For anyone working to become more effective at influencing others, attitude is rarely neutral. It shapes what feels acceptable, what gets attempted, and what gets avoided entirely. And because these attitudes formed gradually, often in response to real and painful experience, they rarely get examined directly.
The frustration most professionals feel about organisational politics is genuine. So is the discomfort. What is less often acknowledged is that these feelings are doing something: they are drawing a boundary around what the professional will and will not engage with, often without a conscious decision ever being made.
That boundary has a cost.
The attitudes that tend to limit effectiveness are not difficult to recognise. They surface as a general unease with anything that feels like positioning, a reluctance to be seen as self-promoting, a preference for letting the work speak for itself. They feel principled. In many cases they were formed precisely because the alternative looked unprincipled.
What sits underneath most of these attitudes is an unexamined definition. The word politics has accumulated meaning through experience rather than through observation. Those who have been outmanoeuvred, harmed, or simply wearied by the behaviour of others in organisational life will have formed a definition shaped by those encounters. That definition then governs what they permit themselves to do.
The word influence has usually acquired a more positive feeling. Yet the actual behaviours that comprise politics and influence show very little difference. They are, in most cases, two sides of the same coin.
The difference between the two words is largely the degree to which an observer notices a self-serving agenda and feels disadvantaged by it. When people do not like the behaviours they are witnessing, they call it politics. When they approve of them, they call it influence. The behaviours themselves are often identical.
This is not a comfortable observation. It is, however, a precise one.
The professional who can hold both words without a charge attached to either is in a significantly stronger position than one who cannot. Not because they are willing to behave badly, but because they can see the terrain clearly and decide deliberately what they will and will not do within it.
That clarity is not a personality trait. It is a position that can be reached. What it requires first is a willingness to examine the attitudes that are currently doing the deciding.
How far that clarity has become a matter of urgency is explored in Upgrading Your Attitude to Politics and Influence.
Colin Gautrey, July 2014. Updated April 2026