Training Center Workshop & the Real Decision-Maker

    A training center owner waits weeks for a workshop approval that never comes — because he pitched the wrong person. A lesson in political awareness: knowing who actually holds the power to say yes.

    Training Center Workshop & the Real Decision-Maker

    Training Center Workshop & the Real Decision-Maker

    You run a training center. You have a genuinely good workshop idea for engineering students. You pitch it to the right-sounding people, they nod, they say they'll 'discuss it and get back to you' — and then silence. Weeks pass. No workshop happens. What went wrong wasn't your idea. It was your map of who actually holds the power to say yes.

    In short

    Where this sits on your Winning Kite

    Political Awareness is Trait #17 on the EQ — left — side of your Winning Kite (KITE Leadership Framework). Your kite rises on the balance of EQ, RQ and PQ, not on any one side alone. You can have the best proposal in the room, the strongest data, the most enthusiastic listeners — and still get nowhere, because you spent your energy convincing people who were never going to be the ones to approve it. Political awareness is what tells you where the real power sits before you spend that energy.

    The story: a workshop that never happened

    Picture this. You run a training center, and you want to organize a workshop for engineering students at a local college. It's a good pitch — practical, relevant, useful for the students, and a good visibility opportunity for your center. You set up a meeting with the regular lecturers, the people who are visibly responsible for organizing academic activities on campus. You walk them through the plan. They listen. They nod along. And then they tell you something that sounds completely reasonable: "We'll need to discuss this with the Head of Department before we can confirm."

    So you wait. A few days pass. Then a week. Then two. You follow up once, politely. You get a vague, non-committal response. You follow up again. Silence. The workshop never gets approved. It simply evaporates somewhere in the gap between the lecturers' desk and wherever decisions in that college actually get made.

    Most people in this situation get frustrated and conclude the college "wasn't interested" or that "government and academic institutions are just slow." That's the easy story. It's also the wrong one.

    The mistake: pitching the messenger, not the decision-maker

    Here is what actually happened. The lecturers you pitched were never the decision-makers. Neither, in most colleges of this kind, is the HOD. In many private engineering colleges across India, the real authority — the person who can say yes to a new workshop, a new vendor, a new activity on campus — is the principal or, more often, the owner or trustee of the institution. The lecturers and the HOD are part of the formal chain of command on paper. But the actual power to approve, fund, or greenlight something outside the routine academic calendar sits higher up, and often outside the academic hierarchy altogether.

    If you had gone in with political awareness, you would have understood this before your first meeting. You would have realized that asking the lecturers to "raise it with the HOD" was really asking them to raise it with someone who — like them — doesn't have the final call. You were, in effect, passing your proposal through people who could listen politely and nod, but who had no real power to make it happen. Not because they were unhelpful, but because the decision was never theirs to make.

    Political awareness would have told you something else too: that going straight to the principal or owner isn't rude or presumptuous — it's often the respectful, efficient way to do business in a hierarchical institution. Skipping levels isn't always a breach of protocol. Sometimes the protocol itself is a maze designed, intentionally or not, to filter out people who don't understand how the system really works. Understanding that maze and choosing the direct route when it exists is exactly what political savvy means.

    Awareness first, savvy second

    I always separate these two ideas for the people I train, because they get used interchangeably and they shouldn't be. Political awareness is the understanding — who has power, who has influence, how decisions really flow, and what the informal map of an organization looks like underneath the formal org chart. Political savvy is what you do with that understanding — building the right relationships, making your proposal visible to the people who can actually act on it, and choosing your moment and your approach with intention.

    You need both. Awareness without savvy leaves you correctly diagnosing the problem while still doing nothing about it. Savvy without awareness is just guessing — working hard at influence but aiming it at the wrong people, the way our training center owner did with the lecturers.

    In the training center's case, awareness would have meant recognizing early that lecturers and HODs in most academic institutions handle curriculum and day-to-day administration, not external partnerships or new spending. Savvy would have meant using that awareness to request a short, direct meeting with the principal or owner from the start — framing the workshop not as an academic favour to be routed through channels, but as a value proposition worth five minutes of the real decision-maker's time.

