Politics and good culture can coexist.

I've worked in some very different businesses over the years. Large PLCs with complex structures and multiple layers of leadership. Smaller independents where everyone knew everything about everyone. Private equity backed businesses where the shareholders were very much in the room even when they weren't. And everything in between.

And in every single one of them, there was politics.

Because politics is what happens when you put human beings in organisations together. There are power structures. There are relationships that carry more weight than the org chart suggests. There are decisions that get made in conversations before the meeting has even started. There are unwritten rules about who gets heard, how things actually move forward, and what the real priorities are underneath what’s been shared.

That's just how organisations work.

What I've noticed, across all of those different businesses, is that the leaders who navigate this well are the ones who take time to understand it. They don’t pretend the politics don't exist, and they certainly don’t make it their job to be above it all. They read the room, know whose relationships matter, how decisions actually get made, what the meeting before the meeting looked like. And who work within that reality rather than spending their energy resisting it. Because that is exhausting….

Here's what resisting can look like in practice. It looks like gossiping. It looks like building alliances around shared frustration rather than shared purpose. It looks like conversations that start as venting and end as something that quietly poisons the air. It looks like a leader who has decided that the politics make it impossible to do good work and who, in doing so, has made it impossible for the people around them to do good work either. That’s what creates a poor culture - not the politics, but the behaviour.

And that's where culture often gets damaged. By the people who talk about the politics.

Politics and good culture can absolutely coexist. I've seen it. But it requires something specific from the people inside it, and that’s a decision to understand the landscape, to work within it with integrity, to say what needs to be said in the right rooms rather than the wrong ones. And to put their energy into moving things forward rather than keeping note of everything that's in the way.

This is about being intentional about choosing where your energy goes. Because the energy you spend complaining about the politics is energy you're not spending on the work. And the culture around you will reflect whichever one you choose.

There's a saying that if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth. The same is true of a narrative. Repeat 'this place is broken' often enough, in enough conversations, with enough people nodding along and it becomes the culture. Not because it was true but because it was repeated.