Know the game you’re playing
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Do you know the game being played?
The one in your organisation beyond the values on the wall.
Most leaders would say yes and that's usually where the problem starts.
Knowing the game isn't a cynical idea. It isn't about manipulation or politics in the pejorative sense. It's about understanding the incentives at work around you.
What people actually need, what's actually at stake, what's actually driving the decisions being made in the rooms you're in and the ones you're not.
When you can see that clearly, you become more useful to the people around you. You see disruption before it arrives. And you find yourself being the person who moves things forward when everyone else is stuck.
This requires a discipline that leaders mistakenly think they have and it this: You have to keep questioning your read on incentives even when you think you have it figured out.
Especially then.
Incentives shift. Situations change. The model you built of someone last year is likely to be out of date. The leaders who stay current on this rarely get blindsided. The ones who don't are always the last to know.
In my experience there are three levels at which the game is played and most leaders are only fluent in one.
In the room
In the corridors
Over the horizon
Each requires a different kind of attention. Each gives you a different kind of leverage. And together, they form the full picture on which effective leadership depends.
In the room
The first level is the most immediate and the most deceptive. It's what happens when people sit down together. What's said, and what isn't. What the stated position is, and what the real one is.
Reading a room well is a skill many leaders underestimate because they confuse it with listening.
Listening is necessary but not sufficient.
The question isn't just what's being said. It's why this, why now, why in these words and not different ones.
Silence is data. Enthusiasm that feels slightly too performed is data. The person who defers every time a particular topic comes up is data.
When you can read and interpret all of that data, you can see the incentives operating beneath the surface of a conversation and that’s where clarity lives. You can name what's actually in the room, cut through the noise and get people onto the same page. Few leaders do this well and those who do become indispensable.
This skill also helps you make better decisions about people.
Who belongs in which conversations. Who's holding the team back through malice or misaligned incentives. Who needs a different role, a different brief, or in some cases a different organisation.
That kind of clarity is only available to leaders who are genuinely paying attention.
In the corridors
The second level is what happens when you're not there.
Every organisation has two operating systems: the official one, and the informal one. The official one is the org chart, strategy and stated values. The informal one is what gets talked about over coffee, what the real concerns are, what people actually think about the direction the business is heading.
A strong culture keeps these two systems reasonably aligned. People carry the mission into the spaces you can't see because they believe in it, not because they're being watched. Decision-making stays consistent and trust compounds.
Brittle cultures fracture along that line.
Gossip fills the vacuum left by unclear direction. Workarounds become the norm. 'That's how we've always done it' becomes a form of passive resistance. And by the time a leader notices, it's usually been going on for longer than they'd like to admit.
The CEO's job is to set and drive the organisation to its north star. To make direction so clear, and trust so present, that the informal operating system runs in the same direction as the official one. That doesn't happen by accident. It happens by design, consistency and by being genuinely curious about what's being said in the rooms you're not in.
The leaders who are good at this develop a kind of antennae. They build relationships across the organisation that give them an honest read. They create the conditions of psychological safety, mission orientation and genuine openness to difficult feedback where the truth travels in all directions rather than being filtered on the way.
Over the horizon
This is the macro game. The forces operating beyond your organisation and your industry that will reshape the context you're operating in, whether you're watching them or not.
History is instructive here.
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 destabilised global oil markets in ways nobody fully anticipated. One consequence, playing out over the following decades, was a sustained push to develop more fuel-efficient vehicles. The car industry didn't choose that shift because it wanted to, it was forced to evolve because the external environment made the old model unviable. The companies that saw it coming adapted. The ones that didn't spent years catching up.
Now, nearly half a century later, we're in another inflection point. The accelerating take-up of electric vehicles is reshaping not just automotive manufacturing but energy infrastructure, urban planning, and the geopolitics of mineral supply chains. That's not a story about cars. It's a story about how the world is reorganising and which leaders are paying attention.