    This isn't only a training-center problem

    I've seen the same pattern play out inside corporate offices, again and again, just with different job titles standing in for "lecturer" and "HOD." A manager pitches a new process to a peer who says, "let me check with my reporting manager" — and the idea disappears into a black hole because the reporting manager, too, needs someone else's sign-off, and nobody ever traces the chain all the way up to the person who can actually commit budget or change policy.

    I train leaders and working professionals across sectors — from the Indian Army and BRO to RBI, BARC and JSW — and one thing is constant everywhere: every organization has a formal hierarchy on the letterhead, and a real one that operates underneath it. The formal hierarchy tells you titles. The real one tells you who actually moves things. Political awareness is the skill of reading the second one, not just the first.

    This matters even more in India's business landscape, where relationships, trust, and informal influence often carry as much or more weight than designation. A junior person with the ear of the owner can move faster than a senior manager who has never built that relationship. Recognizing this isn't cynicism — it's simply seeing the organization as it actually functions, rather than as the org chart claims it functions.

    How to find the real decision-maker before you pitch

    Before your next proposal, ask three questions. Who actually signs off on the budget or resource this requires — not who reviews it, who signs it? Who has the authority to override a "no" from the person in front of you — because if a "yes" from your contact can be reversed by someone above them, your contact isn't the decision-maker. And who do people in the room quietly defer to when something unusual comes up — because in every meeting, there's a moment where all eyes flick, even briefly, to the person whose opinion actually settles the matter.

    Once you know who that person is, political savvy takes over: build a relationship with them before you need something, make your proposal easy to say yes to by tying it to what they already care about, and don't be afraid to go direct when the direct route respects everyone's time more than the roundabout one does.

    Psychologist Daniel Goleman, whose work first popularized emotional intelligence in the West, includes social awareness — reading the room, the organization, the unspoken currents around you — as a core EQ competency. Political awareness is that same skill, sharpened for the specific terrain of Indian workplaces, where hierarchy, relationships and cultural nuance all shape who really holds the pen.

    The lesson

    The training center's workshop wasn't rejected. It was never actually seen by anyone who could approve it. That's a subtly different and, in some ways, more frustrating failure — because it means the idea was good enough, the effort was real, and the only thing missing was an accurate map of where the power actually sat.

    Political awareness won't replace a good idea. But without it, even your best ideas will keep dying quietly in meetings with people who were only ever going to say, "let me check and get back to you." Learn to find the principal, not just the lecturer — and you'll find that doors you thought were closed were simply never knocked on by the right hand.

    If you're building this skill in your team, it pairs closely with the concepts I cover in corporate training on workplace effectiveness and in my signature leadership programs — where we work through real organizational maps, not just theory.

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    Avinash Chate

    TEDx Speaker · Founder, The Future Corporate · Author of Stars at India Inc.

    Avinash has trained the Indian Army, BRO, RBI, BARC, JSW Steel and 1000+ corporate leaders across India. His work focuses on leadership, emotional intelligence and behavioural training rooted in Indian values and modern business needs.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is political awareness at the workplace?

    Political awareness means understanding how power actually works inside an organization — who holds real decision-making authority, how relationships and hierarchy shape outcomes, and where the formal org chart differs from the informal one. It is the seventeenth trait on the EQ side of the Winning Kite and is essential for getting proposals approved and building influence.

    Why did the training center's workshop proposal fail?

    The owner pitched the regular lecturers, who said they would 'check with the HOD' — but neither the lecturers nor the HOD had the authority to approve it. The real decision-maker was the principal or owner of the college. Because the proposal never reached the person who could actually say yes, it died quietly in the middle of the hierarchy.

    How do you identify the real decision-maker in an organization?

    Ask who signs off on budget, who can override a 'no' from someone below them, and who has been in the seat long enough to actually use their authority. Titles help, but observe who people quietly defer to in meetings — that person, not the org chart, usually reveals where the real decision sits.

    Is political awareness the same as office politics?

    No. Office politics usually means manipulation or backstabbing for personal gain. Political awareness is a form of emotional intelligence — reading power structures accurately so you can work within them honestly, get real decisions made faster, and avoid wasting effort on people who cannot say yes.

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