When Politics Meet Projects: What It Costs

A few weeks ago, I wrote about an elevator ride — a senior executive offering me his "support" in exchange for a report that would have thrown my own boss under the bus. I said nothing beyond a polite nod. It was only after, once the doors closed, that the weight of it caught up with me. What I didn't fully appreciate at the time was what that moment was really telling me: I'd walked into a program where the people with the most power had the least interest in compromise.

I want to talk about what that really costs.

It's easy to treat politics on a project as background noise — uncomfortable but separate from the "real" risks like budget, timeline, and technical scope. I've come to believe the opposite. On a large, cross-company implementation, turf protection at the top is often the single biggest risk on the program. It just doesn't show up on the risk register, because no one wants to write "sponsor unwilling to compromise" in a document everyone can see.

Here's what it actually does, quietly, over time.

Decisions stall. When steering committee members are protecting territory instead of aligning on outcomes, even simple decisions — a scope change, a go-live date, a shared process across business units — get stuck. Not because the decision is hard, but because agreeing means someone has to give up ground.

Ownership gets blurry exactly when you need it most. When something goes wrong on a program like this, the first question is always "whose issue is this." If the top of the house has spent the whole project protecting their own patch, nobody wants to own a problem that crosses into someone else's. The PMO ends up holding accountability that was never really designed to sit there alone.

Trust erodes below the level where anyone can see it. Teams take their cues from leadership. If executives are competing instead of collaborating, that tension travels downward — into how business units treat each other, how issues get reported, and how honestly people speak up. By the time it's visible in team performance, it's already been quietly damaging the program for months.

The technical risks get harder to manage, not easier. This is the part that surprised me most. Every ERP program has real technical exposure — a big-bang rollout across multiple affiliated companies, legacy systems with deep and messy integrations, licenses expiring on a fixed clock, customization pushed to the limit to satisfy every business unit, supply chain dependencies that can shift overnight. None of that is new. What politics does is remove your ability to respond to it well. A team that trusts each other can surface a problem early and solve it together. A team protecting turf hides problems, minimizes them, or waits for someone else to raise them first — and by the time they surface, they're bigger and more expensive to fix.

Here's what made this harder to solve than I expected. Most people on a steering committee — even competitive ones — are still operating inside some shared sense of fair play: escalate through the right channel, disagree on the merits, let governance settle what governance exists to settle. But not everyone at that table was playing by those rules. Some weren't negotiating in bad faith occasionally. They'd simply never agreed to the same rules everyone else assumed were in force. You can bring facts, patience, and process to a table like that, and it isn't enough — because the table was never level to begin with.

I'll be honest: the way I chose to navigate it — staying with governance, sticking to principle, trying to build consensus — wasn't fully effective at the time. It protected my own integrity and my credibility with the people who were watching. It did not convert the people who needed converting, and it did not stop the damage the politics did to the program. I've since come to believe that's an important distinction to make. Standing on principle is the right thing to do. It is not the same as solving the problem. Sometimes it simply means you come through it intact, while the problem itself goes largely unsolved.

So what actually helps, in my experience — with that honesty attached.

Know the organization's culture and the key players' real motivations before you're deep into the program — not after your first difficult meeting. Insist on an independent channel for feedback, ideally through HR or a similarly neutral function, so issues don't only travel through people with something to protect. Keep an open line to the CEO or the ultimate sponsor, not to go around anyone, but so the person with the most authority has an accurate picture, not a filtered one. And build your own base of trust deliberately — relationships you've earned before you need them, not favors you're offered in an elevator.

And one more, learned the harder way: recognize early which players are willing to be brought in, and which aren't. Not everyone can be won over by patience, good governance, or a fair process — and pretending otherwise cost me time I didn't need to lose. Knowing the difference, early, is its own skill. That lesson has stayed with me since — it's shaped how I navigate engagements now, and how I advise teams walking into the same terrain.

None of this removes the politics. I haven't found a program large enough, or important enough, where politics fully disappears. But naming it early, and refusing to let it substitute for real governance, is often the difference between a program that survives its own organization and one that doesn't.

Looking back, that elevator ride wasn't really about transparency in a status report. It was an early signal of exactly this — and I'm glad I read it as a warning rather than an invitation.

I've told you what I did, and I've told you it wasn't enough on its own. I'm genuinely curious — when you've faced players who weren't playing by the same rules, what actually worked for you? Not the principled response. The one that actually changed the outcome.