The Unwritten Rules of Office Politics

You can hate office politics as much as you like.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t make it disappear.

Wherever people compete for resources, promotions, attention and influence, politics exists. The useful skill isn’t learning to manipulate people. It’s understanding how your organisation actually works.

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The organisation chart only tells you part of the story

The most senior person in the meeting isn’t necessarily the person everybody listens to.

Somebody without an impressive title may have years of organisational knowledge and enormous influence. Decisions may appear to happen in meetings when most of the groundwork happened beforehand.

And the values written on the wall don’t always tell you what the organisation really rewards.

Learning to see those things makes workplaces considerably easier to understand.

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What you’ll learn

By the end of the guide, you’ll know how to:

• Work out where influence really sits.
• Understand how decisions actually get made.
• Build useful relationships without fake networking.
• Pay attention to what gets rewarded, not just what gets said.
• Disagree without creating unnecessary enemies.
• Avoid being dragged into other people’s political battles.
• Understand conversations about your career that happen without you.
• Recognise when you’re being politically naive.

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Includes a Political Map

The guide includes a practical exercise for mapping a real workplace decision: who formally owns it, who influences it, what each person cares about and where your assumptions might be wrong.

Not so you can become some Machiavellian office mastermind.

So you can stop assuming that doing good work and being right are the only things influencing what happens.

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Written by Lee Harding

I’ve spent 20+ years working in recruitment, Talent Acquisition and leadership, including senior and Director-level roles.

My advice comes from years spent on the other side of workplace decisions – hiring people, managing teams and working closely with managers and senior leaders.

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Understand the workplace you’re actually in

You don’t need to play stupid games.

You do need to understand the game that’s already happening around you.

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