Game of Careers - NeoStrategy

“Fortune does favor the bold and you’ll never know what you’re capable of if you don’t try.” -Sheryl Sandberg

The intention of this course is not to preach, but to share my experiences of both doing and not doing the right things, and to express my observations of the corporate world in general. There are hundreds of books on career management and management in general. Everyone is bored with them. So I touched only upon the essentials and presented them in as interesting a manner as I could. In The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, there is a paragraph which talks about why it is important to pick work that you enjoy.

It is as follows:
“”But you see,” said Roark quietly, “I have, let’s say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I’ve chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I’m only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.”
 

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” -Benjamin Franklin

I believe that in the future the key principles of playing a great game will remain the same. However the requirements of every “job”, in every career and in every field, will change dramatically in the rapidly evolving digital era. Although the scoring model will remain the same, each CSQ index will have to be recalculated to keep pace with changing demands.

You will not be able to operate using the same old tricks. You won’t be able to play simply by “managing” things. The CSQ index will have new key players like deep expertise, innovation, adaptability, speed, etc. I’m certain that the coming era will be one of specialists. For example, the skill of “general management” will certainly be replaced by “deep expertise”.

No career will ever be immune to change. This is why you need to visualize how your chosen career is evolving and predict the direction in which it will move. It would be wise for you to calculate your Future CSQ for what your career will look like over time, and accordingly, work toward acquiring and building new key skills. Then you will be able to move at much greater speed and prevent yourself from being disposable in the coming decades. You shouldn’t be caught unawares like other blissfully ignorant people when entire careers get eliminated from the picture. Yes, there are many such careers, and only those jobs which can’t be automated and replaced by technology will survive.

“Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Now that you have been introduced to the 11 players and understand their roles, you should be in a much better position to calculate your CSQ score. Do it now if you haven’t already. Once you do, come back to this section. How did you fare? If you scored well, then congratulations. But if you didn’t, then do you understand why you didn’t and have a better picture of the way forward? I think you are mature enough to know what to do. Nonetheless, I will give you two broad ways in which you can progress:

1. You can try to improve on your players (skills). This is the common management theory or personality development pitch. But I have some reservations about it. I agree that some things can be learnt over time and with practice. But others can be very difficult to learn, not because they involve complex concepts and calculations, but because they clash with your hard-wired nature. They are not difficult per se, but difficult for your personality. Let’s take the skills of marketing your work or alignment. Some people just cannot do this because they feel it would conflict with their value or belief system too greatly. For this reason they may not even be willing to improve their CSQ scores if required.

2. If you are one of those people and you cannot improve certain skills to the desired level, all you can do is look for the right pitch. The right pitch could be a better suited role or division within the same company, a job at a different company, or even a new career choice if your core strengths and skills warrant it.

I personally believe that at any stage of your career, if you focus on your core strengths, you move ahead, but not if it’s not the right pitch. Finding the right pitch is not always easy, and requires some experimentation. If you are unwilling to experiment, then most probably there are some fears holding you back. If that is you, then it is important that you first learn how to romance with fear.

“The point is that when it comes to friendships and mentorships, you give what you get.” -George Ilian

Out of all the 11 players or factors, this is the one that is probably the most important but is rarely spoken about or taught.

Mentors play a crucial role in any career journey. Take any line of work- arts, entertainment, technology, politics, sports or business- and you will find a highly influential mentor behind every successful person in the arena. In fact, all great achievers will list their mentors as one of the top reasons they could set themselves apart from the competition. Yet, for reasons I don’t understand completely, it is not taken to be of very great importance in the corporate environment. It may be this way because most realize the importance of good mentorship very late in their careers, by when it’s too late to build a strong relationship or derive much guidance as a result of it. Another reason may be that people make the mistake of thinking they know everything when they progress far enough in their careers. Finally, good mentors are so hard to come by, that they are treated as state secrets by people who are lucky enough to have them.

