If you’re like me, you hate office politics. In an older post, I have written about how I have balanced playing vs walking away. We often think of politics as scheming or power plays, but what if we reframed it? What if we understood the human element that drives it?

This understanding is essential for those moments when you have to engage with the system to get your good work i.e your authentic vision done.

The Anatomy of Conflict: Why “Politics” Emerge

Our large, complex organizations run on divided goals. No one can possibly know or track the thousands of things everyone else is doing. You have your set of crucial goals, and everyone else has theirs.

The problem starts with emotional investment. It’s human nature: when you pour your time, expertise, and energy into a project, you become emotionally attached to it. We want people to care, but when you have dozens of people, all emotionally invested in different priorities, you create the perfect conditions for conflict.

This usually boils down to two core issues:

1. Perspective Bias: I intimately understand my goal, why it matters, its complexities, and why it must be prioritized. It’s far easier to rationalize defending my goal over yours, which I don’t fully understand or feel connected to.
2. Emotional Ownership: I am deeply attached to the work that defines my contribution, not yours.

So, a lot of what we label as “office politics” is really just the raw, human process of defending our own emotional investment in the work we believe in.

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The Core Threat: Losing Self-Worth

The reason this gets nasty is that when someone else’s goal threatens to sideline ours, it feels like more than just a scheduling conflict. It can feel like we wasted our time or effort.

And here is the gut-check moment: beneath that surface feeling of “wasted time” is the deeper, more painful feeling that if we focused on the wrong goal, perhaps we made a mistake, or worse, that our expertise and judgment are somehow not good enough.

We all hate that feeling. It threatens our sense of self-worth and competence—the very foundation we stand on to do great work. People will do almost anything to avoid that feeling, including engaging in what looks like frustrating, petty office politics.

Leading with Empathy and Authenticity

My personal philosophy is about holding the helm when the sea isn’t calm. You can learn from others, but ultimately, you must steer the ship in a way that feels authentic to you.

This psychological insight helps you steer through the political storm without losing your identity. The next time a priority conflict arises, or someone seems irrationally resistant to your idea, try to see it not as a personal attack, but as them defending their self-worth and their emotional investment.

This means change management is actually emotion management.

• Instead of saying, “Your goal is irrelevant now,” say, “How does your current goal feed into this new, larger organizational direction?”
• Instead of making it a zero-sum game, focus on making others win. Show them how your idea elevates their work or makes their contribution even more visible.

This is especially critical with disruptive change, like AI adoption. When you champion a faster, better, new way of doing things, the hidden message a listener might hear is: “The old way you did this was stupid, wrong, and slow… which means you are too!” You are absolutely not saying that, but a part of them might be hearing it, and that’s why they resist your brilliant, new approach.

It takes courage and experience to trust your gut, put your values on top, and stay true to yourself. Part of that courage is refusing to compromise your authenticity, and the other part is having the maturity to recognize when others are just reacting from a place of threatened self-worth.

Be honest with yourself: Where has a priority conflict or change threatened your self-worth? Learning to manage that feeling in yourself is the first step to navigating it in others.