Your Career Game

Rachel Salaman: And how is game theory used outside of the world of careers?

Nate Bennett: Well game theory has been used, as you mentioned in the introduction, in economics to understand rational decision making there, it has been used in politics to try to analyze things like the Cold War period and more recent political events. It's been used to try to understand competitive sports. The applications really are quite broad.

Rachel Salaman: And why is it relevant to someone who wants to grow their career?

Nate Bennett: We think it is important for someone who wants to grow their career because when you think about it, a career is a situation where you are interacting with lots of other players – your co-workers, your supervisor, your family members. These are all actors who have an impact on your decision making and if you can begin to think about your career and your career decisions, in a way that takes into account all of their interests, our argument is that you will make better decisions.

Rachel Salaman: Now some people think that that leads to behavior that could be seen as Machiavellian or somehow sneaky or cunning. Is that fair do you think?

Nate Bennett: It certainly can be used in a way to try to advance your own interests, in fact the point of game theory is to try to understand what the best way is to get the outcome that you want in a particular situation, so yes, the tool is intended to help you gain advantage over others, there's no question about it.

Rachel Salaman: So where does the boundary lie between using game theory positively and using it manipulatively in any sector?

Nate Bennett: Well I don't think it really is any different than it would be for any other decision making tool. The ethicality of the use of the tool is going to be situation dependent and individuals using this tool, just like they would be in using any other decision tool, have to be comfortable that they are not behaving in a way that is unprincipled and others have to be aware that the people with whom they are interacting may not be behaving ethically, so they of course need to be on the look out for that.

Rachel Salaman: How much does a person need to know about game theory in order to apply it to their career?

Nate Bennett: Well the good news is that our approach is to try to introduce some of the fundamental concepts in game theory and then show how they can be used to frame career decisions. As a result it doesn't require a deep understanding of game theory, in fact we made the argument that it would be very difficult to have such an application of game theory to your career because to do so requires that you can really measure well the values that others in your game place on different outcomes. So it is difficult to know, for example, how much your spouse would prefer that you were transferred to town A rather than town B. If you can't assign an objective value to that, you can't use game theory fully so what we're offering are some tools and frameworks from game theory that we think will help you reconfigure the way you think about career decisions and as a result allow you to be a little more strategic about them.

Rachel Salaman: Well before we look at some of the ideas in the book, it's worth talking a little about its structure because the book is full of in depth interviews with a wide range of successful professionals. What was the idea behind including those interviews?

Nate Bennett: We thought it would be interesting for the readers to see how the way successful individuals had approached their careers, actually illustrated some of the concepts we were applying from game theory, so while the individuals we spoke with wouldn't have claimed to have used game theory deliberately in making the career moves they'd made, it's clear from looking at what they've done that it fits this game theory framework.

Rachel Salaman: So what can we learn from the interviews then?

Nate Bennett: First of all I think the interviews by themselves are very interesting, we were really fortunate to have the opportunity to talk to such a wide range of people who have had so much success in their career but I think it also provides good illustrations for how these concepts, which may seem a little abstract to people, really do come into play.

Rachel Salaman: So we all might be using game theory anyway without knowing that we are?

Nate Bennett: Correct, you'd tend to be using it perhaps poorly.

Rachel Salaman: So playing a game, any game, is all about making moves of one kind of another and in your book you categorize career moves into three groups: incidental, instrumental and blunders. Could you explain what you mean by incidental moves?

Nate Bennett: Sure. Incidental moves are those that really do no more than fulfill your obligation to take a turn. It's a move that at best has the effect of incrementally advancing you toward your career goals.

Rachel Salaman: Could you just give me a brief example of that?

Nate Bennett: An example of an incidental move might be to volunteer to participate on a strategic planning committee, to take a turn sharing a task force, something like that. It's fulfilling an obligation that you experience as part of a group as opposed to something that really could be consequential for the business or for your career.

Rachel Salaman: What about instrumental moves, could you explain what these are?

Nate Bennett: Sure. An instrumental move is a move that takes you closer toward achieving your career game goal, so simply put an instrumental move is one that advances you towards your objective. We further describe instrumental moves as being either career defining or career refining. So a career defining move might be one that you only have a chance to make once or maybe twice in your career. It's sometimes hard to tell what is career defining without the benefit of hindsight but it is that move that really sets you apart from everyone else. Career refining moves are also instrumental but they tend to help you improve your position relative to others, to sharpen the story you are able to tell about your experience relative to others, so not as dramatic but just as purposeful as a career defining move.

