Power, Influence, and Politics
Org charts describe authority. Power maps describe reality. Senior sellers learn to read both — and the gap between them.
is not a dirty word; it is the operating system large organizations. Sellers who refuse to read it consistently lose to sellers who read it accurately. You do not need to participate in politics — you do need to it well enough to avoid becoming collateral damage.
Formal vs informal power
Formal Power lives in titles, budget authority, and approval thresholds. It is necessary but rarely sufficient. lives in the chief staff who controls the 's calendar, the long-tenured architect whose technical memo becomes the standard, the senior PM who quietly aligns peers in pre-meetings. does not appear on LinkedIn. It is mapped only through conversations and patient observation.
How decisions are actually made
Formal committees ratify decisions that have already been made informally. The pattern across most enterprises:
- A trusted lieutenant builds the recommendation
- Pre-meetings align the senior peer group
- The committee meeting confirms the alignment
- The signs what the room expects them to sign
If you are only present at step 4, you are watching the outcome a process you did not participate in.
Assessing influence beyond titles
- Tenure proxy — long-tenured operators often have outsized informal influence
- Calendar density — who do executives actually meet with weekly?
- Attribution — whose name appears on past initiatives that shipped?
- Veto evidence — has this person killed a vendor or initiative before?
- patterns — who walks into the 's office without an appointment?
Reading the politics
Common patterns to :
- Rival VPs competing for the same promotion
- A function defending its existing tooling against
- A leader's recent failed initiative making them risk-averse
- A quiet alliance against an unpopular SVP
- An incoming executive resetting prior commitments
Real example of misreading power
A vendor invested 9 months building relationships with the SVP Engineering, who held the formal budget. disqualified them in week 38. Cause: the CIO's chief architect — title 'Principal Architect,' no direct reports — had quietly authored the technical standards that excluded the product. The SVP's budget authority was real; his technical authority was not. The seller mapped formal power and missed , and the deal was lost before the formal evaluation began.