If power and influence are leadership commodities, then politics is the marketplace inside the organization through which many deals and bargains are made. Everyone knows that leaders compete for resources; grappling over slices of the budget pie, CEO face-time, manpower, etc. To a degree, such resources are a way of quantifying power and influence. Leaders also compete for followers ¾ with each other, with outside distractions, and with conflicting organizational priorities.

The ebb and flow of organizational energy is difficult to harness, let alone use efficiently. Leaders can use positional or hierarchical power to control resources, make moves, and define direction. But this power doesn’t ensure that others will follow, let alone perform up to their potential in service of the leader’s vision. Leaders are constantly vigilant in their search for ways to win the competition for followers’ hearts and minds. This makes them, by definition, political. We should not look at political behavior as necessarily good or bad, but neutral. To evaluate the extent to which political behavior is contributing to or distracting from the organization, don’t look for the existence of politics ¾ figure out what it’s being used to do.

But What About the Dark Side? In my view, political behavior gets perceived as a negative attribute of a leader when it does not reinforce a leader’s vision or the organization’s needs. When colleagues, reports and supervisors point out that a leader is political, chances are that person simply does not know when to “turn it on” and when to “turn it off.” They aren’t using their political skills with acumen.

Anthony Smith is Co-Founder and a Managing Director of Leadership Research Institute and author of ESPN: The Company (Jossey-Bass, September 2009). He is also the author  The Taboos of Leadership: 10 Secrets No One Will Tell You about Leaders and What They Really Think (Jossey-Bass, May 2007). This article originally appeared in different form in his book, The Taboos of Leadership.