Almost every senior professional I work with says some version of the same thing when we first meet. "I'm not really a politics person. I just want to do good work."
I understand the instinct. Politics has a foul reputation. It conjures up images of sycophants, climbers, and the kind of person who treats every interaction as a transaction. Nobody wants to be that person.
But here's the trap. The phrase "I don't do politics" doesn't mean you've opted out. It means you've opted in, badly. You're still in the game. You're just playing it with no strategy, no map, and no awareness of who's actually moving the pieces around you.
What politics actually is
Strip away the connotations and politics is a neutral word. It describes how decisions get made in groups of humans where the formal authority structure isn't sufficient to explain the outcomes.
Every workplace has politics because every workplace has limited resources, competing priorities, and human beings with different incentives. The org chart tells you who reports to whom. It tells you almost nothing about who actually shapes a decision, who gets vetoed quietly, or whose buy-in is required before any change can move.
Pretending this layer doesn't exist doesn't make it go away. It just means you operate without access to it.
The cost of opting out
Three things happen to people who genuinely refuse to engage with workplace politics, and I've watched all three repeatedly over twenty years.
First, they get passed over for promotion. The decisions about who moves up happen in conversations they're not in. Their work might be excellent. Nobody senior is in a position to advocate for it because they haven't done the relational work to make that happen.
Second, they get blindsided by decisions. Reorgs, budget cuts, project cancellations, headcount moves. The people who saw it coming had been picking up signals for weeks. The "I don't do politics" person finds out by email at 4pm on a Friday.
Third, and this is the painful one, they get credited less for their own work. Because they didn't communicate the strategic narrative around their projects, more politically aware peers absorbed the credit, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes deliberately.
The unfairness of all this is genuine. But unfairness doesn't change the rules. It just makes the rules more expensive to ignore.
The clean version of politics
Here's the move. Think of politics in terms of awareness rather than ethics.
Ethical politics is doing what you'd already do (delivering good work, treating people well, being honest in your assessments) with full awareness of how that work is perceived, who needs to know about it, and what decisions are coming down the pipeline.
Unethical politics is undermining colleagues, taking credit unfairly, or saying different things to different audiences. That's a different category. You can be completely ethical and still be deeply political. The two are unrelated.
The clients I see make the biggest leap in their careers tend to be people who had a moment of realising that they could engage with politics from a place of integrity. Once you separate "politics" from "manipulation", a lot of the discomfort disappears.
The 10-30-60 split
A useful frame to carry around. In any senior career, your trajectory is shaped roughly 10 per cent by your performance, 30 per cent by people's perception of you, and 60 per cent by your strategic exposure to the people who make decisions.
The 10 per cent gets you in the game. The 30 per cent gets you considered. The 60 per cent is where the real movement happens.
Most professionals invest 90 per cent of their effort into the 10 per cent. They work harder, deliver more, and wonder why their careers aren't moving. The shift is to invest deliberately in the other ninety. Not at the expense of the work. Alongside it.
If you reach Director or VP without internalising this, you'll either plateau or you'll be lucky. Plateau is the more common outcome.
"Your network is your net worth." It's a cliché because it's true, but the cliché understates it. Your network is also your sense of what's coming, your access to opportunity, and your insurance against the bad quarters that hit every career eventually.
