“I just can’t.”
I hate that expression. Yet I hear it often from a surprising group of leaders: high performers.
Clearly, they can. Look at everything they’ve already done.
So what can’t they do?
- Work for a boss who ignores their expertise and dictates what the business needs from them
- Stay in a role where cronyism wins, and they can’t find the angle into the position they were hired to fill
- Drive results in a toxic culture that nobody has any plan to fix
These talented leaders are at their wit’s end. Yet there’s one more thing they can’t do: quit.
They’re not quitters. So they stay and suffer … I’m talking Biblical levels. Lots of weeping and gnashing of teeth.
When I coach leaders in this spot, I don’t usually tell them to leave. Instead, I point them to a critical skill they haven’t mastered yet: workplace politics, also known as “the game.”
Early in your career, success is about doing your job. You take direction, drive results, and do more than expected. That’s how you stand out and earn more opportunity. Then you’re promoted into a role with different demands: setting direction, competing with peers for resources, and working across divisions. That game requires interpersonal savvy and nuance, which few people are born with and even fewer are taught. If we’re lucky, we develop the EQ side of our careers on purpose. If we’re not, we “just can’t.”
It’s easy to blame the company or the culture for its politics. It’s more productive to look at what others are doing that you aren’t, and to honestly assess your own skill in the arena.
Maybe a peer is better at promoting their work, so they get tapped for the best assignments. Maybe another leader tells marketing which external panels they’d like to speak on, and marketing makes it happen. Or maybe someone studies the CEO’s speeches to learn what the CEO values, so when they pitch for investment, they use the right language and approach.
(Aside: That last one works at every level. I recently encouraged a client to look at what their boss had been posting on LinkedIn and weave those themes into the deck they were about to present to that same boss. Yes, I encouraged them to use AI to synthesize this, too. It was a game-changer.)
If I had to distill workplace politics into five skills, they’d be:
- Situational awareness: reading the room
- Social awareness: reading the power in the room
- Style flex: tailoring your leadership style to the person in front of you
- Empathy: understanding someone else’s truth
- Authenticity: bringing your whole, managed self to the conversation
None of these develop overnight. But over time, you’ll find that yes, you can. The situations that used to frustrate you become chances to show your expertise, because you haven’t just learned the game. You’ve mastered it.
