Workplace politics will not disappear. People are social. Power exists wherever people gather.
- But there is a meaningful difference between a workplace where politics is a background human present but not dominant, and one where it is the entire engine. In the first good people can still find their way. In the second, they burn out, go quiet, or leave.
Tooba Khalil
I thought if I worked hard enough, the work would speak for itself. It took years and a few quiet humiliations to understand that workplaces run on two parallel tracks. One is visible. The other is not visible
Early in my career, I believed in a simple equation: do good work, and good things will follow. I was not naive I understood hierarchies existed. But I assumed that inside a research organization, in a field driven by evidence and ethics, merit would carry weight. I was wrong. Not entirely. But enough to matter.
What nobody explains when you join a professional environment is that there is always a second job running alongside your official one. Your official job has a title, a salary, and measurable deliverables. The second job the quiet one has none of those things. It is about being seen by the right people, at the right moments, in the right light. And it is this second job, I have come to believe, that shapes most careers more than the first one ever could. At my workplace, it has been by most of the employees those are old employees who know work politics very well.
Hard work, done in silence, in the field, far from the rooms where decisions are made it sustains organizations. But it rarely builds the careers of those who do it. What I Saw in the 40°C Heat of the Sindh Field Clinics
Beyond the Boardroom: What the Dust of the Field Taught Me
In public health and community research, field staff are the load-bearing walls of every project. They wake up before anyone else. They travel to places no one else wants to go. They build trust with communities that have every reason to distrust outsiders. They hold ethical lines when shortcuts would be easier. And they make the data real, not as numbers on a spreadsheet, but as lived realities they witnessed firsthand.
I have worked alongside people like this. I’m one of them. I have watched them carry the weight of a project on their backs while attending meetings where their names were barely mentioned. Their work showed up in reports. Their voices did not. And slowly, I started to see a pattern: the people closest to the ground were rarely the ones rising through the organization.
I remember sitting in a planning meeting once, listening to a senior colleague ask a question about community engagement. He answered confidently, fluently, and almost entirely incorrectly, based on what our field team had shared with me just days before. No one challenged him. No one asked for the field team’s input. The room deferred to his confidence, not to the evidence. That moment stayed with me.
THE WEIGHT WOMEN CARRY
When Doing Your Job Well Isn’t Enough
For women in professional environments, this invisible system carries an extra charge. Many of us were raised in workplaces and at home to believe that diligence is its own reward. Show up. Do the work. Stay professional. Don’t make noise. The results will come. But the results often do not come. Or they come for someone else. The colleague who speaks louder in meetings, who emails leadership directly, who positions himself at the center of every project narrative he or she gets the credit. Not always. Not everywhere. But enough that the pattern is undeniable.
I want to be careful here because I am not arguing that women should play the same games differently. I am questioning why we accept that the games must be played at all. And I am naming something that is rarely named directly: a woman’s professional vulnerability financial pressure, career insecurity, isolation should never be read as an opportunity. That bears saying plainly, because in some workplaces it is not understood plainly enough. Working women are not opportunities to their bosses. This should not be ignored by the professionals.
There is a difference between navigating politics and being consumed by them. One is survival. The other is a slow erosion of everything that made you good at your work in the first place.
WHAT ACTUALLY NEEDS TO CHANGE
Some Things worth Believing In
I am not cynical about institutions. I have seen good ones. I have seen managers who credit their teams publicly, who advocate in rooms where their staff cannot advocate for themselves, who build systems that reward substance over performance. They exist. And they make an enormous difference.
The question is whether organizations choose to build those conditions deliberately or leave them to chance.
FOUR THINGS THAT ACTUALLY HELP
1 Name the work that goes unseen. Not in a patronizing way but in a real, recorded, documented way. Field contributions belong in performance reviews. They belong in project credits. They belong in the room.
2 Make promotion pathways transparent enough that they can be questioned. Informal systems thrive in the dark. When the criteria are explicit and public, bias has fewer places to hide.
3 Give women access to mentorship that speaks honestly about how power actually works, not to corrupt them, but to stop them from being blindsided by a system they were never taught to read.
4 Hold leaders accountable not just for outcomes, but for the environment they create. An organization’s culture is built, one interaction at a time, by the people at the top. This should not be dictated by those who are working for many years just to manipulate employees’ credibility.
A CLOSING THOUGHT
The Real Question
Workplace politics will not disappear. People are social. Power exists wherever people gather. I do not think the goal is a frictionless utopia where none of this operates.
But there is a meaningful difference between a workplace where politics is a background human present but not dominant, and one where it is the entire engine. In the first good people can still find their way. In the second, they burn out, go quiet, or leave.
The professionals I admire most are not the ones who played the game best. They are the ones who managed to stay decent while surviving it; who kept caring about the work, even when the work did not seem to care back; who held onto their integrity when compromising it would have been easier
Those people deserve organizations worthy of them. And building those organizations —that is not idealism. That is simply what good leadership looks like.
Read: Choosing Right Over Easy
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Tooba Khalil is based in Karachi
