How to Master Office Politics Without Compromising Your Values

HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR on Leadership, case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock the best in those around you.

What do you think of when you hear these words: “Office politics”? Maybe you think of someone hoarding information or taking credit for other people’s work.

Stereotypes about playing office politics often verge into bad behavior. But if you want to be a leader, learning to manage your organization’s politics is part of the job—nd there is a way to do it without sacrificing your principles or your authenticity.

Today we bring you a conversation about how to become more politically savvy at work – with the help of organizational psychologist Madeleine Wyatt and a guest who is struggling to navigate the politics in her management consulting firm.

In this episode, you’ll learn how to master three key skills that you need: apparent sincerity, networking, and interpersonal influence.   

This episode originally aired on Women at Work in January 2023, as part of a special series called “The Essentials.” Here it is.

AMY BERNSTEIN: I first became aware of office politics early in my career. I noticed that the colleagues of mine who sucked up to the boss consistently received better assignments from him. At first, I found their ingratiating behavior – bringing the boss coffee, for example – unprofessional and kind of repulsive. Shouldn’t my work speak for itself? Yet, while I kept my head down and churned out research report after research report, hoping the boss would notice and offer me more promising opportunities, the suck ups just kept coming out ahead. I realized something had to change. I had to make real connections with the higher ups. I had to understand them as people so that I could establish relationships that went beyond the transactional. I had to learn to do that while being true to myself and without being totally self-serving, though. If those relationships led to the green light or the fast track, great.

You’re listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I’m Amy Bernstein. Everyone at work has their own priorities and concerns, and knowing what those are allows you to move more deliberately and smoothly through whatever meetings you’re in or project you’re on. Being politically savvy isn’t the same as being a political operator. To be clear, I’m not encouraging bad behavior. Do not go out there and take undue credit or act like you’re in charge when you’re not, or hoard information to appear powerful. Actually, if you work with someone who’s doing those things, Amy G’s book Getting Along has advice for coping, but I am encouraging you to consider adopting a principled approach to pulling strings. You can push your own agenda in the interest of your team and company goals instead of at their expense. Winning over higher ups who can help your career doesn’t require sucking up to them. If you’re looking to move up, becoming interested and involved in your company’s politics is just part of the process.

MADELEINE WYATT: I do speak to a lot of people who’ve plateaued in their careers and they just didn’t understand until kind of 25 years in that there was politics going on. They thought that the formal systems were enough to get them through and into leadership positions.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Maddie Wyatt is an organizational psychologist and professor at King’s Business School. One of her research areas is the informal side of our workdays: impromptu in-person chats, non-work-related IM-ing, after hours outings. She’s found that a lot of ambitious professionals skip this sort of socializing either because they failed to see the value in it, had too many negative experiences, or haven’t been invited in. That’s why Maddie’s campaigning for a healthier or inclusive form of office politics, which is what a woman who we’re calling Jess wants to be playing in her job as a transportation planner. They’re both here with me to help us learn about how to build relationships, access opportunities, and influence others without compromising your integrity or wearing yourself out. Thank you so much for being with us, Maddie. Jess, just let me start with you. Tell us about the politics that you deal with every day in your work.

JESS: Where to begin? The politics are kind of two-sided. I work in consulting and have to deal with the politics of being in sort of the management consulting, transportation side, and then also have to work with the politics of dealing with clients and trying to win contracts, trying to build relationships. I am still relatively… at what point do you stop calling yourself junior in your career? I’m not sure, but I think that I may still qualify. I still am newer in my career, been in the industry about five years. I found that trying to build external relationships with our clients was really challenging. What I had to do was rely on internal politicking to get access to the external politicking. I had to make sure that I was building the right relationships with my manager, with other people in the office who had access to those avenues to our clients. That would mean getting invited to happy hours, getting invited to golf outings, things like that. Then internally, I kind of made a conscious decision, I think, when I started the job, that I was going to adopt a certain persona within the industry – transportation – as I think many probably know as very male dominated, trends older. I’m Latinx. I’m sort of an outlier within the industry. I chose to adopt a certain persona of someone that was going to be a yes woman that was not going to say no to any opportunity. I was going to be really bubbly. I was going to be very peppy. I was going to be the person that all of the engineers would want to hang around, and then I would get invited to things. Sometimes I worry that that action has… I think it’s helped me advance my career, but sometimes I wonder if it’s plateaued me, where people only are able to see me as the kind of young, peppy, She’s a lot of fun, she has a really loud laugh and we like working with her, but we could never see her being the office leader or vice president. We wouldn’t see that for her, but she’s really great with the clients because they like spending time with her.

