Political intelligence without compromise — an extract from The Executive’s Path

The following is an extract from The Executive’s Path, published by Greenfields Press.

The executive who claims to be above organisational politics has either not been paying attention or is not being honest.

Politics — the informal system of influence, interest, and relationship that operates alongside the formal structure of every organisation — is not a pathology. It is the inevitable consequence of putting human beings, with their differing interests and differing understandings of what the organisation is for, into a shared institutional arrangement. The executive who is naive about it will be ineffective. The executive who is cynical about it will erode the trust their effectiveness depends on. The question is how to be politically intelligent without becoming politically compromised.

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Political intelligence is the capacity to understand the interests and motivations of the people around you, to read the informal dynamics of an organisation accurately, to build the coalitions that make good outcomes achievable. This is a genuine professional skill, and a valuable one.

Political manipulation is different in kind. It involves the use of information advantage to maintain power rather than to serve the organisation’s interests. The executive who operates this way may produce results in the short term. But the results come at a cost that is invisible in the quarterly review and very visible over five years: the gradual erosion of the trust that genuine leadership effectiveness depends on.

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The practical test for any political action is straightforward, though it requires honesty to apply: if the people whose trust you most depend on knew exactly what you were doing and why, would you be comfortable with their knowing? Political conduct that passes this test is legitimate. Conduct that does not is compromised, regardless of whether it is discovered.

The executive whose political conduct is an expression of genuine values rather than a performance of them — who can be the same person in private as in public, who can say the same thing to the board as to the team — is exercising a form of integrity that is rarer than it should be, and that produces, over time, the most durable form of influence available in an organisation.

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