At one point, I seen a company with just 12 people. Tight-knit, no middle managers, WhatsApp group culture. On paper, no room for politics.
I could feel it. Product had “a favourite” in engineering. Sales talked in DMs instead of threads. Founders would workshop a plan in 1:1s, then present it like it came from consensus. It didn’t.
Twelve people. And still—alliances, narratives, unspoken rules.
We tend to think politics starts with headcount. Layer in some VPs, a board, a dotted-line org chart, then the backchanneling begins.
Not true.
Politics starts with silence. With assuming instead of clarifying. With choosing who hears what, and when.
In small teams, a single relationship imbalance carries the whole room.
What fixed it, at least partially, was daylight. Decisions got written down. Roadmaps shared early. Tough questions logged, not deflected.
And the moment someone said, “Let’s not do this in DMs,” things started to shift.
Small team? Still politics. Don’t pretend it’s not there. Just drag it into the open early—before it calcifies into culture.
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