If Results Spoke for Themselves, Corporate Life Would Be Much Simpler

The Noble but Outdated Instinct

I was never especially talented at being a courtier.

I was never the guy who naturally knew how to laugh a little too hard in the right room, orbit the right executive, or perfume every conversation with just enough agreeable nonsense to sound “aligned.” My instinct was always much simpler. Do the work well. Deliver the number. Let the result speak.

It is a noble instinct.

It is also, in many organizations, an incomplete strategy.

The older I get, the less I believe that strong work fully defends itself. Results matter. They should matter. But inside companies, results rarely arrive alone. They are interpreted, narrated, sponsored, protected, diluted, and sometimes ignored.

Merit matters, but merit alone is not the operating system.

That realization took me longer than I would like to admit. For years, I wanted to believe that if you produced enough, clearly enough, and consistently enough, the structure around you would eventually have no choice but to reward you correctly. Performance in. Recognition out. A clean equation. Adult. Rational. Meritocratic.

Then you spend enough time in real companies.

You see directors get pushed out after the best year their function has ever had. You see new leaders arrive with authority far larger than their actual competence. You see top performers labeled “difficult,” “not strategic,” or, my favorite, “not sure he really knows how to sell,” usually by people whose main exposure to selling is approving slides about it.

At some point, the illusion becomes too expensive to keep.

Results Rarely Travel Alone

The truth is not that results do not matter.

The truth is that results rarely travel alone.

Inside companies, outcomes are filtered through relationships, politics, trust, timing, narrative, sponsorship, manager preference, leadership insecurity, and whatever mood the organization happens to be in that quarter. Your work may be excellent, but excellence still has to survive interpretation.

That is the part nobody likes saying out loud because it sounds cynical.

I do not think it is cynical. I think it is adult.

There is an old line I heard years ago that stayed with me: to Caesar what is Caesar’s. It sounds elegant until you spend enough time in corporate life to realize that plenty of things get handed to Caesar that were never Caesar’s to begin with.

That is the uncomfortable part.

There is, in fact, a great deal in the modern workplace that is distributed without true merit.

And the research is far less romantic about this than corporate culture tends to be.

The Meritocracy Paradox

MIT Sloan professor Emilio Castilla has spent years studying what he calls the meritocracy paradox. In one line of research, managers working in organizations explicitly described as meritocratic actually favored a male employee over an equally qualified female employee when awarding monetary rewards. In another study of a large U.S. service organization, women and racially disadvantaged employees received smaller merit-based bonuses than white men even when performance scores were the same. In other words, loudly declaring yourself meritocratic does not necessarily reduce bias. Sometimes it licenses it.

That should make anyone a little less sentimental about the word meritocracy.

And if that were only a bias problem at the edge of the system, you could still argue the machine mostly works. The problem is that many organizations do not even trust their own performance systems. Gallup reported in 2024 that only 2 percent of CHROs at Fortune 500 companies believe their performance management system works. Around the same time, Harvard Business Review highlighted research showing that calibration meetings, which are often introduced to make reviews more consistent, can themselves introduce bias into performance decisions. So the very apparatus companies use to prove they are fair is often experienced, and sometimes designed, in ways that are not especially fair at all.

The Interpersonal Layer

Then there is the interpersonal layer, which many people prefer to pretend does not count.

It counts.

A meta-analysis published in The Leadership Quarterly found that supervisor liking explains variance in subordinate performance ratings above and beyond leader-member exchange. Put less academically, whether your boss likes you is not a decorative detail. It can materially influence how your performance is seen. Related research in management education found that ingratiating behavior, political skill, and supervisor liking all shaped job performance ratings in internship settings. Nobody enjoys hearing this because it sounds like an argument for manipulation. It is not. It is an argument for abandoning the fantasy that performance is judged in a vacuum.

And careers are not shaped only by what gets measured. They are also shaped by who is willing to advocate for you when you are not in the room.

That is sponsorship.

A growing body of research suggests that sponsorship is not some soft, ceremonial concept. It is often one of the clearest ways social capital gets translated into career movement. It is the activation of real social capital. Experimental research from Harvard Business School has likewise examined how sponsorship affects competitive workplace advancement.

