Someone in your network just posted a promotion announcement on LinkedIn. The comments are full of congratulations. You read it during a boring meeting, and you experienced a twinge in your stomach and kept scrolling.
The threat of layoffs is constantly hanging over your head. Perhaps you have been laid off, or you survived the layoff, but are worse for the wear. You absorbed the work of people who were laid off in your division. You are doing more with less, more than what your title should reflect, keeping things together while a semblance of stability returns.
And someone who you did not even consider was that good, got promoted.
You say to yourself, "I don't know how to play the game. Promotions are political." And you close the app.
Going beyond "political"
There is a WhatsApp forward doing the rounds. Ten corporate truths HR keeps quiet.
- Promotions are political.
- Visibility matters more than most employees realise.
- The people who move up fastest understand perception, timing, and influence.
Corporate Truth: The biggest career advantage is understanding how decisions actually get made behind closed doors.
It resonates because it is able to categorically state the thoughts that loop in your head. It puts it out as a universal truth. This is the frustration of so many people who do really good work, go beyond their call of duty, keep the project or team from crumbling but find that this does not earn them the promotion.
While the frustration is legitimate, look at what the forward does. It gives you a clear path ahead which it calls Corporate Truth: the biggest advantage is understanding how decisions get made behind closed doors.
But can you really understand how decisions get made? Do you have entry in the rooms? Decisions are first made in the minds of people, and then support is solicited. So even if you could get behind the closed doors, you would not be closer to understanding what is going on.
Many of us may not even go past the first line, 'Promotions are political'. What is the point of reading any further? I am politically naive. Period.
What I want to offer is a way to sit with "it's political" long enough to see what it is actually pointing at.
Why Harvey and Mike are unbeatable
In Suits, Mike Ross the young lawyer is brilliant. His recall is extraordinary, his legal instincts are sharp, and he outworks and outsmarts almost everyone around him. He is also, for much of the series, blindsided by informal hierarchies. Who is aligned with whom. What decisions happen outside even before the lawyers go to court. His technical brilliance is unparalleled, yet his ability to read and navigate the room he is in is a different matter entirely.
Harvey Specter does not put in hours like his protege Mike. What Harvey does very well is read rooms, read people, and read power with the same precision and depth that Mike brings to case law. He knows who the power brokers are, who needs to be spoken to beforehand, and what a decision means beyond what it says. He operates in the informal system as fluently as Mike operates in the formal one.
The show works because both Harvey and Mike are needed to win a case. Technical excellence and political fluency are not in competition. They are two complementary skills.
Most of us have developed technical excellence. Some people pick up the other skill because of their childhood experiences. Experiences of having to survive in challenging conditions.
Fortunately, we do not have to be pushed to a corner to learn how to be politically literate. It is a skill, and it can be learned.
Going beyond declarations
A few years ago, Kelly Shue and her colleagues at Yale studied promotion data from nearly 30,000 workers at a large retail chain. Women received higher performance ratings than men. They were also consistently rated lower on one thing: potential.
Potential is abstract. It is subjective. This is one of the ways in which the informal system does its work, because nobody can tell you exactly what it means, or precisely how it is measured, or whose template it is built around. It is the category that looks like merit but operates nebulously and erratically.
This is not a death sentence for your aspirations. It is a clue, it starts to pull together a map. When you understand what the informal criteria are, you can start to read them.
Which part, specifically
The problem with ten-point lists is not that they are wrong. It is that they offer a worldview without the texture. This kind of thinking needs hours of deliberating. It cannot be condensed into Instagram or WhatsApp posts. When we believe everything is political, it becomes about either being savvy enough to play or principled enough to refuse to play the game. There is no scope for middle ground, and that takes away the choices and agency you do have in this situation.
The reality is more textured. Some promotions happen because someone was in the right place at the right time. Some happen because a manager built a path and advocated hard. Some happen because a rising tide lifted a team. Some require deliberate navigation of the informal system. Some promotions happen because the person is too good to lose. And some, yes, go to people who understood the room better than the most capable person in it.
The question is not whether politics was involved in someone's promotion. It almost always is, in some proportion.
The question is: which part, specifically? What can you see, and what are you not yet reading? What is within your scope of influence and what is outside of it?
That is where the strategising needs to begin.
If the promotion conversation is live for you right now, work with me.
Frequently asked questions
What does it mean when people say promotions are political?
It means the decision was shaped by informal factors as well as formal ones. Every organisation runs on two systems: the official one, with performance ratings and appraisal criteria, and the real one, where relationships, visibility, perception, and advocacy move the outcome. Political is not a euphemism for corrupt. It is an accurate description of what happens when decisions are partly subjective and the people making them are human. The question is not whether politics was involved. It almost always is. The question is which part, specifically, and what you can do about that part.
Can I get promoted without playing politics?
You do not need to scheme, manoeuvre, or compromise your integrity. What you cannot do is advance while being invisible to the informal system. If the people with influence over your promotion cannot see your work clearly, have no relationship with you, or have formed an inaccurate picture of what you do, that affects the outcome regardless of your performance ratings. Political literacy is not about doing politics. It is about being visible and readable to the people who matter, on your own terms.
Why do women often get stronger performance ratings but fewer promotions?
Research by Kelly Shue and colleagues, drawing on data from nearly 30,000 workers, found exactly this pattern. Women consistently outperformed men on ratings but were rated lower on one thing: potential. Potential is abstract and subjective. It has no agreed definition and no fixed measurement, which means it tends to function as a proxy for informal fit. And informal fit is often built around unexamined assumptions about what a leader looks like. Reading how the potential criterion operates in your specific organisation is a practical first step.
What is the most useful question to ask after being passed over for promotion?
Not "was it political?" That question almost always answers yes. The more useful question is: which part, specifically? Was it a visibility gap? A relationship you had not built? A narrative that had formed about you without your input? A misread of what the role required? Specificity creates a path forward. Vague political explanations remove agency. Specific ones restore it.