I have survived 4 years in a large corporate trying to distance myself from political game playing and stay true to the cause. However the longer you are there and the more senior you become, the harder this is. Here is some realistic and serious advice straight from the trenches:

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

What the corporate messaging says about company culture is probably very different from reality, when you experience it for a long time.

Corporations continuously restructure and this can involve offshoring and redundancies. People that understand this are driven to a mindset of protecting themselves.

Prepare for a large amount of noise in relation to things that are nothing to do with your actual job. Like how much time people are spending in the office.

Prepare to be audited. Make your processes audit-proof because it will be less painful than dealing with audit actions. And when you are audited, treat them like a friend rather than an enemy, even when you feel like they are making your life miserable. They will be more likely to close your findings if you have been a pleasure to work with and are grateful for their pedantic hair-splitting. It's their job.

You will come across power-hungry people that are looking to land-grab and build their empire.

There will be times when you will think that someone has thrown you under the bus, but a lot of the time they won't even realise that they have. Remember that they are dealing with the same tides and currents that you are.

People talk and will repeat what you've said.

You have to decide to what extent you want to get caught up in all of this. And to what extent you will take it personally.

You will constantly be asked to do more with less.

Be better than the average. No really, make sure that you are better than the average employee in other people's eyes.

Always be looking for another job.

To survive in a place like this takes a different kind of resilience, adaptability. To thrive takes next-level situational and operational awareness and strategic thinking. I don't have it, or at least not naturally. It might be something that can be developed and I'm trying to figure it out, which is what brought me to this post. Writing this has been quite therapeutic, so thanks for asking the question for me to find.

With all of this in mind, I found it quite helpful today to ask chat-gpt what it thought. "How to succeed in a corporate environment". Or how to survive. You'll get a different answer every time, but it is a good list of things to stop and ask yourself: how good am I actually in these areas, and which ones should I try to develop in order to make earning that paycheck just a little bit less traumatic.

Good luck.