I know that most corporates have some kind of mentoring program or the other. But I am not talking about those mentors who exist because of some process of compliance within the system. I am talking about the kind of mentors with whom you could have a really good friendship and who are genuinely interested in your growth. You would be really lucky to get such a mentor in the normal course of affairs. Most often you will have to work hard to find someone who is good. But if you manage to get one very early in your career, then I can guarantee you that you will outshine your competition. Why is it that mentorship is so effective? It’s because your mentor will guide you through the optimal path of success, which they would have learnt from experience. It will save you a lot of time and tears to learn from their mistakes.

Although your mentor can be from outside the organization, it is always better if they are from inside, as every organization and its practices can be fairly unique. So do your career a massive favor and find a great mentor if you don’t have one. It will take time, but once you find them, you will thank me.

“The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.” -Plato

The biggest complaint I hear about the corporate world is that “corporates are full of politics”. But the truth is that politics is everywhere. If there are more than two people involved, there is scope for politics. It starts from the level of your family and goes all the way up to the international level. Why then do we crib only about workplace or corporate politics? I think the biggest reason for this is that we idealize the corporate world. The expectation is that we will be rewarded purely on merit and hard work. But this will never happen. Period. It is up to you to make your peace with this.

This is a good point to define what politics means in the corporate context. One of the definitions for politics in the Oxford Dictionary of English (OUP, 2010) is “activities aimed at improving someone’s status or increasing power within an organization”. I think this fits our understanding of workplace politics well. Now depending upon your own value system, you can project the activity in question as good or bad. But remember that this is all relative.

Politicking, or playing politics is an art and not a simple skill you can learn from a book. That’s why not everyone will be good at it. Most people will claim to dislike it but will indirectly engage in it when the need arises and give a different name to it. I suggest you overcome your aversion for it and learn to get better at it. At the very least, you should know how to avoid becoming a pawn in someone else’s dame. But some people are pure souls and they really can’t get themselves to do it. Others are savvy politicians and actually love it. Most often, most people will do it when they see the need for it.

So the bottom line is that you should expect politics as a normal part of the game, and not become emotional about it.

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.” -W. C. Fields

“I am very good at my job and work very hard, but my manager promoted Srinivas. He doesn’t have good technical skills. He only talks and flatters my manager. But all these companies are like this. They don’t recognize hard working people like me.”

“There is too much politicking in my company. Here people only survive by aligning with their bosses. I hate it that the main focus is alignment and not results. It is very difficult to get ahead without political maneuvering. But I don’t like politics and I can never be like my coworkers.”

“I work at a multinational corporation. My manager, and the other people in my team should recognize my good work. But here it is all about networking skills and marketing yourself. My networking skills are not great and I don’t like to boast. Why should I have to market my work if it’s good?”

Do you have a story like this? I’m sure you do and know of many others who do too. Although selecting an addictive career and knowing your strengths are fundamental, they alone aren’t sufficient to win the corporate game. Actually, most people have no idea what will be required of them, especially when they are just starting their careers. When I entered the corporate sector I certainly had no clue what I needed to do in order to be successful and continue to rise within my organization. I was told, and I believed, that if I had good “technical” skills and was hard-working then I would “grow” easily.

This was indeed the case for the first few years. Afterwards I learnt that this wasn’t enough and I needed to have team management skills as well. Fast forward a couple more years, I was told that I needed to “align” with the right people, “sell” my work, etc. Then came the need for networking and politics, and finally, power plays. None of these are inherently good or bad. Like it or not, these are just the essential skills you have to learn if you want to win the game.

Let me use the game of cricket as an analogy here. You need 11 players to play and each of those 11 players are crucial to forming a winning team. Similarly, in the game of careers, there are 11 key players:

1. Technical competency
2. Hard work
3. People skills
4. Networking
5. Marketing your work
6. Personal Branding
7. Politicking
8. Alignment
9. Mentorship
10. Strategic thinking
11. Power plays

Just like in cricket, your players need to be carefully selected for pitch conditions. But what could be the pitch conditions of your corporate career? Among other individual factors, they are your corporate sector, company culture, job title, seniority and level of experience in the corporate world. How do you calculate your score at any stage of the game? This is where what I call the Career Success Quotient (CSQ) comes in. Your CSQ is quite simply your score as a percentage of the maximum, winning CSQ score of 100. The closer you get to 100, the better are your chances of winning at your career.

