At the August WIT Forum, one piece of advice came from a mentor one of our panelists never forgot. Early in her career, someone told her: figure out who’s got the juice in your organization. Not who has the title. Who actually has the influence.
It’s a simple question, but our panelists spent a good part of the morning unpacking just how much career movement depends on getting the answer right, and how few people are ever taught to ask it in the first place.
The power in the room isn’t always the power on the org chart
One of the more practical threads from the discussion: the people who move careers forward aren’t always the ones with the most senior titles. They’re the ones who influence the decision-makers. Every table has someone sitting at it making decisions that affect your career, and often a few people around that table shaping those decisions before they’re ever made. If you don’t know who those people are, you’re not fully in control of your own trajectory, no matter how well you’re doing your job.
Watch for the people whose scope keeps growing
Panelists offered a concrete way to spot this in practice: pay attention to who keeps showing up with more responsibility, even when their title hasn’t caught up yet. Teams that quietly keep growing. Names that keep appearing in more rooms. That’s often the earliest visible signal of who’s gaining real influence in an organization, well before it’s reflected anywhere official. Finding those people, and understanding what they value and how they operate, was described as one of the more reliable ways to build the kind of relationship that eventually becomes sponsorship.
Small interactions can open big doors
One panelist shared a story that captured this well: someone reached out for a brief, 25-minute conversation, just to introduce himself and show what he’d been building with AI. That one interaction led to more visibility, more opportunities to present, and more exposure to senior leaders. The lesson wasn’t that you need a grand gesture or a polished pitch. It was that showing initiative in a small, genuine way, and making sure the right people know what you’re capable of, can move faster than years of quiet, heads-down work.
Look for common ground, not just common titles
The panel was candid about a real barrier here: it can feel harder to build these relationships across lines of difference, whether that’s race, background, or simply not knowing where to start. The advice wasn’t to force it. It was to look for genuine points of connection, shared interests, shared experiences, even something as ordinary as both being parents, and let the relationship build from there rather than assuming there’s nothing in common to start with.
This isn’t about playing games. It’s about paying attention.
It would be easy to hear “know who’s got the juice” and think it’s about corporate politics. What came through in the conversation was something more grounded: careers are shaped by relationships and visibility as much as by output, whether we acknowledge that system or not. Understanding who holds influence, and being intentional about how you build relationships with them, isn’t a workaround. It’s simply how the system actually works, and it’s advice every attendee in that room left able to act on immediately.
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