AMY BERNSTEIN: It sounds to me, Jess, as if you were really grappling with the parts of the politics that made you feel inauthentic.

JESS: Yeah. I think that sometimes I positioned myself as someone that I wish I was, but it’s very taxing and I find myself more often than not in situations where it’s kind of like somebody makes a joke and you’re like, That is the best joke I’ve ever heard, because you’re trying to stroke somebody’s ego or you’re trying to make a connection and it feels really crummy.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Maddie, help Jess out here. What are you hearing?

MADELEINE WYATT: Well, I think that authenticity piece is quite interesting because we find this all the way across organizations is that people want authenticity, and it also is one of the most important political skills that you can develop. The political skills literature talks about four aspects of political skills, and one of them is called apparent sincerity. People believe you are sincere and genuine. When you want to try and influence them, for example, when you’re laughing at a client’s joke, they want to believe that you are being true to yourself. Whereas if you’re very politically skilled, then maybe you can make them think that when you’re not really. As you say, it comes at an emotional cost in terms of the emotional labor involved with that. If you’re always having to be acting and being someone you’re not, it is quite challenging. We see this all the time in my own research, I do research on social class, which is probably less of an issue within the states, but in the UK people change their accents, their mannerisms all the time to try and make sure they’re fitting in with people at work, but actually that means it’s quite stressful for them. When they go home at the end of the day they spend all day kind of acting changing who they are, and that’s quite draining process. As you go through your career I think you can become more at home with who you are, but I think it depends on the people around you to help facilitate that for you.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Maddie, you said that there are four components to office politics, to workplace politics, one of which is a parent sincerity. What are the others?

MADELEINE WYATT: Yeah, so there’s networking ability, which is not just networking, but it’s doing it well. I always talk about this in terms of people who have 3,000 LinkedIn contacts aren’t necessarily networking well, they’re just networking. Networking well is about understanding who the right people are to be in your network and also knowing how to deal with those people and how to maintain those relationships. Networking is a long-term strategy. It’s not just going to a conference and meeting three people and using those relationships within the next six months. It’s cultivating the relationships and making sure that they work for you over time and you work for them as well. It’s a reciprocal relationship and networks just don’t work if you don’t put the effort in. That’s one aspect. The second aspect is interpersonal influence, which is again, not just influencing people, but knowing when to influence them and how to influence them.

Some people might use self-promotion as an influence tactic and talk all about themselves, and other people might use flattery and ingratiation, but it’s people who are skilled in this aspect of political skill know when to use which strategy, who it’s going to work on, which situation to use it in. I always say my daughter, when she wants to have some chocolate or something, she might come up to me and say, “Oh, I love your hair, mommy, it’s amazing.” I’m like, “It’s the wrong strategy darling. You should have gone with some self-promotion. You should have said, I got a really good grade on my assignment or something like that instead, and that would’ve convinced me a lot better.” Politically skilled people use the right influence tactics. Then the third one is social astuteness, which is really understanding social situations, knowing who’s in power, what’s going on in the room, what are the hidden agendas around the table, and those kinds of things. Then finally the apparent sincerity, which is ensuring that other people believe you’re genuine and sincere and your interactions. Importantly, all those four aspects work together. If you want to be able to network well, you also need to influence people and people need to think you’re genuine insincere. It all combines together to become effective, and people who can do this really well tend to get really good career outcomes in terms of leadership, team working ability, job performance, salary, job satisfaction, and they’re also less stressed because they feel like they can cope very well in political environments.

AMY BERNSTEIN: What does it mean not to do it well? When do those skills turn dangerous, harmful, toxic?