Rachel Salaman: Could you share an example that illustrates that?

Nate Bennett: Sure, so one of the people we spoke to was Stevie Lapp who's at Microsoft now and he talked about the fact that relatively early in his career he had a chance to take the position as Chief Financial Officer for a company called Boston Chicken. It was something he felt completely unqualified to do. The company had confidence in him, he took the position, he experienced a great deal of success and it was something he felt really catapulted him forward in his career. We also talked to Muhtar Kent who's at Coke and he described how relatively early in his career he was given the opportunity to run the Eastern Europe region for Coca Cola and that that had been for him a career refining move and we talked to Ted Matheson of New York Live who talked about the fact that early in his career he had been given the opportunity – opportunity might be an odd word for it – to take over a terribly under-performing division of the company and his ability to turn that division around became career refining for him. That's something that he will be remembered for throughout his entire career and it is something that he will be able to leverage throughout his entire career.

Rachel Salaman: How do those examples illustrate game theory, moves within game theory, versus just general moves anyone might make as part of developing their career?

Nate Bennett: To understand how the moves illustrate game theory we have to think a little more broadly about the context in which the move was made, so each of these executives at the time they were confronted with this choice, this opportunity, had to take into account their career goals, they had to take into account what moves would be supported or blocked by others players in their game such as family members, co-workers, supervisors, leaders in the different companies they worked for and then they had to do some math to try to understand how each of the opportunities available to them at that time when thought about in that broader context would move them forward. Game theory would suggest that by taking all of this into account, you could understand which of the options available to them at that time was the most instrumental. It would be that move that moved them closer to their career goals.

Rachel Salaman: So is it about using a formula, when you talk about using math?

Nate Bennett: Game theory quickly becomes about math and to my earlier point, our experience has been that in the career game it's difficult to do the math because it's difficult to measure the things that need to be measured with precision but if you take an example, Muhtar Kent moved to Eastern Europe, if we just think about what would maximize his career he might have thought, right, that's the move that will maximize my career but if he failed to take into account whether or not the family would be supportive, as an example, he might over-estimate the degree to which that move really helped him because he might have gotten into a situation where while he maximized his outcome at Coke, he disrupted his family in such a way that it wasn't worth it.

Rachel Salaman: So it's about sitting down with a piece of paper and looking at all the players and what they might be thinking and where they might be moving?

Nate Bennett: Right. The first step we argue in using game theory, to understand your career, is to map out who are the players, so who are the other people who can impact your game. Once you understand who they are, you need to understand the options that are open to each of them, you need to understand their goals and then from that analysis you can start to ascertain where you might be able to expect co-operation from other players, where you might expect resistance from other players and perhaps where you might need to enlist some people who want to see you win so that they become supportive of your goal. So a quick example might help here: Imagine you are interested in a promotion at your company and you know that in order to put together a solid application for that promotion you are going to need a letter of recommendation, so you need to think about who should I get that letter from. The first thing to think about is your boss – your boss is one of the players in your game. What options does your boss have? Your boss can choose to support you, your boss can publicly support you but privately undercut you or your boss can oppose you, just to pick some simple options. Understanding that about your boss would help you know whether or not you wanted to approach him or her for a reference.

How would you know which of those options is most likely to be one that your boss would take? Well it begins by understanding what your boss's goals are. Does your boss want to have a reputation for developing talent and investing in people and mentoring them and making them stronger so that they are better contributors to the company? Or does your boss want to have a smooth running office where he or she doesn't really have to do a lot of work and as a result doesn't really want to have much turnover. So by understanding your boss's motives, what they want, you can start to think which option they might be more likely to use. If the boss wants a reputation for being a great mentor they would be proud to have you go forward into a more responsible position, so it creates a very different situation than the one faced by someone who has a boss whose concern really is about minimizing disruption in their work group and who as a result isn't going to support someone.

Rachel Salaman: And you suggest going through that analysis with all the different players in the scenario?

Nate Bennett: That's correct and certainly you need to at some point draw a boundary because there will be people who could potentially impact your career game but they are so distal that the impact is probably not going to be great, otherwise you could get lost in the planning and actually never make a decision.

Rachel Salaman: Now the other kind of move I was going to ask you about is blunders. That sounds like something that should just be avoided.

