Your work will not speak for you: Nneka Jethro-Iruobe on workplace politics

Many capable professionals assume that good work will be noticed. The better question is whether anyone who decides their next opportunity can see it.

That was the question behind GEPA's leadership workshop on workplace politics, led by Mrs Nneka Jethro-Iruobe, an HR and career coach known as the Happy Employee Coach, who spent more than eighteen years in HR advisory work and rose to director level in a professional services firm. Her case for visibility is simple: people reward and recommend the people they recognise, and opportunities go to whoever is top of mind. Like every GEPA session, it was framed in explicitly Christian terms.

Where you are coming from

Jethro-Iruobe begins before the office. Contrasting Joseph, raised as a prized son, with Moses, nursed in hiding and raised watching his people brutalised, she argues that upbringing follows you to work. It shapes whether you speak up, how you address your boss and what you assume you are allowed to say.

Since, as she puts it, we spend upwards of 70% of our waking hours at and around work, she asks each person to examine that pattern and take it to God in prayer. She then turns to David, competent before he was known, and to Deborah, who in Judges 5 put her own part on record. Her conclusion is that showing your competence at work is not a sin.

Why you work, and who you work for

Work, she argues, is a way of reflecting godlikeness, drawing on Genesis 1:26. Without a clear reason for working, the job simply frustrates you. For her, employment is a place to learn while still earning. She contrasts a slave mindset, which treats work as servitude, with a genius mindset, which treats it as a chance to unlock and test what you can do.

You work, in her account, for three parties: for God; for yourself, so the question is who you are becoming; and for your boss, since you were hired to help that person succeed.

What to be known for, and by whom

Jethro-Iruobe names creativity, excellence and consistency. In practice that means building a buffer into every timeline you agree, and raising a slipping date before anyone has to chase you. Excellence, she says, is not perfection but visible improvement over time.

From a longer list in her book, she picks three people who must know your work: you, honestly; your boss, who should be able to vouch for it; and your boss's boss, which is why she urges speaking up in the meetings they attend. She is blunt that relying on your work to speak for you does your career a disservice. Her ratio for workplace communication is roughly 70% contributions, 20% compliments and 10% complaints, and the contributions should be heard. She calls voicing your own contribution the lizard phenomenon, after the lizard that lands a jump, sees no one watching and nods its own approval.

Accept, strategise, execute

Her method for office politics has three steps:

• Accept. Politics is the undocumented set of rules for how people interact at work, so observing them in a new team or under a new boss is part of the job. Then ask who has the power to reward you, and whether they value you.
• Strategise. Identify key players and build critical relationships, closing the loop with anyone whose help you sought.
• Execute. Use your strengths and get your work in front of the right eyes, because people promote who they see.

Questions from the host and audience tested the edges. With a difficult peer, civility is a legitimate setting, and active obstruction calls for a direct conversation. On upward visibility, and where it tips into insubordination, she calls heart posture critical, alongside wisdom, timing and continued respect for your own manager, to whom she reports conversations with her boss's boss. To correct a wrong impression, distil it into about three specific behaviours, say what you will change, and ask to review it in a month or two.

The full course in the catalogue also covers the closing questions on work social events and on work outside your contract.