You're Already Playing Politics. The Question Is Whether You've Thought About It.

On organizational politics, ethical lines, and why good leaders become the thing they hate.

Someone asked me recently whether their unwillingness to engage with organizational politics was going to hold them back.

My answer was: probably, yes.

But I want to be careful about what I mean by that. Because the moment I say "engage with politics," a lot of people picture the worst version of it: the backstabbing, the credit-stealing, the brown-nosing. That's not what I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is the reality that every organization above the size of one person has politics. Every one. I don't care how healthy the culture is, how flat the hierarchy is, or how well-intentioned the leadership team is. People have colleagues they like more. People have projects they're more invested in. People build relationships that give them advantages in getting things done. That's politics.

When you decide you're not going to engage with any of that, you haven't escaped politics. You've just picked a particular political strategy: disengagement. And like any strategy, it has trade-offs.

"You can choose not to play politics. You've just chosen a particular strategy for engaging with politics, which is disengagement. You're still in the political space, even through active disinterest in it."

The problem with disengagement is that it tends to work right up until the point where it doesn't. You can outwork everyone, outdeliver everyone, and build a track record that's hard to ignore. And for a while, that's enough. But getting to positions of real influence like lead, director, EP, these usually require that people know who you are, feel invested in your success, and will go to bat for you when it counts. That doesn't happen automatically. It happens through relationships.

The Real Danger Isn't Politics. It's Politics Without A Map

Here's what I've seen happen to people who didn't want to play politics but felt like they had to.

They start engaging. Carefully, thoughtfully. They build relationships with the right people. They choose their battles. They learn how to frame things. They figure out who has influence and how to get access to it. And somewhere along the way - without realizing it! - they start making decisions that are less about the team and more about protecting their own position.

They become the thing they hated.

I've seen this in game dev. I saw it in the Army. Leaders who came up with fire in their eyes about fixing broken systems, who by the time they had the power to fix anything, had been practicing survival inside dysfunction for so long they'd become part of it. Not because they were bad people. Because they never drew lines.

This is how good people end up complicit in real problems. Things like fraud, cover-ups, and harassment cultures that they saw and never addressed. It's rarely one big evil decision. It's a hundred small ones where the line of what was “OK” kept moving, a little at a time, and they went along because everyone else seemed to think it was fine.

"The way a lot of people who [were] not Machiavellians end up becoming political animals is because they never drew lines [when] they needed to."

The Black, Gray, and White Zones

Before you engage with the politics of any organization, you need to know where your lines are. Not in theory. Actually written down, thought through, tested against real scenarios.

I think about this in three zones:

BLACK:  The things you will not do. Full stop. For me, lying is in the clear black. I don't ever want that to be ok for me. I want to sit in uncomfortable silence rather than say something untrue. Other people put outright manipulation, harassment cover-ups, or budget fraud in their black zone. Doesn't matter exactly where you draw it. What matters is that you've thought about it, drawn it out, and you mean it.

GRAY:  The things that require judgment. This is the tough part of the terrain. Withholding information that might be important to someone. Giving a vague answer to avoid conflict. Staying quiet when you probably should have spoken up. Not every gray situation has a clean answer. But knowing it's gray means you're making a conscious call, not just drifting.

WHITE:  Where you want to spend most of your time. Transparency. Honesty. Directness. Advocating for people who can't advocate for themselves. Most of us know what the white zone looks like. The challenge is staying there when gray starts to look easier.

The gray zone is where corruption happens. Not dramatically. Very very quietly. Someone else in the room doesn't say anything, so you don't either. The group seems to think this is fine, and now the start of a habit is present. One decision at a time, you move from white into gray, and eventually the gray starts to look like white.

I'm not telling you that you'll keep a perfect record. I've failed to hold to my own standards. What I'm saying is that if you haven't thought about where your lines are before you need them, you'll find yourself making those calls in real-time under social pressure, and suddenly the line has moved and you hardly noticed.

Organizational Tax

Before everyone goes out dying on every grayish hill, I want to explain a concept I call the organizational tax. No workplace is going to perfectly align with how you'd want to work. You're going to get asked to do things you think are inefficient, unnecessary, or mildly annoying. Sprint reports you don't find useful. Status updates that feel like theater. Meetings that could have been emails.

Pay the tax. Don't overinvest in it, but pay it. This is different from compromising your values. It's recognizing that working inside any system requires some accommodation to the system's existing habits.

What you're doing when you draw your black/gray/white lines is separating the tax from the non-negotiables. Bending on process is fine. Bending on values is not. Know the difference before you're in the room.

Healthy Engagement Is Possible

I don't want to leave you with the impression that all politics is corruption waiting to happen. Because healthy engagement is real and it actually works better than the alternatives.

When I've done this well, it looked like this: I deliberately built relationships with people across the organization not to get something, but because working with people who trust you is genuinely better. Over time, when I needed to get something important moved, I could go to those people and ask for their support. They'd say yes faster than they would for a stranger. Important things got done that wouldn't have gotten done otherwise.

I want to be clear, this is not immoral manipulation. It's leadership. Leadership is influence. You're supposed to be building influence. The question is whether you're doing it with your ethics intact.

Decide what those ethics are. Write them down. Hold to them especially when it's awkward or requires sacrifice.

And then go build the relationships that let you do the work that matters.

If any of this landed for you...

The Game Dev Leadership Accelerator is a 16-week program for leaders in game dev who were promoted for their craft and never trained to lead. It covers what actually drives whether a team works: leadership, culture, product vision, and process. In that order.

Leaders who go through it come out knowing where to actually point their attention, and with a clearer picture of why their team moves the way it does.

If you want to learn more, fill out the interest form and I’ll be in touch: https://forms.gle/er6ew8DBKDnLLk319