Nate Bennett: Blunders themselves are three types: career distracting, career limiting or career ending. You're correct that clearly career ending blunders are to be avoided, certainly all three kind of blunders are to be avoided but career ending are certainly much more dramatic in their effect. I think an interesting example that's playing out currently is Martha Stewart. Martha Stewart was found guilty of insider trading offenses some years ago, really when she was overseeing a multi business and very profitable enterprise. When she was indicted, some people thought that was the end of Martha Stewart, when she was sent to prison some people thought that was the end of Martha Stewart. People were quick to say that that insider trading scandal was a career ending event but it became clear pretty quickly that no, it was career limiting. It didn't end her career but it certainly was going to dampen her ability to make the most of her opportunity. Over time, I think now she is back, back in charge of her company, it is really clear that it was just a distraction for a few years. It still remains a blunder but it certainly hasn't ended her career.

Rachel Salaman: So how does game theory play into that?

Nate Bennett: We're using these terms to describe the impact of a move on a career. I think that to the individual who is in the midst of a career decision, it is pretty clear that they want to avoid blunders, that's straightforward. I think the more important realization for someone who is interested in advancing their career is to not mistake incidental moves for instrumental moves so someone who throughout their career devotes their attention to making a series of incidental moves is basically saying that in their career game they are happy with very modest, very incremental advancement. People who are willing to try and identify and then figure out how to execute instrumental moves are the people who are going to see a discontinuity, a real leap ahead in their ahead in their career. You can't leap ahead through a series of incidental moves, you can only leap ahead if you identify some instrumental moves to me and I'm not saying that one or the other is preferable, right, but the player gets to make the choice about what sort of career they make, but if they don't ever try to seek and then execute one of these career defining sorts of moves, their progress will be slow.

Rachel Salaman: In the book you emphasize the importance of mentoring in the career game. Can you expand on this and explain how it fits in with game theory?

Nate Bennett: We think mentors play a tremendously important role in an individual's career game and while a lot has been written about mentoring, we don't think it has encouraged people to be strategic enough about how mentors are leveraged. In terms of how they fit in the career game, one of the things that we emphasize in this approach is understanding who are the other players who care about you and who want to see you win and as a result will be supportive of you. To us that is pretty much a textbook definition of a mentor so mentors really are critical in the career game, at least the way we frame it.

We think one of the things individuals need to do to be a little more strategic about the way they use mentors is to understand how what they need from a mentor is different at different stages of their career and so as a result, the sort of person you seek out as a mentor needs to be different. Early in your career what you really want is sort of the wise veteran, someone who understands the company, someone who understands the politics, someone who really knows how work gets done at the company. They understand the unofficial but important organizational chart that lies behind the official organizational chart. This is somebody who may not necessarily be the most connected in the organization but they understand the terrain and as a result can be a really, really good advisor to you.

Mid-career, what you need from a mentor is a little bit different because mid-career now you've got your feet under you, you're beginning to develop some reputation in your profession or in your company and what you need is somebody who you can hitch your wagon to and really leverage because this is where you're going to begin to have an opportunity for rapid advancement. So here you need someone who is politically connected, who is well thought of in the organization and who is going places, so that they can pull you along with them.

And then finally, late in your career when you are near the top of an organizational chart, what you really need the most from a mentor is someone who will be a truth teller. People who are near the top of organizations can't really help but be surrounded by people who constantly agree with them, support them, remind them about how impressive they are when what's really needed is somebody who is not afraid to confront you, to challenge you and to do so aggressively so that again clearly requires a different sort of individual who is probably in a different sort of place than the mentor who helped you get to the top of an organization.

Rachel Salaman: Now one quite unusual idea that you promote in your book is taking a job for which you are uniquely unqualified and you say that can be a springboard for big career gains. Could you explain that seemingly contradictory concept?

Nate Bennett: It's a concept that was brought to our attention by a number of the executives we talked to. They used different labels for it but that uniquely unqualified one is the one that's stuck with us because we thought it was the most intriguing way to frame it. In each case, what the executive is describing is a situation where they had an opportunity really to be tossed in the deep end of the pool into a place they really didn't think they were ready to be but people in the company who were older and wiser and more experienced and as a result were in a position to better understand what truly these executives were capable of, had confidence in them. So they felt it was a safer bet to advance them into this position than in fact the executives themselves thought it was. So that's what it means to take a position you are uniquely unqualified for, it's one that you don't quite feel comfortable with but where there are impactful people surrounding you who do think you can do it and who are going to support you and who want to see you be successful. It creates a situation for an executive that is incredibly energizing because there is a clear sense that the spotlight's on and this is a special opportunity and that you really need to do everything you can to make the most of it.

