October 2026

Early in my executive search career, I sat in a client debrief where a senior colleague presented the insight that reshaped the entire search. The update included a recommendation of the candidate everyone had overlooked, the new read on what the role truly needed, and the reason the finalist slate finally worked. It was sharp thinking. It was also not his. A junior researcher on our team had built it over three weeks of late nights, and I knew, because I had watched her do it.

The client loved it. The senior colleague accepted the praise with the ease of someone who had done this before. And I said nothing.

Afterward, I found the researcher in the hallway and told her how good her work was. I meant it. I also knew, even as I said it, that my private compliment cost me nothing and her public erasure cost her a great deal. If you had asked me that morning whether I believed in giving credit where it was due, I would have said yes without hesitation. I would have meant that too.

Talking a Good Game Is Free

Ask almost any leader what they value and you will hear a familiar list: fairness, candor, giving credit where it is due, not playing favorites. I heard some version of that list in thousands of interviews across three decades of executive search, and I rarely doubted the sincerity of the person saying it.

The trouble is that stating a value costs nothing. It costs nothing in the interview, nothing at the offsite, nothing in the self-assessment where you describe yourself as someone who "creates space for every voice." The price arrives later, at a specific moment: when acting on the value creates friction for you.

Someone takes credit for work they didn't do, and the person who did it sits in the room, silent. A colleague stops getting invited to the meetings where decisions get shaped, and everyone notices and no one says anything. A truth needs to be said out loud, and saying it will make the next hour uncomfortable, sometimes the next quarter.

That is the test. Values that hold only when they're free are preferences. Your values are what you do even when they come at a cost.

Last month, in Playing Favorites, I asked you to look honestly at who you invest in and who you overlook. Seeing it was the first step. This is the second, and it's harder: now that you see it, what are you going to do about it?

"I Don't Play Politics" Is a Political Choice

I hear this sentence in coaching sessions constantly, usually with a note of pride. "I don't play politics." I understand the impulse. Politics feels grimy, and opting out feels clean.

Here is the uncomfortable truth. Neutrality is a position. When you stay out of it, the situation does not stay still. The credit still goes to the wrong person. The excluded colleague stays excluded. The decision still gets made, only now it gets made without your voice, by the people who were willing to use theirs. Your absence gets counted as consent.

Politics, at its core, is how decisions get made when people with different interests compete for scarce resources: attention, budget, opportunity, credit. You are in that system whether you acknowledge it or not. The only choice you get is whether you participate consciously or by default.

Silence is never neutral. It feels neutral because it's passive, and passive feels safe. No one gets angry at the person who said nothing. That is exactly why silence is so seductive, and exactly why it deserves scrutiny.

What Your Neutrality Is Protecting

So let's scrutinize it. When you choose not to intervene, you are protecting something. Be honest about what that something is.

Sometimes it's your relationship with someone more powerful. Sometimes it's your reputation as easy to work with. It could be your next promotion. Maybe it's the plain comfort of an afternoon without conflict. None of these are shameful to want. All of them are worth naming, because once you name what your silence protects, you see what it costs, and who pays.

In that debrief with my colleagues, my silence protected a working relationship with a senior colleague and my own sense of being a team player. The researcher paid for it. She paid in visibility, in the client's impression of who the real thinker was, in the next assignment that went to someone else. My hallway compliment was sincere. It was also a way to feel good about my values without spending anything on them.

This is where quiet power lives. It doesn't require a title. It requires a sentence. "That analysis came from Maya; she should walk us through it." "I noticed Jordan wasn't on this invite. Was that intentional?" "Before we move on, I see this differently." Small, specific, spoken in the room where it matters. The 95% (those without positional authority) hold this power in every meeting they attend, and most of it goes unspent.

Mind the Gap

So here are your questions. Take them one at a time, and answer each one honestly.

When did you last watch someone get credit that belonged to someone else? What did you do? What did you tell yourself afterward?

Who on your team is being quietly left out right now? Do you know? Have you made it your business to know?

When you say "I don't play politics," what are you protecting? And who pays for that protection?

If those questions sting, good. The sting is information. It tells you exactly where the gap between your words and your actions lives.

Word to action is the whole game. It always has been. The leaders whom people trust, from any seat in an organization, are the ones whose behavior under pressure matches what they said when it was easy. That match is rare, which is why people remember it when they see it.

So how about you close the gap in the next meeting, with the next sentence you choose to say or leave unsaid? Pick one value from your list. The next time living it creates friction, spend something on it. Notice what happens. The cost is almost always smaller than you feared, and the respect you earn is larger than you expected.

The work, as always, starts within. It doesn't end there.

Favoritism and silence are two of the quieter ways politics operate at work, and they are far from the only ones. That's why I built The Office Politics Playbook, now live. It's the course I wish I'd had in that debrief all those years ago. How to read the real power structure where you work. How to build influence without compromising who you are. How to say the true thing in a way that lands. If you've ever stayed quiet because you didn't know how to speak up without paying too much for it, this one is for you.

​Enroll in The Office Politics Playbook.

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Sending love and light,

Ginny