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Comment by jrowley | Hacker News Reader

I'll take a stab at this. To me, it means instead of leaning on trust to build respect/relationships, you use some more artificial or formal ladder. Maybe you act disingenuously, letting people fail when its avoidable, turning people against each other, thus allowing a space for yourself to succeed.

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This, there are two ways to stand out in a group; one is to do excellent work, the other is to make everyone else appear worse than you. A "political" leader will use their skill at 'crafting the narrative' to establish a completely different reality for those who don't have the time to figure out what is really going on.

Perhaps another way to look at it would be how cult leaders get people locked into their way of thinking. It makes them very effective but by my definition it doesn't make them 'good leaders'.

One of the VP's at NetApp used to say "When your actions improve everyone's experience at the company it is leadership, when your actions improve your own experience at the company its politics."

You can use it for good though. I viewed one of my most important tasks as insulating my team from corporate politics. That often involved me using politics on other leaders in the organization to keep their (useless) agendas away from my team.

Or maybe understanding motivations, how people and groups will react not based on trust or relationships, but strictly on expected outcomes.

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