Episode 827 - Navigating Internal Politics

0:00You already know how AI is changing how everyday work gets done, how much ground you can cover, and how fast a team can scale. To stay ahead, you need the tools to give you a competitive advantage, built for this new era. Welcome to a Gentech Revenue. Adio is the CRM for this world. It meets you where you work. Compounds every customer signal into context, then acts on it across your pipeline to let you move it on match speed and scale. With agents and animations for every job in Revenue, Adio orchestrates your work around the clock, built to handle the scale of your workloads, extensible with API, and MCP, and with the infrastructure to keep up with your most ambitious agents. Loved by high growth startups like Granola, Modal, and Edget, Adio runs the work behind every win. That's Adio, the agent to CRM, the intelligent system that never sleeps. Fix up leads at 2 a.m. Catchers renewals before they slip. Hands you the answer before you ask. Try Adio free at adio.com slash iHeart. That's adio.com slash iHeart.

1:02If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Hi, I'm Sean Evans from Hot Ones, and I want to tell you about YouTube Premium. It has offline downloads, so you can watch without Wi-Fi. Background play. So you can lock your phone, and it still plays, baby. Oh, and it is completely ad free. Yes, I said it, ad free. Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com slash premium. Trial eligibility varies, terms apply, cancel anytime. This is Matt Rogers from Los Cultures, test with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Los Cultures, test with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. You know when people try a new food, and suddenly it's like, okay, hold on. I got a new favorite food. That's the reaction a lot of people are having when they first try Cupid Mayon. Yeah, it's the one with the red cap and the little baby on the bottle. You've probably seen it at the grocery store. And this mayo is different. Most mayonnaise uses whole eggs. Cupid only uses egg yolks, which gives it this rich umami flavor. It's smoother, deeper, almost buttery. Once people try it, they start putting it on everything.

2:05Eggs sandwiches, fries, burgers, chefs use it, restaurants use it, people who really care about flavor use it. Put it on just about anything. Then you'll understand. Cupid, the original Japanese mayonnaise. Helping leaders motivate their people to a higher level of performance through strong human relations, team building and goal achieving. This is the seven minute leadership podcast with your host Paul Felle Valido. Hello everyone and welcome to the seven minute leadership podcast. It's episode eight twenty seven. Today we're talking about something almost every leader eventually runs into internal politics. And I don't mean Republican or Democrat. I'm talking about workplace politics, the alliances, the private conversations, the person who somehow knows what happened in the meeting before the meeting is even over the employee who has the boss's ear,

3:09the manager who protects their territory, the person who agrees with you in the conference room, then walks down the hall and tells everyone why your idea won't work. Every organization has some version of this. You can pretend it doesn't exist. You can complain about it. You can become part of it. Or you can learn how to navigate it without becoming someone you don't respect. That's what we're talking about today. Internal politics usually begins with something very normal influence. Every workplace has an organizational chart. But there's another chart. Nobody prints. It's the influence chart. The organizational chart tells you who has authority. The influence chart tells you who people actually listen to. Those are not always the same people. You might have a director with an impressive title and very little influence. Meanwhile, there's an employee who's been there for 15 years, has no management title whatsoever.

4:18And everybody asks that person what they think before anything changes. That person has power. This is where leaders make their first mistake. They assume that because they have authority, they automatically have influence. You don't. Authority comes with the position influence has to be earned. And when leaders don't understand that difference, they can walk straight into an internal political mess without realizing what happened. Imagine you're promoted into a department and you immediately decide you're going to fix everything. You've been there two weeks. You change your process. You move some responsibilities around you eliminate a meeting on paper. Everything you did make sense. And then suddenly there's resistance everywhere. People are irritated. Rumors start. Someone says that's not how we do things here. You start wondering why everybody is fighting a perfectly reasonable idea.

5:28Because you changed the organizational chart without understanding the influence chart. Maybe that meeting you eliminated was where an influential employee had a voice. Maybe the responsibility you reassigned belonged to someone who considered it part of their identity. Maybe the process you changed was created by someone who still highly respected inside the organization. You walked onto the field without knowing where the landmines were. That's internal politics. So here's the first thing I want you to do. Before you start changing things, learn the room. Watch who people look at after an announcement is made. That's one of my favorite leadership observations. Someone announces a major change. Don't only watch the person making the announcement. Watch everyone else. Who do they look at? Because sometimes you can literally see the influence network operating in real time. A decision gets announced and five people immediately glanced toward the same person.

6:38There's a reason. Learn who people trust. Learn who carries institutional knowledge. Learn who can calm a room down. Learn who can quietly turn a room against something. That's intelligence. Every leader needs. There's nothing manipulative about understanding how your organization actually functions. The problem starts when leaders begin participating in the ugly side of workplace politics.

