strategy. Nothing more elaborate than that is actually required of you.
If naming a political strategy still feels uncomfortable, that discomfort is worth examining rather than letting it quietly cost you the influence your work has already earned.
If you would like to think it through in a receptive and non-judgemental space with someone who will listen carefully and reflect back what they hear, a Discovery Call is a confidential 30-minute conversation about where you are, what is in the way, what you could and would want to do about it, and how coaching can support you in moving from uncertainty to clarity to strategic action.
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If a Discovery Call feels like a bigger step than you are currently ready for, perhaps the Find Your Focus: The Executive Strategic Audit is an easier place to begin. It asks some honest questions that help you take stock of how you are navigating your seat, whether you have the support you need, and the leader you are building. It is the first step in the same direction: introspection now, a conversation, insight, clarity and strategy when you are ready.
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