It is all actually very simple. Let me explain. Say you are 5 years in, in your career. In those early years, what is required and expected in any field is technical competency and the ability to work hard to deliver results. So each of those factors have a 50% weight towards the total score of 100. Depending on how good you are at your job and how hard you are working, you can know your score. Life is very easy right? Now let us assume that you have 5-10 years of experience. You will be expected to be good at a few more things like people management and networking. So the overall score gets distributed across these four factors based on importance.

Slowly, the interesting parts of the game begin. Observe how the relative weightage changes in the table above once you are in the 10- 15 years and 15-20 years brackets. The game becomes much more complex. You need to have the ability to market your work, build a personal brand (people need to know who you are), and manage internal politics. Most importantly, you need to “align” with your boss, your boss’s boss and with the culture of the organization in general.

The game changes even more radically when you get to the senior- most positions. It becomes very intense because the talents that are required are rare and not everyone can play the game at this level. That’s why very few can get to the top. Did you know notice the 180 degree shift as you went along from the start to the end, in terms of what is required to win? Don’t look at any of these factors- whether alignment, politics or power plays- in the negative shade. This is just how things work on the ground.

In every field, even ones as distinct as sports, entertainment, politics, and business, there are different kinds of players (talents) required, based on the pitch and the stage of the game. The framework I’ve presented to you is not meant to be an exact science. Don’t worry too much about how to score yourself- just use it as a rough guide. You will have to come up with a suitable CSQ table for your career and derive your score. What are the benefits of putting all this work in to calculate your CSQ? Put simply, it will give you your career astrology. You will know why you are growing or not growing.

But not everyone has the focus, talents or insights required to win. In fact, few people actually care about the game beyond a certain stage of financial security. It all comes down to your own individual biology, psychology and philosophy of life. Nonetheless, I hope you get some clarity from your score.

“Hide not your talents, they for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade?” -Benjamin Franklin

On one occasion during my time as an account manager in the US, my client asked me for a DBA (database administrator). I didn’t have one, but I had a Java developer. So I tried to sell this person to my client, telling him how great he was, and how he could do DBA work as well. Finally, my client said jokingly: “Kishore, don’t try to fit Circles into Squares and Squares into Circles”.

I have never forgotten this phrase. The idea it conveys is very relevant to career selection and growth. If you try to fit even the most talented person into the wrong role, both the person and the work will suffer. If your career or your specific role within an organization does not match your core strengths, then it will just be a drag. But can you just imagine by how much? Think of how much of a visibly negative impact the wrong person has as the leader of a company or even a country. Then imagine the opposite- the right person in the right role. How many examples can you think of, of either type of situation? It is no different at a corporate. The right people will bring in exponentially greater returns for their work.

But how can you find your real talents and strengths? Most often you will know what they are based on gut instincts. In fact, life too has a way of showing you what you are good at. The main issue with this is that very often people confuse skills with talents. Skills come with practice. Talents are inherent. When you apply your talents to something, you get the highest returns with minimal efforts. A good sign that something is a talent is that you’ll find yourself wanting to use it more and more. Fortunately, now there are many scientifically-based assessments and tools available to find your core talents. You may have heard of tools like DISC, MBTI (Myers–Briggs Type Indicator) and Gallup’s StrengthsFinder. You could explore any tool you like. My personal favorite is the StrengthsFinder assessment as it has helped me identify my innate strengths with great detail and accuracy. Based on the insights generated by the use of these tools, even large organizations are transforming into “Strengths-Based Organizations”. Regardless of whether you are at the entry level or at a senior level in your organization, it will be of great benefit to you to know your core talents. This is really the key building block.

Strengths based individuals —> Strengths based organizations —> Strengths based nation

“Your love for your country is only in your work.” -Sudhir Mishra

What is the big deal, really, if you live with your accidental career and not pursue an addictive career? Life will still continue, right? The truth is that it will, but it will significantly impact the quality of your life and diminish how fulfilled you feel, how much you achieve and the impact you make on society. Apart from your personal wellbeing, it will also dramatically impact your nation’s progress and its economy.

