How to play the corporate game

what is the corporate game and why is it important to know not only the Rules of Engagement but how to play the game effectively so the reality of corporate is that it is not the straight meritocracy that we sometimes wish that it was what I mean by this is that doing your job doing your job well doesn't always matter we've all experienced seeing that one person who gets promoted even though it is inexplicable to us they don't have the experience they don't put in the hours and they don't try as hard as us or many of our peers so when those sorts of things happen it's easy to question how fair the corporate game really is ultimately it's not just the Merit of the work that you do that determines your promotability or even your raises what's more important than just the work that you do is your ability to advocate for yourself and showcase that work if nobody knows you're doing all of the hard work Suddenly It's significantly less important to the company the game itself can be interpersonal it can be political or it can be reputational it takes place in a lot of different ways and you may not encounter it in your career at all as you move through Junior and entry level positions you may not even see the game until you make middle management or even upper management but the reality is that the game does exist and if you have goals and objectives for your career it is critical to learn how to play the game and to play it well now that we all know what the game is let's talk about five ways to improve your gamesmanship so to speak so the first tip is that you need to have an objective you need to have a goal that you are trying to accomplish and this is going to be important for three separate reasons first reason is that without a goal it is difficult to be successful or to measure your own success what I mean by that is if you don't know what level of seniority you're trying to get to what industry you're trying to break into or what type of job you're looking to have it's really difficult to feel intrinsically that you're achieving the things you want to achieve in your life it's also hard for you to advocate for yourself for you to partner with your leadership or refer you to make the Right Moves to ultimately get you where you want to be making strategic choices for your career is critical this doesn't always mean job hopping or moving up seniority levels but this could mean taking a lateral move in order to learn a skill that you're going to need or to get exposure to something that's going to come in handy as you progress in the direction that you want lastly it's critical to have a goal so that you can inform your leaders and your manager it is hard for them to make the changes that you want to see if they don't know what you're trying to accomplish I find that Managers generally are very receptive to promotion conversations and progression as long as they have advanced notice it's really hard to walk into your performance review and say if I don't get promoted today I'm leaving a lot of the time they don't even have the power to make that happen even if they wanted to so what becomes really important is communicating with them in advance hey I'm looking to get promoted in the next three to six months I want to make sure that I'm showcasing the right competencies and level of work what is it that you would need to see for me for us to make this feasible it is a partnership when you're looking to progress to the next level tip number two is learning to build maintain and repair relationships with the people you work with so when it comes to building relationships you're going to want to very intentionally build relationships with the people on your influencer list if you're not familiar with the influencer list go back and listen to episode one where we talk about self-advocacy but basically to summarize it is identifying the people around you either more senior or laterally who have the most impact on your potential career and reviews once you identify the individuals who are going to be important as you navigate your job then you want to build strong relationships with them on the basis of both what you do at work and a personal level the second thing is going to be maintaining relationships with those individuals it's very easy as you start to work to get caught up in the day-to-day we all have a million priorities and lots of things that we want to work on so it becomes really important to intentionally reach out and build those ongoing relationships with the people around you this might mean setting quarterly meetings with people you don't interact with very often weekly meetings with your direct leadership or even a different Cadence if it makes sense for you and the individual with whom you're working the last thing is to repair relationships and this is where I see so many of my clients and my peers really struggle if you have an issue with a specific individual there is some amount of personal responsibility to address that the ways that I find you can do this most effectively is to have a one-on-one conversation with that person hey I've noticed we're working together a lot on various projects I want to make sure that I'm able to work with you effectively is there something that you'd like to see for me to ensure we can both be successful you don't have to come out and address the issue with direct criticism but make sure that you're taking steps to build that one-on-one relationship that's going to allow you to be able to do your job if somebody is a roadblock for your own performance at the end of the day it's really difficult to sit there with your leadership and point the finger and say well that person didn't help me take ownership of the situation resolve some interpersonal conflict and then be ready to execute your job at a really high level tip number three is learning to really advocate for yourself we talked a lot about this in episode one so I won't spend too much time but there are a few things still left to touch on the first thing you should be doing in advocacy is you should be informing sharing and then over sharing it's easy to believe that your manager should know what great work you're working on what you've delivered and what you've accomplished but the reality of the situation is a lot of the time we're all stuck in our own heads with our own priority list and whatever's going on with us and we're not necessarily paying attention even if you have a great leader it's possible that some of the work that you're doing is getting lost in the shuffle so it's important to constantly be over communicating the work that you're doing in partnership with communicating what the work is it's really important to articulate the impact of that work are you improving customer experience are you making teams more efficient Are you delivering financials in a way that is more insightful and actionable make sure that you articulate not only the work that you do but why it is important to the business additionally make sure that you're communicating clearly what you need from others this can be peer groups that you work with this can be your leaders or the people who report to you but if you're having a hard time