My career has included “big P” politics. I ran for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama when he won the presidency. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life and I came out of that experience with a lot of “aha” moments. One of the biggest things I learned is that we women do not like politics. 

We vote. We run our wheels off donating our time, heart,  and money to our families, our communities, and nonprofits. But we run away from electoral politics. When we run away from electoral politics, we abdicate responsibility for our rights and interests to other people—people who may not have our best interests at heart.

But we don’t run away from only electoral politics. We tend to run away from “small p” politics, as well. We shun workplace politics, which has the same result—abdicating responsibility for our career growth and advancement to other people. I get it. Playing politics is difficult. It’s messy. It’s harsh. 

A recent Harvard Business Review article listed five reasons why women hate office politics. We believe that our work should speak for itself. It’s time consuming and emotionally draining. It feels inauthentic to us. We don’t like playing hardball. We’re afraid that we’ll be labeled too “ambitious.”

You may find playing office politics to be distasteful, but it’s not optional. It’s the way you control and advance your career. It’s how you control your narrative. Women—and particularly women of color—are already outnumbered at senior executive levels. According to McKinsey & Company’s Women in the Workplace research, covid may reverse years of progress for women in Corporate America. 

But what do you do when playing politics doesn’t work? When you’re doing everything right—you’re showing how your work connects to other people’s work, you’re building connections, you’re matching your leadership tactics to the situation—and it’s still not working? You have to execute what I call the Outside/Inside Game Approach. The reality of Corporate America is that the inside approach to politics doesn’t always work for women and women of color. The inside approach to playing politics assumes that you’ll be allowed to play, when sometimes we’re not even allowed to step onto the playing field. 

I had a senior male colleague tell me, to my face, that he “and the boys” had gotten together and decided that they were not going to work with me under any circumstances. This was not news to me, but he was bold enough to pick up the phone and admit it because when you are outnumbered (the way women and women of color usually are), there are no consequences for other people not working with you.

With my Outside/Inside Game Approach, you retake control of your destiny by finding a playing field where you can win. You have to switch up the rules. The option is not to simply disengage from politics. You have to take your political skills and apply it to an outside/inside game. 

You need to get validated outside your company. I teach this in my Career Free Agent course. You have to get validated and affirmed on the outside and then bring that “win” back to your job. Recently, I reached out to a woman whose newsletter I saw on LinkedIn. I was interested in her services, but I didn’t know who she was. She emailed me back and said, “You don’t remember me, but I know you. Ten years ago, you gave me advice that changed my life.” She had attended an event where I spoke. “I was the person who stood up and asked, ‘What do you do when you’re being bullied at work?’”  

My advice to her was to go get validated on the outside, and that’s exactly what she did. She began teaching a course at the University of Chicago on social media marketing. Then other companies began asking her to teach. The bullying stopped. The main bullier even asked to collaborate with her But you know what else happened? By going outside for validation, she discovered her passion. Seven years later, she is running her own business and is killing it. That’s playing the Outside/Inside Game.

Next, you need to have enough political acumen to know when “enough is enough.” You need to recognize when the inside game isn’t working and your mental health is being impacted. Women shoulder way too much of the emotional labor at work. Those men who didn’t want to work with me were putting it all on me. They did not have to meet me even halfway. Bearing all of the emotional labor at work is a high cost and not sustainable over the long term. 

But don’t quit before you quit. Start laying those eggs in other places. You know that saying about the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? You need enough political acumen to assess the situation and make your plans. 

You can’t avoid politics. Just go to any preschool playground! It starts early because it’s the nature of relationships. You need to develop your political skills—but you also need to know when to find an environment and a playing field where those skills will work for you.