7:39People wonder who you're targeting. That's an awful environment to lead. So protect yourself from becoming part of that system. One of the easiest ways to do that is to become extremely predictable in your principles. If people should know where you stand. If something is wrong on Monday, it should still be wrong on Friday when your favorite employee does it. If you expect one department to follow a policy, another department shouldn't get a pass because their manager is your friend. Consistency makes political games much harder to play. And here's another rule I want you to remember. Don't become a courier for workplace gossip. Someone comes into your office and says you're not going to believe what somebody said about you. Be careful. You don't automatically need to know some information makes you smarter.

8:43Other information poisons the way you see people. There's a huge difference. I've watched leaders get completely consumed by this. Who said what? Who agrees with me? Who doesn't? Who's talking about me? Who went to whose office? Who had lunch together? Who liked whose post? Just stop. You're leading an organization. Not investigating a high school cafeteria. If somebody disagrees with your decision, that's okay. If somebody doesn't particularly like you, that's okay too. Leadership does not require universal approval. Your job is to make good decisions, communicate them clearly, treat people fairly, and protect the mission. You're going to create unnecessary stress for yourself if you spend your career trying to track every conversation happening behind your back. Some leaders also make the mistake of believing they need to win every political battle. You don't. There are arguments you can walk away from. There are comments that don't deserve a response. There are people trying to pull you into a fight because your participation gives their complaint legitimacy.

10:01Learn the value of saying, I'm not getting involved in that. That's an incredibly powerful sentence. And when there is a legitimate issue, bring it into the light. Workplace politics thrives. Invade conversations. Someone says, everybody is upset. Okay. Who is everybody? People are saying this isn't working. Which people? There's a lot of concern about your decision. What specifically is the concern? Make people move from vague political language into facts because everybody is sometimes two people standing beside the coffee maker. And people are saying can mean one person said it three times. Don't manage ghosts, manage facts. And another important lesson never build your leadership around access to powerful people. I've seen people become obsessed with being close to whoever sits at the top. They want to be seen talking to the CEO. They want everyone to know they're texting the owner.

11:13They mention executives by first name every chance they get. They want people to believe I have access. That's borrowed power and borrowed power disappears very quickly when the person you're borrowing it from leaves. Build your own credibility. Become valuable because you solve problems. Become respected because your word means something. Become trusted because people know you won't throw them under the bus to protect yourself. That kind of influence survives leadership changes. And if you're currently caught in an internal political situation, here's something practical you can do tomorrow. Draw two organizational charts. The first is the official one. The second is the influence chart. Who has formal authority? Who has informal influence? Who are the people others trust? Where are the relationships strained? Where does information move quickly? Where does information stop?

12:24You may discover that your biggest communication problem isn't actually communication. It's politics. Maybe information is being filtered before it reaches you. Maybe employees don't trust one of your managers. Maybe an unofficial leader has more credibility than your official leadership team. That's useful information. You don't use it to manipulate people. You use it to understand the environment you're responsible for leading. And sometimes you're going to find yourself on the losing side of an internal political battle. You don't get the promotion. Your idea gets killed. Someone else gets credited. decision gets made that you strongly disagree with. Those moments reveal a lot about you because leadership isn't only measured when the room agrees with you. It's also measured by what you do when the room doesn't. Can you disagree professionally? Can you support a final decision after you've had your opportunity to speak? Can you keep your disappointment from becoming everybody else's problem? That's maturity.

13:33And people notice it because careers are long. The person who won today's political battle may be gone next year. The executive who rejected your idea may eventually become your biggest supporter. The coworker you're frustrated with today may eventually be sitting across from you during one of the most important decisions of your career. Don't burn relationships over temporary battles. Your reputation has a longer shelf life than most workplace arguments. So internal politics will always exist wherever people, power, relationships and ambition come together. You don't have to become political to survive it. Learn the influence chart, protect your credibility, stay consistent, refuse the gossip, deal in facts, build relationships before you need them and remember the strongest person in the political game is often the leader who doesn't need to play it. This has been the seven minute leadership podcast and I thank you for listening.

14:46For more Paul Felle Valito podcasts visit PaulFelleValito.com. You already know how AI is changing how everyday work gets done, how much ground you can cover and how fast a team can scale. To stay ahead you need the tools to give you a competitive advantage built for this new era. Welcome to a GenteG revenue. Adio is the CRM for this world. It meets you where you work. Compounds every customer signal into context, then acts on it across your pipeline to let you move it on match speed and scale. With agents and animations for every job in revenue, Adio orchestrates your work around the clock. Built to handle the scale of your workloads, extensible with API and MCP and with the infrastructure to keep up with your most ambitious agents. Loved by high growth startups like granola, modal and etched. Adio runs the work behind every win. That's Adio, the agentic CRM, the intelligent system that never sleeps. Pick up leads at 2 a.m. Catches renewals before they slip. Hands you the answer before you ask. Try Adio free at Adio.com slash iHeart.

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