In her new book “Secrets of the Career Game: 36 Simple Strategies to Win in the Workplace,” career coach Kendall Berg reveals a range of strategies for taking control of our careers that combine pushing for bigger promotions, titles, and paychecks, but also finding work that fulfills.
Her take has sparked more than half a million followers across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube who are trying to get ahead at work and be happy.
I asked Berg to share some insights. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation.
Kerry Hannon: What’s the key to success in the career game?
Kendall Berg: It’s choosing intentionally and strategically where you want to play the game, how you want to play, and when to not play the game. There are times in our career when it might be more beneficial to do something for our progression, but it crosses a value line that we have, or a boundary that we have.
How is a career a game?
It’s a lot like chess, where there are moves and counter moves, rules and no rules. When my husband and I first got married, he decided to teach me to play chess. He conveniently left out a lot of the rules that would've helped me win.
Your career operates similarly, where there are some rules that you’re told: Here's your job description. Here are the expectations for you to be successful. Here are the deliverables. Here are your deadlines.
But there's a whole other set of rules that you only learn by playing, which is not how hard you work. It’s who you are building relationships with, how you advocate for yourself, how you talk about the work you do.
If you take the first job offer that you get every time you are searching, regardless of how it matches your passions, skills, or values, the only person who gets held back is you. If you stay loyal to a company that doesn’t promote you or give you opportunities for growth, the only person who ends up stuck is you.
There’s one crucial rule that’s common to both chess and the career game: Even when you start off as a pawn, it’s possible to become the queen — the most valuable piece on the board.
You write that career progression rarely depends on merit all by itself. Elaborate on that.
Most of us think that our careers are going to be a straight meritocracy. We're going to go to work, do our tasks, and that alone is going to be enough for us to get promoted.
But it's not true. Progressing in your career is not about the merit of doing your core job, it's about developing the right soft skills to be an effective leader.
We have tunnel vision. I see it all the time: Individuals who are working hard on a million different projects, increasing their mental load and stress levels exponentially, only for their leadership to be blissfully unaware.
