Using (Without Losing) Your Influence at Work
A practical guide to workplace political capital
The first time I heard the phrase “political capital,” I was fifteen and helplessly losing a debate. We (my debate partner + I) had said we should withdraw forward-deployed Marines from Japan, and the other team had said that doing so would be controversial in Congress.
Sure, fair enough. But I wasn’t grasping why that would make our proposal a bad idea.
Well, because Congress was also in the middle of negotiating terms for a new nuclear arms reduction treaty (START) with Russia. Also controversial! And if the congresspeople who would (hypothetically) advocate for withdrawing Marines wasted all their energy and influence on getting people to agree, they’d have no influence left to shape a good START treaty.
“Political capital is finite!” some pimply dude in slacks and an untucked button-down shouted at us. “This argument is so stupid,” I whispered to my partner. And then we swiftly lost.
People write this argument (the “politics disad”) in debate for one reason only: it applies to everything. Accordingly, I went on to answer it hundreds of times over eight years of debating. And just for posterity: I was right the first time. The argument is stupid.
But that one kernel of genius—that it applies to all proposals—really landed with me. I think it’s true: advocating for something always requires dipping into finite reserves of influence. Including at work. Where, whether we know it or not, we’re all participating in an economy of political capital.
Political Capital: The Basics
Think of “political capital” as a person’s ability to influence decisions. You use it every time you raise an issue, advocate for a change, or try to get someone to change their mind. It’s a little north of “trust” and a little south of “power.” And unlike other personal “resources,” such as competence or humor, it doesn’t compound with use. It depletes.
We have other cultural references for this idea: famously, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, a story about how credibility misspent becomes credibility lost. But political capital theory asks us to consider that you can lose influence even when there is a wolf.
This idea matters for everyone… but especially for those of us who think ourselves sharp, incisive, and very good at spotting workplace wolves. It’s obviously a great thing to be able to identify problems at work, but that awareness becomes a liability quickly if you don’t manage your influence wisely (aka: pick your battles). And if you’ve been lobbying constantly without gaining traction, you should perhaps consider that the problem isn’t people misunderstanding your brilliance. It’s more likely you’re just spending your political capital too recklessly.
Alas, some practical guidance on how to build and spend it better.
How to Build Political Capital
While by no means exhaustive, here’s where I would start with building my political capital: be generous, be right, and be predictable.
Be Generous
Counterintuitively, one of the best ways to build political capital is to set aside the power politics and be generous with people. And I really do mean generous: motivated to put others’ interests above your own purely because it’s a good thing to do.
The thing about “advancing your agenda” is that you can’t do it without trust—and no one will ever trust you if you act like a selfish ass.
Admittedly, if you don’t possess some level of innate goodness, I can’t help you with this one. You can’t pantomime generosity. People viscerally feel the difference between being helped and being transacted with. And if you start helping people just to rack up interpersonal debt, it will backfire.
Why you struggle to be generous with others (*cough* your overactive scarcity mindset) is for you and your licensed therapist to discuss. However, if you stop and sincerely ask whether you’re being as good a teammate as you are an individual contributor, you will inevitably find opportunities to earn more trust.
Where can you offer help that you currently don’t because you’re “busy?”
Who could you give more public credit to?
I owe my current career entirely to offering to help executives with their writing—simply because I had the time, and they didn’t. Generosity, even when it’s inconvenient (especially when it’s inconvenient!), always pays off. Even if in unexpected ways.
Be Right
Unfortunately, since influencing eventually requires convincing people you have a good opinion, you cannot solely be benevolent. You also have to actually have good ideas.
To build your credibility as someone who is “right” about things, start by improving your hit rate. People who tell you they’re just “super intuitive” are lying to you. Being right is a skill, not a divine gift. You can build that skill by being attentive, informed, scrutinizing, open to new ideas, committed to truth, and curious (see: how to have good opinions).
Read more, ask more questions, spend more time picking apart your own ideas. The people who are more right than you just do more of these things. And if you build out the foundational behaviors and mindsets that help people be right, you will find your influence grows. This takes time, but “I told you so” (obviously, you never actually say this) is an incredibly effective long game.
Be Predictable
My curveball tip for being influential: be wildly consistent—in what you believe, how you think, how you treat people, and how you work.
Being predictable doesn’t make your ideas better. However, it does make people more likely to hear them because they know how to fit them into your broader POV.
For most people, reliability is as important to trust-building as generosity is. People need to know your interests don’t always trump theirs. They also need to believe that who they perceive you to be lines up with how you actually act. People want to be able to understand how the battles you pick fit into your (metaphorical) war.
If they agree with you on one thing, will you come back asking for more? If they back you, are you going to follow through? Are you simply a hungry little mouse who got fed a cookie and is about to come back for milk? Or a person with clear, consistent, limited motivations that other people can make sense of.