stating your needs in a way that allows them to be successful against your expectations you're not only hurting them and their performance but you're hurting yourself make sure you're always upfront and forthright with what you're going to need to be successful this becomes especially important if your boundary setting nobody wants to work 100 120 hours a week it's obscene please don't do it but an important part of that is being able to tell your manager why you can't do that hey I'd love to take on this new project in order to do that I'm going to need to de-prioritize some other work or I'm going to need to extend the deadline by communicating clearly what you need from your leadership what kind of decisions they need to make you not only set better boundaries for yourself but you allow them to understand a little more clearly what trade-offs are being made and the last thing is give yourself credit and others too so if you're working on a collaborative project which is what most of us do most of the time you definitely don't want to be that person who steals credit from other people however you should definitely be taking credit for the components of the work that you are delivering I always think of having my cake and you eating it too so on this project I was able to work successfully with the marketing team I developed the reporting and strategy for which customers were going to attract and then the marketing team stepped in and was really helpful with coming up with strong creatives so that we could penetrate the market give yourself credit and give it to others too tip number four is draw from your experiences I hate to have to talk about this I wish it wasn't the case but my goal is always to give you guys tactical real world applicable advice and the reality of the situation is not everybody in corporate is going to be out to support you as you interact with people it is important to learn which individuals might be career limiting either because they would steal credit from you they would bad mouth you they would gossip or they may potentially tell leadership things that are untrue these people exist in every workplace that I have ever been in and they will continue to exist for the rest of time as you begin to interact with the individuals around you it is important to realize which people you should maybe hold back from the second component of learning which people is learning how to protect yourself and this is where we're going to introduce a cya and a cya is cover your bottom and it's important because there will always be people in situations where it is important to look out for yourself what I mean by this isn't that you should go around badmouthing other individuals or that you should go to your boss and complain instead if you're interacting with someone who you know will generally steal credit for you each time that you interact with that person send an email to your boss after hey wanted to let you know I act together with Jane and we had a really productive conversation I recommend we make some small changes to the marketing content but she had some really great suggestions about how we address the campaign itself I think we ended up coming up to a really good solution I'm excited to see how it rolls out it's more of an FYI for your leadership but that way if Jane goes behind your back and tries to take credit for the work your boss knows what actually happened it's kind of a subtle way of protecting yourself against being taken advantage of this could also be true if there's somebody who you know bad-mouths others or talks about about leadership if it gets to the point that it makes you uncomfortable it's important to inform your boss of the situation hey I noticed that Daniel has a tendency to really talk about a lot of other people on the team I'm concerned about how that will affect Morale on the project is there anything you think I should be doing to help mitigate the situation make it actionable and something that your boss can actually give feedback about while informing them of what's happening this is another way that you're going to see why a the fifth and final tip today is going to be all about building your personal reputation in the workplace it is important to build up a level of trust and follow through you want the individuals that you work with to know that they can trust in you to complete your work by deadlines and to meet the expectations of the team or of your leadership this becomes important not only when trying to progress or trying to get to the next level or a different division but it also becomes important with just your everyday interactions if you build a poor reputation for yourself as being untrustworthy or unable to deliver things it will eventually get around to the point where you won't have any growth opportunities so make sure that you're building a strong foundation on which people know that they can come to rely on you the second piece of this is that if you're in a management position you should be protecting the people on your team and this sounds a little bit dramatic but in the end if you have Junior people who report to you who are supporting you through a variety of functions your job is not to go to them and complain about company Direction senior leadership decisions changes that are being made your job is to protect them from things that are going to ultimately become roadblocks escalations are going to affect their General perception of the work that they do you are a supporter and you are there really as an intermediary between them and everyone else my team always jokes that if someone is mean to me I can take it with Grace if someone is mean to my team all bets are off it is worth it to be known and have a reputation for not only building a strong team but for the people on your team feeling protected and valued in their space last piece is going to be to build others up so this isn't necessarily just the people on your direct team or who report to you but when someone has a good idea or they come up with a good solution they should be given affirmation and Accolade for that and whether you are their leader or not it is important to recognize the hard work that's being done so where you can always be there to promote others to share their great work and to make sure that the people around you feel like if they come to you it's going to be a good experience that's ultimately going to build a really strong relationship for you that's going to allow you to do a lot of different things a lot of people don't know but if you're trying to move even laterally within a company odds are the hiring manager is going to call your boss they may even call peers that you work with and ask what your reputation is and what you're known for building a strong reputation opens so many doors and so many opportunities in the future both to move up and to move side to side I hope that you guys found these five tips really helpful for how to play the game and navigate the corporate workplace

Channel: That Career Coach - Kendall Berg

Views: 64,333

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Id: rOwwv3lEdk8

Length: 14min 51sec (891 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 05 2023