This is what 'over the horizon' means.
And thinking this is about knowing your competitors is missing the point. Over the horizon means knowing who's building new models outside your industry that will eventually become your industry. It also means understanding which political, technological or demographic shifts are going to change the incentive structure of your entire market, the clues for which often hide amongst partnerships being built between relative outliers (think X Money).
Leaders who think at this level don't just react to change, they position for it. And when it arrives, as it always does, they are rarely surprised.
A mentor once shared that ‘Perspective is what separates leaders who are always catching up from those who always seem to be one step ahead.’
Today, that statement rings more true than ever before.
What you find when you actually look
Here's something worth being prepared for. When you start reading incentives honestly, the answers can take you aback.
"I'm here to make a name for myself"
"I'm here to build my influence"
"I'm here because this organisation needs me"
Your instinct might be to judge those people.
To categorise them as self-serving, or misaligned or at odds with what the team needs. Resist that instinct but don't abandon your standards either.
There's a distinction that matters here.
Knowing someone's incentives doesn't mean tolerating anything in pursuit of them. The people worth working with, the ones this approach is designed for, are people who hold themselves to a high standard and who can be held accountable when they don't.
Incentive-alignment is a tool for getting the best out of people who deserve to be in the room. It isn't a reason to keep the wrong people there.
With that guardrail in place: whether an incentive strikes you as humble or calculated or somewhere in between is beside the point. What matters is that you know it. Because once you do, you can work with it.
The person who's here to make a name for themselves? Give them visible wins that serve the business.
The person who wants to build influence? Show them how their influence grows when the team delivers.
The person who believes the organisation can't function without them? Structure accountability in a way that lets them own something real.
The leaders who are good at this don't waste energy wishing people had different motivations. They work with the motivations in the room and they're clear-eyed about who belongs there.
What this looks like in practice
These three levels show up constantly across the work I do with CEOs and those in a succession path. Here are three situations that illustrate what's at stake when you don't know the game and what becomes possible when you do.
The investor who thought he knew what he wanted
A founder I worked with closely had a lead investor who'd been explicit from the start: Patient capital, long game, no pressure for a quick exit. The founder believed him. Why wouldn't he?
Eighteen months in, the dynamic shifted.
Sharper questions about revenue milestones. A potential acquirer introduced, casually, as a 'useful contact.' A push for a specific CFO profile. Each move felt reasonable in isolation but together, they told a different story.
The investor's LP structure had changed. A key commitment was coming up for renewal. The 'patient capital' story was still true in spirit but the timeline had quietly compressed. The founder was playing a five-year game. His investor had moved to an eighteen-month game.
One honest conversation broke the impasse. Direct and not confrontational. The founder asked what success looked like for the investor in the next two years, not the next five. The answer reshaped the relationship. He didn't have to change his strategy. He just needed to know the real game he was in.
The CEO who inherited a map that didn't match the territory
A client of mine stepped into a CEO role at a well-established multinational in the European agriculture sector. He was commercially sharp, had turned around a struggling regional division, and arrived with a clear mandate to accelerate growth in a business that had plateaued.
What he underestimated was the political landscape. The leadership team looked aligned. They said the right things. But the moment he pushed for speed by restructuring accountabilities and shortening decision cycles the resistance came.
The resistance wasn’t overt, it showed up through the organisational machinery.
Decisions that needed two sign-offs got four. Information arrived late.
He hadn't mapped the real incentives.
One senior leader had been the internal candidate for his role. Another was months from a significant share vesting. A third was close to retirement and had spent two decades building a particular way of operating.
None of them were obstructing him deliberately. They were humans managing their own stakes.
When he slowed down enough to understand what each person actually needed, not just professionally but personally, the path forward clarified.
He adjusted his approach. Instead of abandoning his agenda, he stopped assuming everyone shared it.
Growth followed. But it started with understanding who was actually in the room.