MADELEINE WYATT: I think it depends on how you define well. If you think about it, the people who are the most politically skilled are doing it very well, but they might be doing it for different reasons. I think that comes down to the political motivation or the political will we call it in the literature. I think if you are doing it to help other people, so there’s a lot of research coming out to suggest that politics can actually be quite a good thing and you can help your team members gain resources, as a leader you can support the people that you are leading by developing their careers and introducing them to important networks, but also you can do it for the wrong reasons. You can be very Machiavellian about your political strategy and obviously for those people they might be doing politics very well, but be doing it for the wrong reasons. It depends on how you define well and how you define good in terms of political behavior at work. You can also be very bad at politics. I think we’ve all come across people who do it in a kind of jarring way. I’ve just done some interviews with people who talked about politics in hybrid work and how they had colleagues who would put comments in their chat function in every meeting regardless of what they were talking about, and it was just to promote themselves. They said this kind of behavior’s really jarring. It’s really obvious. Those are people that are doing political behaviors, but they’re not doing it in a skilled way because it’s obvious what they’re doing and it’s not very good.

AMY BERNSTEIN: We have networking ability, we have interpersonal influence, we have social astuteness, and we have apparent sincerity. Jess, of the four political skills that Maddie described, which one are you most interested in working on?

JESS: Okay, it’s definitely between the last two because while Maddie was talking, I was thinking about social astuteness. Let’s say I’m politicking: how do I know if the other person is politicking me? I’m really curious about that. I’ll leave this open for Maddie because I am also very interested in the authentic appearance too, because I work a lot with communities and so being authentic, especially in my heritage, in the languages that I speak, the person that I am, I want to bring my full self to work. The avenues that you were kind of describing that exist for white men, like going out to the bars or going to the golf course just simply don’t exist for women.

Then I find myself in odd situations where I’m one on one with somebody or I am at an event and I’m the only woman or I’m one of three women, and I don’t know if it’s better in those situations to kind of be one of the guys and try to go drink for drink with the guys at the bar or if it’s better to stay true to myself and say, I’m here as me and trying to get to know you, or if it’s better to blend in.

MADELEINE WYATT: Okay. I think in terms of identifying when other people are politicking, it all comes from understanding who you are dealing with. And that boils down to intel. I think men call it intel. I think women often call this gossip. Who is this person you’re about to meet? What is their agenda? Why are you meeting them? I think developing your internal networks will probably help with your client networks because those people internally will be able to say, yes, I know this person. We’ve dealt with them before. This is how you should approach them. This is the kind of thing they might do. You can’t just magically know this stuff. People will tell you it. They will guide and advise you on how to do this.

JESS: What if they’re wrong? My mentor was introducing me to somebody and it turns out that person that they were introducing me to actually really didn’t like my mentor or my mentor’s company. I was like, “Oh, this is really bad. I have politicked incorrectly.” Is that normal? Does that happen?

MADELEINE WYATT: Well, obviously it happens as you’ve just said. Yeah, I think this is a classic example of the fact that you definitely need not just one mentor, but you need a whole committee of mentors, but actually to get you above not just getting advice to actually help you, you need someone to sponsor for you. That could be strategizing about your career, giving you insider information, which is potentially about clients, about what people’s agendas are within the organization, someone who’s willing to connect for you and make introductions for you and provide you with lots of opportunities and also advocate for you when you’re not in the room. In your example, if you’d had maybe two or three people to go and speak to about this person, then you might have got the inkling that maybe the relationship between the mentor and the client wasn’t so great.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Well, let’s say you haven’t had the time or the exposure to develop this panel of mentors and sponsors. How would you recommend Jess walk into a situation like the one she described? Is there planning that she can do? What kind of prep?

 

MADELEINE WYATT: I think for me personally, there’s a certain amount of prep you can do. I think you have to think about the wider agendas that people might have, but you don’t necessarily need that all upfront. I think that would be quite tiresome to have to spend every time you want to meet someone to have to go and speak to four or five different people. A lot of this can be quite organic. You can just think, I need to be aware that this person might have a different perspective on this or might have different needs and wants out of this meeting. A lot of it is just coming down to asking people questions, questioning some of the things they might be saying and thinking about the different angles that might be possible, I think. I think it all does come with time and experience as well, which I’m sure you’re accumulating as you work.

JESS: I feel like my politics – I’ve been honing it over the past couple years and obviously I have a lot more work to do, but I keep coming back to being authentic and how I can be less exhausted. You mentioned that you don’t need to plan interactions, which I do think a lot about interactions and who’s going to be in the room and who I want to talk to. And I guess that sometimes I just wish that it came more organically to me. I think a lot of the times it ends up going really well, but it’s just it at what cost, probably more than the job itself is thinking about the politics of the job. I don’t want other women to have to live in that discomfort and that fear that they have to blur lines or that they have to participate in this. I know that you have to participate to some degree, but I guess I’m rambling. What recommendations do you have for me now that I am moving into a more leadership role where I can advise more junior colleagues?