The practical meaning is obvious to anyone who has worked long enough to become less naive: talented people do not rise only because they are talented. They rise because someone with credibility is willing to make their talent legible to the system.

Not Every Relationship Is Flattery

This is where people usually make the mistake of swinging too far in the other direction.

They start with a healthy frustration with corporate favoritism and end up with a childish contempt for all internal relationship-building. They collapse diplomacy into sycophancy. They confuse visibility with vanity. They treat every politically skilled person as a fraud and every blunt high performer as a martyr.

That is just another form of immaturity.

Not every relationship is flattery.

Not every act of influence is corruption.

Not every politically capable professional is a snake.

Some people simply understand a hard truth: if your work is going to move through an organization, someone has to trust not only the result, but the person carrying it.

That is not corporate flattery.

That is organizational reality.

In fact, research suggests political skill is often associated with career success. A 2022 study found that political skill positively influenced subjective career success, with mentoring and career adaptability helping explain part of that relationship. Another study found political skill related positively to work role performance and lower intention to leave, partly through perceived organizational support. Political skill, at its best, is not about fake charm. It is social intelligence used to navigate institutions that do not run only on spreadsheets.

Even the Top Is Not Purely Meritocratic

Even at the very top, where we like to imagine pure accountability reigns, the story is messier than people admit. NBER research on CEO turnover found that CEOs were significantly more likely to be dismissed after bad industry and market performance beyond their control. In other words, boards do not perfectly separate merit from noise either. If the filtering is imperfect at the top of the house, it would be strange to assume it becomes pristine in the middle.

So where does that leave people like me, or people like the version of me that once wanted the world to be simpler?

I do not think the answer is to become a flatterer.

I do not think the answer is to treat every meeting like a court and every leader like royalty.

I also do not think the answer is to sit in principled silence and hope that undeniable results will eventually overcome weak interpretation.

That is not integrity.

Sometimes that is just passivity in a nice outfit.

The Adult Answer

The adult answer, I think, is harder and more interesting.

Build relationships without becoming false.

Learn the internal language of the company without letting it swallow your own.

Make your work visible without turning yourself into a self-promotional mascot.

Understand who trusts whom, where decisions are really made, which leaders can sponsor serious work, and which ones can only consume it.

Do not worship politics, but do not infantilize yourself by pretending politics does not exist.

There is a meaningful difference between sucking up and building credibility.

The first is theater.

The second is infrastructure.

The first tries to borrow status.

The second makes your contribution easier to believe, easier to defend, and harder to erase.

Results Need Interpretation

That distinction matters because results, by themselves, are often less eloquent than people think. Results are data. Organizations still need a story about the data. Why it happened. Whether it can happen again. Whether it reflects judgment or luck. Whether the person behind it can be trusted with more. Whether they are scalable. Whether they are “leadership material.” Whether they are safe.

That story gets written socially.

Which means that if you are absent from the relationship layer entirely, someone else may end up narrating your work for you.

Usually not kindly.

This is one reason so many high performers become quietly resentful. They believe they are competing on output when, in reality, they are competing on output plus interpretation. They dominate the first category and ignore the second. Then they watch less capable people rise and conclude that merit is dead.

I would put it differently.

Merit is not dead.

It is just not sovereign.

It is one force among several, and pretending otherwise does not make you principled. It makes you strategically blind.

Merit Matters, but It Is Not Sovereign

If anything, the real professional task is to keep merit at the center of your identity while getting much better at the human systems around it. To make sure your work is not only strong, but understood. Not only delivered, but sponsored. Not only real, but legible.

That is not corruption.

That is translation.

And maybe that is the most useful way to think about internal relationships in companies.

Not as a performance of charm.

Not as a betrayal of substance.

But as the social process through which substance becomes undeniable.

Conclusion

Yes, there are people who get too much without deserving it.

Yes, there are leaders who inherit authority they have not earned.

Yes, there are top performers who get discarded for reasons so thin they almost become comedy.

All of that is real.

But none of it changes the more practical truth.

If you want your work to survive the corporate world, it cannot only be excellent.

It has to be seen correctly, interpreted correctly, and carried by enough trust that the wrong people cannot easily mislabel it.

That does not mean becoming someone you are not.

It does mean accepting that inside organizations, justice is not automatic.

You have to help it arrive.