Rachel Salaman: Another unusual idea comes in the section about using your network for career purposes and you say that weak ties in your network are better than strong ties, how is that?

Nate Bennett: This is an idea that has been floating around research in sociology for some time but it somehow has not really transferred over into the business lexicon. The issue with strong ties is that they tend to be redundant with one another so just to back up a little bit, strong ties are those that involve a connection between individuals that is based on a number of different dimensions of a relationship, so it's the people who you work with, who you are also friends with, who you also do social stuff with, who you also went to the same university with and so on and so forth. Weak ties are those that are, it's the term that's used to describe relationships that are not nearly as multi-faceted or not nearly as intense, they're more casual sorts of relationships. As a result, what you have in a strong tie network are a number of people who are really intimately connected with one another but there is very little variety in that network. Weak ties essentially get you in to a whole different network, people who went to other universities, people who have experience at other colleges, people who are friends with entirely different groups of individuals.

So if you think about leveraging your network this is advice that people get all the time when they are interested in trying to accelerate their career, leverage your network. Our point is that the people with whom you have strong ties aren't providing new opportunity, where you are going to have new opportunity is by trying to build and then leverage some weak ties. This will get you connections to new people, new opportunities and so on.

Rachel Salaman: In the book you talk about the importance of career agility in the context of the career game, can you explain what that is?

Nate Bennett: Career agility refers to someone's ability to climb the organizational hierarchy quickly, so just as an agile person would be quicker to scale a wall, an agile career game player is quicker to scale an organizational chart. We think the primary contributor to an individual's agility is the degree to which they have been able to build portable skills so investing in the sorts of skills that can help you not only in the position you are in now but in the position you are likely to occupy next, makes a lot of sense. Developing those skills will help you be more agile.

We also think that understanding the game is the key to agility, understanding what next moves makes sense will help you play the game in a more agile way and you learn that by watching others who have played before you. So what's worked for other players? Can you practice the sorts of behaviors that would help you make those moves? Finally we think that agility is also improved when you can tell a great story about how the work you've done to date has prepared you to take on this next challenge. It is a way of marketing yourself to the decision makers who are going to select the next individual for a position. The better your story to them, the more likely you are going to be given the opportunity.

Rachel Salaman: Do you think there is any danger that applying game theory to your career could turn you into a bit of a cynic, always trying to second guess and get the better of colleagues rather than focusing on let's say delivering excellent work or being a good team member?

Nate Bennett: I think what game theory tries to help you do is understand what is really important. It helps you understand what truly is the factor that will help you have career success so if you work in an organization where what's clearly rewarded is delivering excellent service, there is nothing about a game theory approach that would not encourage you to do that. If you work in an organization where the quality of your work doesn't matter at all and all that matters is how well you play politics, then game theory will help you play politics so game theory isn't about creating the rules, it's about understanding the rules and then playing well by them.

Rachel Salaman: Does it help you with team work, because it sounds like something that is almost anti team work?

Nate Bennett: That is really a very interesting question. My quick answer would be that I could see it going either way and I think what would determine the way it went was how the team's task was structured. You have actually pointed to something that I think really is kind of an interesting flaw in a lot of the way teams are practiced in organizations, so to give you a quick answer is if what's rewarded at the end of the day is individual performance, I could see how someone might be able to use game theory to make sure that in their team work what really looked great was their individual contribution. This is the rub because organizations love to tout team work as a great way to get things done but at the end of the day they tend to do performance appraisal of individuals, they tend to give promotions to individuals, they tend to give merit pay raises to individuals and those realities are counter to team work.

However, if a company structured a team's task in a way that really made it so that those individuals had no choice but to depend on each other, OK, the only way this team is going to succeed is if we can absolutely positively trust each other, then again it's back to the rules are not set by game theory, the rules are set by the company. Now how would someone using game theory play? They'd make sure they did everything they needed to do to support the team because that's the only way that they would get what they want out of the situation.

Rachel Salaman: Do you think you have to have a particularly strategic mindset to be able to use any of these ideas successfully?

Nate Bennett: I think game theory will help you develop a more strategic mindset. I think what you need to have in regard to a motivation to use game theory is simply a desire to experience success in your career.

Rachel Salaman: Nate Bennett, thank you very much for joining me.

Nate Bennett: It was a pleasure, thanks for the opportunity.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Nate's book again is "Your Career Game: How Game Theory Can Help You Achieve Your Professional Goals," co-authored by Stephen Miles, and there is more information at their website, www.yourcareeergame.com.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another expert interview, until then goodbye.