MADELEINE WYATT: I think there’s a lot of emphasis on women to be professional. I think that is something that can make it quite stressful to engage in politics for women, because talking about blurring lines, when you network, there’s this underlying pressure of sexuality and heteronormativity going on. You’ve got this pressure I think for women in particular, and as you go up the ranks to maintain professionalism and role model professionalism for other people. I think as you go into a kind of position of leadership, my first piece of advice would be to push for culture change within the organization. I know that’s a huge ask, but I think identifying allies, because I don’t think you can do this on your own who are willing to push for change in the way that your organization does business might be key for the long-term change. I found when I work with male-dominated fields that they can be surprisingly blinkered in the way that they network and they don’t really have much knowledge about how their interactions are exclusionary. Sometimes you do just need to point those out, but in the short term, I realize that you have to cope with the situation. You’re having to be in this organization, in this industry, and I think that might come down to identifying your own code of practice – the types of interactions you’re willing to have, the times you’re willing to have them. One good way to make interactions a little bit more work related and professional is to always bring along a colleague, for example. If you are looking to make this a better place for women, then you can bring along mentees so you can start to mentor people and advocate for them and show them that this is how you network, this is how you engage in politics, and it might not be the white male norm. It might not be the same as everyone else in your organization, but you do it in an authentic way. What we see in research with women and ethnic minorities around politics is that it’s when people completely opt out and say, “I don’t want to get involved, it’s just a toxic environment and I don’t want to get involved,” it really plateaus their career. I think when they say, “Actually, I know that politics goes on, but I need to do it in the way that I’m comfortable with, I’m authentic,” then it means that you’ve got a bridge into that world, but you are still maintaining that authenticity. As you develop and grow as a leader, you can start to role model these activities and these small little changes start to create culture change. If you look at competencies of organizations in terms of roles, as you go up to more senior positions, you start to become more political formally. You’ll see that those senior roles actually start to be described in political terms. People want things like negotiation. They want you to influence, they want you to connect with people at the senior levels. If you tried to opt out of politics at the lower levels of organizations, you haven’t developed the skillsets that you actually require to be a senior leader. You definitely do need to develop those skills, but it’s just how you go about doing it. Like I said, you don’t have to do politics in a self-serving Machiavellian way. You can do politics in a very benevolent way that helps other people. It helps the communities that you work with and you do it on your own terms.

AMY BERNSTEIN: You build political capital. And I’m wondering if you can help us understand what political capital really is and then how you build it.

MADELEINE WYATT: I think, really, political capital comes down to reputation and getting other people to think about who you are and what you do. Classically, we see people who perform really well in organizations, but no one really knows that they’ve done that. You might be working really, really hard, beavering away every day trying to make the best you can do, but if no one’s noticed that, then it’s never going to work out. I’ve just done some research on hybrid work that’s showing that women have buckled down a lot in hybrid work. They’re working really long hours trying to make sure they’re ticking everything off the to-do lists, but actually they’re not getting noticed for doing that. I think this political capital all comes down to relationships, reputation. You need people to know you. You need people to know how good you are. You need to develop that. Those relationships need work. You can’t expect to get a payout without putting the work in. Political capital is spending time developing these relationships over time, maintaining them so that when the time comes, you’ve got someone in your corner to advocate for you to showcase your work, to put in a good word, and all those things. I think political capital isn’t necessarily something that is internal or individually focused. It’s developing that sponsorship. It can be challenging if you’re in a male dominated industry to find people to help you. You might have to look externally for people to become your kind of committee of mentors and sponsors to do that.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Jess, what kinds of questions does this raise for you?