I’m not personally very patriotic because I think it is just the combined feelings of pride, belonging and security on a large scale. It makes sense from the survival perspective which is OK. But suppose you are very passionate about your country and want to contribute to its progress, have you thought about how what you do will really contribute to your country’s development? What do you think is the best way to make a difference? Most often, we complain and crib, blaming politics, corruption, colonialism, etc. We think if we got rid of those problems, our country would be among the most developed. But in my view, we can transform any nation if the majority of its people get into addictive careers. Imagine if we had a 1000 Ambanis, Tendulkars, Modis, Rajamoulis, etc. Can you imagine how rapid and transformational our growth would be?

Why do you think that the US or any other advanced country has made significant progress? Do you think they are better because they have more natural resources or are blessed with some special powers? What do you think? I think it all boils down to freedom- the freedom of individuals to choose addictive careers. Period. Progress will naturally follow if you have even 10% (or far lesser!) of the population in addictive careers.

The bottom line is that pursuing an addictive career is good not just for you, but for your entire country. If you are patriotic, then instead of just talking about political issues, focus on getting into an addictive career.

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” -Confucius

How do people choose their careers? They might do so based on personal interests or skills, market demands, pay prospects, parents’ or others’ influence, family professional culture (as in business, doctor or lawyer families), etc. Unless you have a very good understanding of the career you want to pursue, picking one is very much a gamble and will later inevitably require adjustments or compromise. This is what happens when you fall into what I call an “accidental career”.

The closest analogy to this is an arranged marriage. In arranged marriages you or your parents find someone who looks suitable, you get married to them and then leave your fate to probability. You will end up with a suitable partner if you are very lucky person. If not, then you may get used to your not-so-suitable partner through various adjustments, and eventually get locked in the marriage due to obligations. If you get so frustrated that you feel like leaving your partner, but are afraid to take that step, you will continue half- or rather empty-heartedly. You will leave your partner only if the relationship is unbearable, no matter the obligations.

This is exactly how it is with accidental careers. The lucky few fall into the right career after a couple of tries, but the majority go through the cycle of adjustments and frustrations. If you get very frustrated, then you look for alternatives, but if you are afraid or have too many obligations, you are forced to continue. The result of this is an unfulfilling career and mediocre achievement.

Going back to the analogy of marriage, how do you think love marriages fare? At least here you would have made a conscious decision based on your preferences, values, etc. Hopefully you would have dated for a long enough period before marriage. You would know the other person to some extent. Hence the chances of good mutual understanding and a fulfilling life are higher. Similarly, if you select a career about which you feel passionately, you will probably continue to feel that passion, through ups and downs, for the rest of your career. This is the reason why almost every successful person, in every field, says that they feel great passion for what they do. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have be able to get the results they did. In fact, if you heard their life stories, you would say that most of these people are obsessed with what they do. This is the magic of pursuing what I call an “addictive career”. Addictive careers are highly rewarding and fuel outstanding achievement.

The point is not to get you to think about the relative advantages or disadvantages of arranged and love marriages. It is to get you to question yourself if you are living with an accidental career or leading with an addictive career. In the game of careers, the most important step is to understand the kind of career you currently have.

“A career path is rarely a path at all. A more interesting life is usual a more crooked, winding path of missteps, luck and vigorous work. It is almost always a clumsy balance between the things you try to make happen and the things that happen to you.” -Tom Freston

What is a career? I only knew about jobs. It was only after I’d spent a couple of years in my career that I began to understand what it was. Why is your career important? The obvious answers are that good ones give you money, recognition, the approval of society, etc. But for me, it is very important because your career is where you will end up spending the majority of your, happy or grumbling, active life.

This is why it is very important to understand the background and foreground elements of the career game. As the Indian economy grows, just like with other developing countries, more and more people will enter the corporate sector. Many factors come into the picture for a corporate aspirant such as career selection, planning, growth, exits and re-entries, power plays, etc. But did you know about these aspects before taking the plunge? I definitely didn’t. More importantly, did you select your career consciously or did your parents, relatives, or some “well wishers” select your career? If you are in the wrong career for you, you can forget about the rest of the elements. They won’t make any difference.