Influencing is a far grander endeavor than just convincing people you’re right. You also have to build a reputation that tells people what to expect when you show up with an ask.
To start: make your values legible. Be vocal about them. Be transparent about how you make decisions. Use your existing political capital in ideologically consistent ways (at least most of it). Explain your reasoning. Never capitulate on things you care about because of who’s in the room. Be persuadable, but not cowardly.
In short, make it easy to answer the question: “What does she care about and believe in?” If the answer isn’t clear, you’re probably a lot harder to align with than you think.
How to Spend Political Capital
Okay, the fun part. You’ve built up some political capital. Let’s spend it.
Consciously Rank Your Priorities.
Before you do anything else, you need to bring more rigor to how you think about your priorities. If you don’t actually know which ones are most important, you risk spending your influence in heated moments or missing the opportunity to be an advocate when it might have mattered.
To avoid that, write down your priorities. Seriously. Grab a pen. Make a list.
Write down the debates you’re trying to win, the problems you’re trying to solve, the changes you want to see, and the opinions you’re hoping to shift. Take all of these together, and then ordinally rank them.
How you establish that ranking is up to you, but I recommend orienting around value for your team/business, not value for you personally. My favorite way to figure out my priorities is to ask myself, “If I could only change people’s minds about one thing this week, what would it be? If I could pick two, what would the second one be?” And so on.
Once you have a list, whenever you’re about to speak up about something, do a quick cross-check to see where it sits on your priority list. If it’s not top five, hold your tongue.
Know the Cost of Your Priorities
You should also account for how much time, energy, and persuasive capital your priorities demand. It is much more costly to convince the CEO that your whole company should have a four-day workweek than to persuade your manager to change the format of your 1:1s.
When you haven’t costed out your priorities, you’re much more likely to pick fights you’re not actually up for. Maybe you think you’re making an offhanded suggestion in a meeting, but you’re actually spending your limited capacity to disagree on an idea you won’t follow through with. Don’t ruffle feathers with no payoff.
Before you decide to try to influence something, even casually, ask if you’re really ready to put up the whole fight. If not, consider that you might not need to say anything at all.
As a rule of thumb, I try not to speak up unless I’m willing to fully own the execution of whatever perspective I’m advocating for. I also, as a rule, never pick “big fights”—ones that require people to shuffle priorities, change plans, deal with massive emotions, or execute highly complex logistics—more than once or twice a year.
And as you’re evaluating cost, be mindful of who you’re spending it on. Most people work with a limited set of stakeholders, so it’s likely your battles are usually with the same people. Just keep tabs on how often you’re clashing with any one person. You can fight many battles on many fronts, even at a high cost, but political capital is audience-sensitive, so when you notice you’re in a recurring battle sequence, give it a rest.
Leverage Alliances
Let’s say you just can’t help yourself—you need to fight one more battle, even when you know you shouldn’t. Then you need to learn how to leverage other people’s capital rather than your own.
It sounds sort of nefarious, but in practice, all I mean is you should form alliances with people who share similar POVs, pool your political capital, and strategically divvy up your influencing pursuits.
Let’s say there’s a project you really care about, but you simply can’t get others to pay attention to it. You can choose to forfeit that priority, OR ask yourself who else the project matters to, who could take the lead on getting it approved.
Unless you actually are a selfish ass, you should never be the sole beneficiary of your ideas. That makes it relatively easy to find these allies. Ask: Who is served by this idea? Who else cares about this?
Identify them, explain your perspective, and then recruit them to spend their political capital.
Even better: influence together. For better or worse, our silly human brains believe there’s truth in numbers. The more people you can get pooling their political capital into the same cause, the easier it is to emerge victorious.
Know When to Ask Instead of Fight
In truth, this advice is mostly here for my sake. A reminder from me to me that while influencing and persuading are great, they are not the only tools at your disposal.
You can also—*gasp*— ask for help.
If that was already obvious and easy for you, congrats, I envy your healthy relationship to personal vulnerability. But if you, like most people, struggle to ask for what you want, it’s easy to become over-reliant on influence and under-reliant on others’ kindness.
When you know you can’t convince someone, consider asking for their trust instead. Ask them to take a leap of faith on the idea. Hit ‘em with a “I know we see this differently, but if you give me the chance, I will work tirelessly to make this work.”
Not every idea is a candidate for this approach, and you also must be able to be gracious when someone says “no.” But I’ve made the mistake of lobbying for opportunities I should have just asked for. Don’t recommend.
Just like you can build your political capital by being generous, you can conserve it by letting others be generous with you.
With that, get out there and be influential!
Thanks—always—for reading. Talk soon.