JESS: It raises maybe a controversial question, and maybe I’m wrong about this, but I have a lot of friends that work in the tech industry that work in other industries that seem to have politicking figured out a lot more than my industry. My industry is very corporate, it’s very traditional. I’ve talked about the male dominated workplace. That’s all true. The kind of avenues for which people network are all kind of the same. Mental health is not really a thing in the industry. I hear from other friends and colleagues at other places that don’t work in transportation and logistics that it’s totally different that when I share some stories about politicking, they’re like, “That’s crazy that you have to go out on a limb like that. No, you don’t have to have that type of tolerance for odd behavior,” or, “Why do you have to spend all these hours outside of work trying to build relationships? It should be more of a meritocracy.” I’m like, Well, it’s not a meritocracy. And I heard what you were saying about sort of pushing for structural change, but then I feel like you become the rabble rouser that’s pushing for structural change. Then they’re like, Okay, yeah, nevermind, too radical, let’s go with somebody else for the project or to talk to the client because that person, they’re unhappy and now we’ve pegged them as unhappy as the disgruntled employee and we’re just not going to deal with that. Let them kind of stay behind the computer. I guess the question… is what I’m dealing with normal? Which I think you already touched on a little bit. Then the other question’s just about how much hell can you raise before people start to look at you and say, “Yeah, we agree, but structural change doesn’t happen overnight and now you’re kind of just making a scene and it’s not a good look for us”?

MADELEINE WYATT: Yeah, I think it’s a lot to take on as an individual to try and create structural change, but I think as you go up in the leadership positions, then there’s no harm in trying to role model a little bit more inclusivity. When you see someone who might be a good ally, saying to them, “Hang on a minute, this isn’t quite right.” In terms of your other point about how much should I tolerate? I think when I think about politics, I always think of it as a spectrum essentially. Up on the nice happy side, you’ve got leaders who really help their subordinates and you’ve got people who are doing it for a good reason. It could be for diversity, for example, and then you’ve got kind of neutral politics, which can be good or bad depending on your motives, and they might be self-serving, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be. I think if you’re coming across interactions where you feel like it’s more harassment than just plain politics and you’re feeling these environments making you uncomfortable, then I think you have to report them. I think you have to talk to someone you trust at work, whether you report anonymously or not, but I think you have to put a clear line and say, “No, I’m not happy with that. That’s not something I’m going to put up with.”

 

AMY BERNSTEIN: I want to go back to Jess’s question about how you affect structural change if you don’t have a whole lot of political capital. I just want to run this by you, to affect any kind of structural change, you have to recognize that one person isn’t going to do it on her own, and that is actually opening up an opportunity to build political capital to start connecting and finding the allies who will help you build the influence that you’ve been talking about. What’s your read on that, Maddie?

MADELEINE WYATT: I completely agree. Building up those relationships, those allies, those sponsors within the organization that are on your side in terms of making the politics more inclusive is really important. I think in terms of the biggest changes that you can create, the organizations that kind of really spur change in organizations that I’ve experienced or talked to people about are organizations that use those networks externally. For example, you could develop a network of female clients. That is something that will help you as an individual, but also builds a kind of ground swell of support for you both externally and internally. If you start to introduce other women into that as well, you become a role model and you start to be seen as a leader and not just a yes woman, you’re demonstrating those leadership behaviors as well. I think that’s something that you can do to kind of sidestep and then step back in again when you’ve got this kind of huge support base is maybe one strategy.

AMY BERNSTEIN: It also sounds as if you’re suggesting that Jess reframe her view of politics, that it doesn’t take place only in big moments, big pushes, that it takes place in every relationship you have in the workplace. Right?

MADELEINE WYATT: Oh, yes, definitely. When I talk to people about networking, for example, they first think about going to conferences, going to an event where you’re holding a wine glass and a plate, and I’m like, no, that’s not networking. In my head. it’s in the toilets at work. Maybe for a long time I worked at university and my son was at the nursery and a lot of my colleagues had children at the nursery a lot of my politics was actually done on the nursery pickup. Just having a chat with people and just having a kind of share, you’d hear a tidbit of information, you’d think, oh yeah, you don’t really think anything of it. Then two months down the line you might think, oh, actually that person was quite relevant to this thing I’m doing now. That’s how I think politics is really played. I think you’re right, the politics is the everyday interactions. I don’t think it necessarily is these big pushes to be the networker or anything. I think it is just the day-to-day work.

AMY BERNSTEIN: One of the things that happened early on for me when the penny really dropped, and I didn’t think I even thought about this as politics, but I realized that with every interaction I had the choice to be aloof, which might be a natural tendency for me, or to reach out to make small talk, to create a connection. The first way, the aloofness, really wasn’t going to help me or anyone else, but if I could start the spark of a relationship, even the thinnest thread of connection, that would make work so much pleasanter and easier. I think that’s where I realized that office politics, again, I don’t think I thought about it in those terms, was maybe it’s a game you have to play, but it’s also a way of making life easier for yourself and a lot more fun.

