There is a truth that nobody puts in your development plan: when you step into director level territory, the rules change. At senior manager level, you advance primarily by executing well and being visibly competent. At director level and in the transition toward it, execution becomes table stakes. What starts to matter is something harder to name: your ability to read the room, build alliances, and make yourself easy to champion. This is not about playing games. It’s about developing the organisational intelligence to operate at altitude.
What ‘the politics’ actually means?
When people say a workplace is ‘political,’ they usually mean one of two things: that decisions are made through relationships rather than merit, or that people are competing for power in ways that aren’t always visible or fair. Both of these are real. But the leaders who succeed long-term don’t do so by avoiding politics; they do so by developing a clear understanding of how influence flows and building their own credibility within that system.
Politics is not what happens instead of merit. It’s the context in which merit gets recognised or doesn’t.
Think of your organisation as having two maps:
- The formal map: org charts, reporting lines, job titles.
- The informal map: who actually shapes decisions, whose endorsement matters, who the connectors are, and who holds influence that isn’t reflected in their title.
Your ability to navigate both is what distinguishes senior managers who stagnate from those who make the leap.
The sponsor vs mentor distinction
One of the most critical investments you can make at this career stage is building a sponsor and understanding exactly how different that is from having a mentor.
| A mentor… | A sponsor… |
|---|---|
| Advises you in private | Advocates for you in rooms you’re not in |
| Helps you develop skills and perspective | Uses their own political capital on your behalf |
| Gives you feedback and counsel | Creates opportunities and opens doors |
| Is valuable at any career stage | Is essential for director level progression |
Source: Catalyst
Research from Catalyst and the Centre for Talent Innovation consistently shows that women are over-mentored and under-sponsored relative to male peers at the same level. The result: more feedback, less promotion. Sponsors don’t appear organically. They are cultivated through visibility, through delivering results that reflect well on them, and through making it easy for them to champion you.
How to build a sponsor relationship
Sponsorship is built on three things: visibility, trust, and reciprocity.
- Visibility: Your potential sponsor needs to see you in action. This means contributing meaningfully in senior forums, leading high-stakes work, and being present in the spaces where decisions get made. A sponsor cannot advocate for someone they have limited data on.
- Trust: Sponsors take a risk when they put their name behind yours. They need to trust that you will perform, that you will handle the opportunity well, and that you won’t embarrass them. This trust is built incrementally through consistent delivery and through how you show up in difficult moments.
- Reciprocity: Sponsorship is not purely transactional, but it is mutual. Consider what you bring to the relationship. You might offer fresh perspective, strong networks in areas they don’t have, or capacity to deliver on something that matters to them. Make the relationship worth their investment.
Reflection prompt
- Think about the two or three most senior stakeholders who have genuine visibility of your work.
- For each one: Do they know your ambitions? Have you made it easy for them to advocate for you?
- Who in your current organisation has the access and appetite to be a sponsor, not just a supporter?
Reading the informal power map
Before you can navigate political terrain, you need to understand it. This is not about cynicism, it’s about strategic awareness. Ask yourself:
- Who are the ‘connectors’, the people others consult before making decisions, regardless of title?
- Whose endorsement does the senior leadership team genuinely weight?
- Who are the informal gatekeepers, the people whose opposition can quietly slow a career?
- Which alliances are strong and which are strained at the top of your organisation?
- Where does information flow freely, and where does it get stuck?
This kind of mapping is not about plotting, it’s about understanding the environment you’re operating in so you can navigate it with intention rather than being at the mercy of invisible currents.
Common traps for women leaders in political terrain
Women navigating this territory often encounter specific friction points worth naming directly.
The likability tax: Women are often penalised for the same assertive behaviours that earn men authority. This is real, documented, and unfair, and awareness of it helps you calibrate rather than self-censor.
Over-investing in competence, under-investing in presence: There is a point at which producing more excellent work yields diminishing returns. If you are already highly competent, the marginal return on more competence is lower than the return on being more strategically visible.
Treating politics as optional: Choosing not to engage with informal power structures doesn’t make you neutral, it makes you less readable to the people who control progression. You can engage with integrity; you cannot opt out and stay competitive at the top.
Only building relationships upward: Sponsors are usually senior, but the peer network you build now becomes your ecosystem as you both progress. Invest laterally.
Strategic visibility is not self-promotion. It is making sure the people who matter have accurate data about your contribution and your capability.
This month’s practice: the stakeholder audit
Set aside 30 minutes. Take a blank page and map out the following:
- List the 8–10 people who most influence the trajectory of your career, directly or indirectly.
- For each person: rate your current relationship (1–5), their awareness of your work and ambitions (1–5), and your sense of their disposition toward you (supportive / neutral / unknown / cautious).
- Identify any sponsors (active advocates) vs. supporters (warm but passive) vs. gaps (influential people who barely know you exist).
- Choose one relationship to actively invest in this month. What would you do differently?
This exercise is drawn from stakeholder mapping practice used in executive coaching. Its power lies not in the mapping itself but in the honest reflection it forces.
Coaching corner
One question I come back to often in coaching conversations about this topic:
If you were your own sponsor, what would you say in the room on your behalf and are you making it easy for others to say the same?
Often the gap isn’t that we lack advocates. It’s that we haven’t given them the material. We haven’t articulated our ambitions clearly, or we’ve been so focused on the work that we’ve left our stakeholders without a narrative.
Your sponsor needs a story to tell. Your job is to make sure they have one.
A few reads worth your time on this topic
- The Influence Effect by Kathryn Heath, Jill Flynn, Mary Davis Holt. One of the most practically useful books on women, power, and organisational influence.
- Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor by Sylvia Ann Hewlett. The definitive work on the sponsorship gap: what it is, why it exists, and what to do about it.
- The Politics of Promotion by Bonnie Marcus. A candid look at the informal rules of career advancement that nobody tells you, with practical frameworks for women leaders.