There’s a phrase that circulates among technically skilled professionals like a badge of honor: “I just focus on the work. I don’t do politics.”
It sounds noble. It feels clean. And it fundamentally misunderstands how organizations function.
Believing you can do the work without engaging in politics is like believing you can swim without getting wet. You are already in the water. Politics is not an optional layer sitting on top of productivity. It is the medium through which productivity travels. Every idea you have must move through people to become real. Those people have preferences, histories, alliances, fears, and ambitions. Navigating that reality is not a distraction from your job. It is a core competency of your job.
Mathemapolitics
(If you regularly read my articles, you will have noticed some form of equation eventually surfaces to explain a phenomenon. If you are reading this as a new reader, then please embrace the mathematization of concepts in my writing. The math is not axiomatic. It is directional. A way to imagine nonlinear problems in as linear a form as possible.)
So let’s introduce some math to politics. I shall call it mathemapolitics.
Consider a simple formula for how much of your work actually affects outcomes:
Realized Impact = Quality of Work × Organizational Reach × Decision-Maker Alignment
Let’s assign some numbers. Say you produce work at a quality level of 9 out of 10. Exceptional. But your organizational reach, meaning how many relevant people know about and understand your work, sits at 0.3. And your alignment with decision-makers, whether your priorities match what leadership cares about, is 0.4.
Your realized impact: 9 × 0.3 × 0.4 = 1.08
Now take a colleague whose work quality is 6 out of 10. Solid but not exceptional. Their organizational reach is 0.8. Their alignment with decision-makers is 0.7.
Their realized impact: 6 × 0.8 × 0.7 = 3.36
The person with lower quality output has more than three times your organizational effect. This math explains a phenomenon that frustrates technically excellent people everywhere: watching less talented peers get promoted, funded, or praised while their own contributions go unrecognized.
The frustration is understandable. The conclusion most people draw from it is wrong. They assume the system is broken or corrupt. Sometimes it is. More often, they are simply measuring the wrong variable. They optimized for the first term in the equation while ignoring the multipliers.
What Politics Actually Means
The word “politics” carries connotations of manipulation, backstabbing, and empty flattery. This is one version of politics, the pathological kind. But politics at its root means something simpler: the process by which groups of humans make collective decisions.
Any time more than one person is involved in deciding anything, politics exists. Who gets heard. Whose concerns carry weight. What tradeoffs seem acceptable. How conflicts get resolved. These questions have no purely technical answers. They require persuasion, relationship, timing, and trust.
Robert Caro spent decades studying Lyndon Johnson’s political genius. One observation stands out: Johnson understood that power is not a thing you possess, it is a relationship you cultivate. The same insight applies at every scale, from nations to startups.
When you say you avoid politics, what you actually mean is you avoid deliberate engagement with how collective decisions get made. You still participate in politics. You just do it badly, by default, without strategy.
The Psychology of Anti-Political Identity
Why do skilled people resist engaging with organizational dynamics? Several cognitive factors contribute.
Effort justification. Technical skills require years of deliberate practice. People who invested heavily in becoming excellent at something want that excellence to be sufficient. Admitting that social skills also matter feels like moving the goalposts, like being told the marathon you trained for now includes a swimming portion.
Identity protection. Many technically oriented people built their self-concept around being “the smart one” rather than “the popular one.” They experienced social hierarchies in school as arbitrary or hostile. Workplace politics can feel like a return to that environment. Refusing to engage becomes a way of maintaining a sense of integrity, of being above all that.
Illusion of meritocracy. Organizations often claim that performance speaks for itself, that good work gets rewarded. Taking this claim literally is a mistake. It is aspirational rhetoric, not operational reality. But the claim gives people permission to ignore the gap between how things should work and how they actually do.
Skill mismatch. Technical work provides clear feedback. Code compiles or it doesn’t. Designs pass stress tests or fail them. Political skill is harder to measure and improve. The ambiguity feels uncomfortable to people who excel in structured domains.
A Better Equation
Let’s refine the impact formula to include a factor often overlooked: resistance.
Realized Impact = (Quality × Reach × Alignment) / (1 + Organizational Resistance)
Organizational resistance captures how much friction your work creates. Does your proposal threaten someone’s budget? Does it imply that a previous decision was wrong? Does it require behavior change from people who prefer the status quo?
Even high-quality work with good reach and alignment can stall if it generates too much resistance. Resistance values above 1 cut your impact in half or worse.
Now add a modifier for political skill:
Effective Resistance = Raw Resistance × (1 / Political Skill)
Political skill here means your ability to sequence proposals correctly, build coalitions before announcing initiatives, address concerns before they become objections, and frame changes in ways that let people save face.
If your political skill is 2 on some normalized scale, you cut effective resistance in half. If it is 0.5, you double it.
The math makes a prediction: a person with moderate technical output but high political skill will consistently outperform a person with exceptional technical output and low political skill. This matches what we observe in organizations. The prediction feels unfair only if you believe technical quality should be the sole determinant of success. It never was.
Practical Influence
Moving from avoidance to engagement requires both mindset shifts and concrete practices.
Mindset shift one: politics is information asymmetry management. Most organizational conflict stems from people having different information or different interpretations of the same information. Political skill is largely the skill of making sure key people understand what you understand. This reframe makes politics feel less manipulative. You are not tricking anyone. You are teaching.
Mindset shift two: relationships are infrastructure. The time to build a relationship is before you need something. If you only talk to someone when you want their approval or resources, you are making withdrawals from an empty account. Regular, low-stakes interactions build the capital you will eventually need. Coffee with someone from another department is not wasted time. It is investment.
Mindset shift three: alignment is not agreement. You do not need everyone to love your ideas. You need key stakeholders to feel their concerns were heard and addressed, or at least acknowledged. Often the difference between a proposal that passes and one that stalls is whether the proposer took time to understand objections and modified the plan accordingly. Being right matters less than being right in a way others can accept.
Practice one: map the decision landscape. Before proposing anything significant, identify who must approve it, who can block it, and who influences those people. Write this down. Treat it as seriously as you treat technical requirements. Many excellent proposals die because their authors understood the problem but not the decision process.
Practice two: pre-sell relentlessly. By the time an idea reaches a formal meeting, the outcome should already be known. Decisions made in meetings are usually ratifications of consensus built in smaller conversations beforehand. If you are surprised by the outcome of a meeting, you did not do enough work in advance.
Practice three: frame for your audience. The same proposal can be positioned in dozens of ways. For finance people, emphasize cost savings or revenue. For engineers, emphasize technical elegance or reduced complexity. For executives, emphasize strategic positioning or risk reduction. This is not dishonesty. Complex initiatives genuinely have multiple valid framings. Choosing the one that resonates with your audience is basic communication competence.
Practice four: make others look good. Share credit aggressively. Highlight contributions from collaborators, especially those with organizational influence. People remember how you made them feel. Someone who felt valued in one interaction becomes an ally in future interactions.
The Integration
Technical excellence matters. Nothing in this argument suggests you should stop refining your craft. But craft alone operates in a vacuum. Realized impact requires moving your work through an organization composed of humans with their own agendas, fears, and constraints.
The professionals who thrive over long careers rarely fit the caricature of the pure technician or the pure politician. They integrate both. They produce work worth advancing and they know how to advance it. They understand that influence is not a corrupting addition to competence but a necessary extension of it.
You can continue telling yourself that you don’t do politics. Just understand what that actually means. It means you are playing a game with three variables while optimizing only one. It means you are working hard and then letting someone else determine whether that work matters.
The choice is not between integrity and influence. The choice is between deliberate engagement and default irrelevance.