JESS: I think it does make life fun, and it feels really exciting to build connections and to get to know people. That’s why I like working in this industry is because I get to meet so many different types of people from different walks of life, everybody from bus operators to people that are managing the whole transportation department. I think if I could change my perspective on seeing it as this – maybe dirty is too strong of a word – but just the Mad Men style, like swishing glass kind of politicking, to more what you and Maddie are talking about as just making connections. I really think something that’s doable for me is connecting more with female identifying clients because they do exist and they might not be in my direct line of work. They might not be the natural person that I would run to for something, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t help me then connect with another client. I think it would make me feel a lot more comfortable and it would make me feel more comfortable bringing along some more mentees and junior colleagues along for the ride. I did have a question about intel or gossip, whatever we’re calling it now, because this is a problem. I run into a lot at work too, which is that, okay, so I’ve done successful politicking, I did it and then I got some really great information, but the person that I was politicking with was like, “I shouldn’t really say this, but …” And then gave me some really juicy gossip, really juicy intel. Then my company’s like, “Hey, I saw you with that person. What’d they say?” Then I’m like, “Hey, I’m not sure what they said. Did they say anything?” What do you do? This feels like an ethical question, but I guess how do you know when to hold something in confidence versus this is a piece of intel that was political intel that probably 12 other people at my firm know, and I’m just kind of corroborating the evidence.

MADELEINE WYATT: Yeah, it’s an ethical dilemma. I think the political side of me would say that that information is power. If you give it up too easily, then you lose your power immediately. Although someone might see you as a useful contact maybe, you’ve suddenly lost all the luster if you give up that information straight away. Almost being kind of a little bit secretive about it and say, well, yeah, I’ve got some good information, but I can’t say unfortunately what that is, means that you are suddenly seen as someone who’s quite valuable. I think there’s a political element with how you decide to give up information or not.

AMY BERNSTEIN: After all of this back and forth among the three of us, Jess, what are you going to take away from the conversation?

JESS: I’m taking away that it’s not okay to have any obvious toxicity in terms of politicking, but that politicking in the traditional way that I’ve thought about it is not what it is, and that it seems like the real politicking happens in those kind of micro moments of connecting with somebody in passing – like Maddie joked in the bathroom or when we’re in the elevator together. That, I think I’m also thinking that there’s a lot of opportunities to just connect with people that are more lateral to me and that are also junior to me too – that politicking doesn’t just have to happen upwards, but that it can happen with anyone around me because ultimately the people that I’m working with now are going to be senior people at some point. That’s an important part of politicking too. I think those are my main takeaways, but I think if I had to say one thing, I’m leaving feeling a lot more optimistic than I was when I walked into this conversation because I felt pretty helpless in this regard. I’m excited to listen to this back when I’m feeling like I’m losing sight of my politicking.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Maddie, what do you hope listeners will think about after listening to this?

MADELEINE WYATT: My big hope is that if you are a leader in an organization, that you think about how inclusive your politics are in the organization and how you can set a good example of where politics takes place, how it takes place, and who it takes place with. I think making sure that, for example, when you’re networking and who you choose to sponsor, if you’re thinking about demographic diversity within that, thinking about gender and ethnicity and socioeconomic status and who you choose to spend your time within organizations… I think that’s my big mission –  would be to change cultures along those lines. I also hope that people who are looking to develop their own political savvy or political skills within organizations also realize that it is really important. You can’t just ignore politics and try and opt out because that strategy tends to be a very hard one. It means that you might spend a long time in your career trying to go upwards when it could be a lot simpler just by using some relationships and not necessarily in a negative way. You can do politics in a very positive and inclusive way. I think that’s my main message.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Jess, Maddie, thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been terrific.

JESS: Thank you so much.

MADELEINE WYATT: Thank you, Amy.

HANNAH BATES: You just heard organizational psychologist Madeleine Wyatt and Jess, a management consultant, in conversation with Amy Bernstein on Women at Work.

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This episode was produced by Amanda Kersey, Anne Saini, and me, Hannah Bates. Ian Fox is our editor. Music by Coma Media. Special thanks to Rob Eckhardt, Tina Tobey Mack, Erica Truxler, Maureen Hoch, Ramsey Khabbaz, Nicole Smith, Anne Bartholomew, and you – our listener. See you next week.