The succession candidate who almost played herself out of the game
I've worked with a number of leaders at the point where they discover they're being considered for the top job.
It's a particular and difficult kind of pressure.
One leader had been told, in suitably vague terms, that she was 'in the mix' for a CEO role.
She interpreted this as: perform well, stay visible, don't make mistakes. So she did exactly that.
What she missed was what the board actually needed to see.
She had proved she could execute. That wasn’t what the board was looking to understand. They wanted to see whether she could operate at board level. If she was already thinking like a CEO, not a general manager.
The signals were there: The conversations she was being invited into, the questions she was being asked, the people she was quietly being introduced to.
But she was so focused on not making mistakes that she wasn't reading the game.
When we worked through this together, she started showing up differently. She didn’t need to perform more, she needed to demonstrate a different kind of thinking. She started engaging with the board as a strategic partner. She made her perspective on the organisation’s future specific and visible.
She got the role because she finally understood what game she was in.
The question underneath all of this
Three different contexts. Three different games. The same underlying discipline: staying genuinely curious about what's driving the people and forces around you and never assuming your current read is the final one.
I find that most leaders are fluent in one, maybe two levels.
They're good in the room or they have strong cultural instincts or they think well at the macro level. The leaders who are hardest to replace tend to move fluidly across all three.
And that fluency isn't innate. It's developed.
It starts with the habit of asking not just what's happening but what's actually at stake for each person or force involved. Then asking it again next quarter, because the game will have moved.
Experience tells me that the leaders who do this consistently rarely get blindsided. They build better alliances, move faster with less resistance and find themselves in the room when the decisions that matter are being made.
It’s not because they play politics. It’s because they understand people.
Which level do you spend the least time on and what might you be missing because of it?
I’d love to hear. Send me an email, I read every one.
From The Partnership Playbook Podcast
Here are this week’s podcast episodes for your walk, commute or workout.
LEADERSHIP MOMENTS
EP 176 - 11 min: The CEO’s Conviction Principle: How to decide when smart people disagree. Moments like this happen in every company that’s growing and the instinct to search for the objectively correct answer can quietly stall the entire organisation. In this episode you’ll learn the shift from correctness to conviction that experienced CEOs learn to make and a practical three-step decision lens for moving a divided leadership team toward aligned execution.Listen on Apple Podcasts | Spotify
EP 174 - 11 min: The Decision Partner Model: The future of pre-sales in the AI era. What happens to selling when every buyer has instant access to information through AI? In this episode, I explore why credibility, not information, is becoming the most valuable currency in modern selling. It’s time for an enterprise upgrade of your pre-sales capability. Listen on Apple Podcasts | Spotify
CEO INTERVIEW
EP 175 - 54 min: Jeff Wetzler and the power of asking the right question at the right time. What if the key to stronger partnerships, deeper relationships, and better decisions was simply knowing how to ask the right questions? Jeff Wetzler, an expert in learning and leadership, shares his transformative approach to asking better questions, one that fosters trust, accelerates progress, and uncovers hidden insights in both business and personal life. Listen on Apple Podcasts | Spotify
When you're ready, there are three ways I can help you:
1. CEO Coaching: For CEO’s who want to lead with clarity and grow their business without sacrificing what matters most. A tailored 12-session experience with three interconnected elements: scaling you as a leader, elevating how you lead others, and creating conditions for sustainable business growth.
2. The Partnership Lab: A 6-week experience for founders, CEOs, and GTM leaders who are done with slow growth and stalled conversations. Learn to rapidly qualify and prioritise high-value partners, Install a system that turns conversations into contracts and capture outsized returns from partnerships that scale. Apply to join the next cohort today!
3. Leadership Events: From Cochlear and Lifeblood to military leaders, I have shared inspiring stories and practical frameworks and insights that shift how leaders leverage partnerships for growth. Book me to speak at your next conference, offsite, or leadership event.
Looking for something different? Send me an email.
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