Most leaders believe they understand the culture of their teams.
They usually don’t.
This isn’t because they’re bad leaders, but because their title makes the real culture hard to see.
Once you become a director, a VP, a head of something, the room changes. People filter themselves around you whether they mean to or not. Even people you trust and work closely with will choose their words more carefully.
You start receiving a cleaned-up version of reality, and that’s where the first cracks begin.
The Culture You See vs. The Culture That Exists
When leaders talk about culture, they usually point to the visible artifacts: company values, mission statements, and the carefully chosen words on the “About Us” page.
But none of that is culture.
Culture isn’t the team-building event or the offsite. In many organizations, those aren’t actually social events, they are shadow governance sessions.
Half the people there would rather be home with their families, but they attend because they’ve learned that the “real” roadmap is negotiated in the spaces between the calendar invites. They aren’t there for the drinks; they’re there to ensure their project doesn’t get deprioritized over a casual conversation they weren’t part of.
That is defensive networking. It’s what happens when your formal decision-making is leaky. When people feel they must be “in the room” at all times to protect their resources or their reputation, you don’t have a social culture. You have an information asymmetry problem.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: because of your title, you are usually the last person to see this. You see a “highly engaged” team at a happy hour; they see a mandatory session of proximity-based survival.
Leadership Changes the Signal
Your title acts as a massive signal booster. In any meeting, your presence creates a high-gain environment where even your smallest suggestions are treated like mandates. The problem isn’t just that people agree with you, it’s that the low-signal data points, like a developer’s hesitation or a slight misalignment between teams, get compressed and lost in the noise of your authority.
When you lose that fine-grained telemetry, you lose the ability to see an incident incubating.
Those signals often disappear before they reach you. So the dashboards stay green. The updates sound fine. But underneath, the pressure builds.
The real culture shows up in the spaces between meetings. In the side conversations. In the Slack threads that mysteriously stop when you join.
That’s where the politics live.
Where Politics Actually Starts
One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is proudly saying:
“We don’t do office politics here.”
That’s easy to say when you already have the title.
You’re not competing for visibility. You’re not hoping the right person notices your work. You’re not worried about the single promotion slot that only opens when someone leaves or retires.
But many people on your team are. And politics rarely begins because people wake up wanting to play political games. More often it begins because the system leaves room for it.
If ownership is fuzzy, people naturally compete for it. If decisions are made behind closed doors, people start trying to influence those rooms. And when success is hard to measure, visibility quietly becomes the substitute metric.
Politics, in other words, is often just the tax an organization pays for ambiguity.
If leaders don’t define how decisions get made, something else will.
Usually the loudest voice in the room.
When Information Becomes Scarce
Ambiguity gets worse when information flows unevenly.
In distributed organizations, especially those spanning time zones or regions, information rarely arrives everywhere at the same time. Some teams hear about decisions first. Some groups are closer to the people making them.
When a team feels out of the loop, they don’t just work harder.
They start navigating the network of power.
- Who knows what’s happening?
- Who talks to leadership most?
- Who can get the real story?
Politics accelerates when information becomes scarce. This isn’t because people are inherently manipulative, but because the system made the information valuable.
Transparency is one of the few things that consistently reduces this behavior. When progress, decisions, and impact are visible by default, people don’t have to rely on relationships to understand what’s happening.
When impact can be seen, the data will provide the narrative. But when the system lacks transparency, the narrative is left to whoever has the loudest voice. If you don’t build a system that makes progress visible by default, you’re forcing your team to use politics as their primary reporting tool.
What Your Praise Is Really Teaching
Politics also grows in the gap between what leaders say they value and what they actually reward.
Over time the organization studies what gets praised.
If a VP publicly celebrates the person who saved the day during a crisis but never notices the engineer who quietly built a system that prevented the crisis in the first place, the lesson is clear.
Heroics get recognition and prevention doesn’t.
Organizations learn very quickly what behavior leads to visibility.
If you want to understand the politics on your team, look at what gets praised.
That’s usually the blueprint everyone is following.
Not All Politics Are the Same
Not all politics are destructive.
Some of it is simply coordination, aligning teams, negotiating priorities, managing stakeholders across different parts of the organization.
That kind of politics creates value.
But there is another kind that emerges when incentives drift too far away from real impact.
Two very different kinds of politics show up inside organizations:
Value-Add Politics
- aligning teams across silos
- negotiating priorities between departments
- building relationships that unblock work
Extraction Politics
- taking credit for others’ work
- gatekeeping information
- optimizing for visibility over impact
Good leaders focus on the one that helps work move through the system, and not the one that drains value.
How Organizations Slowly Drift
When extraction politics becomes dominant, the organization rarely collapses overnight.
It drifts, like a stagecoach slowly pulling off the road, everything still feels fine for a while. The ride is smooth. The wheels are turning.
But eventually the road disappears.
And the company loses velocity without anyone being able to point to a single catastrophic failure.
Politics is rarely explosive. It’s usually erosive.
The damage builds slowly.
One Question That Exposes the Problem
One habit can expose these problems earlier than most leaders expect.
Before launching a major project, ask a blunt question:
“How could someone game this for visibility without actually delivering value?”
If there’s an easy answer, you’ve probably just discovered a hole in the system.
Close it before the project starts.
Remember, every organization has politics.
The difference between healthy teams and dysfunctional ones usually isn’t the people.
It’s how much ambiguity, and how much hidden information, the system leaves for politics to fill.