The Rules Change But the King Stays the King: Navigating the Career Game Stack

“What’s the most powerful piece on the chessboard?”

This was a question posed to me by one of my favorite sounding boards and coaches. She was helping me work through a professional crossroads quite a while ago.

And it was an easy question. I love a chess metaphor.

“The Queen,” I answered confidently.

Of course the Queen’s the most powerful. She’s got all the moves. No one can do what the Queen does.

“No, the Queen is the most talented,” she responded patiently. “That’s not the same thing.”

Insert record scratch sound.

Huh? What was this crazy talk? The most talented is the most powerful, right? The one who’s most talented wins. At least that’s what someone who’s spent their career winning creative awards and client pitches would think.

But no, insisted my friend.

“The Queen might have all the talent, but she has the same job as every pawn on the board…to protect the King. The only way to win is if the King wins. It’s the King’s board, and every piece on the board is there to do the work that helps him win.”

Wow. That little insight lodged itself right in my gut. I was staring down a truth I hadn’t looked at before. At that time in my life, I was a Queen on quite a few gameboards. But I wasn’t the King on any of them. And the more overachiever professional women I’ve talked to, the more I’ve learned that this is true of them as well.

It’s good to be king.

One of my very first jobs out of college was at a fantastic digital marketing and creative agency. I had just left Chicago and was stunned to see so many women leading the creative team at my new workplace. In my hometown, the lion’s share of creative director and copywriter jobs were held by men (because of the whole “women aren’t funny” thing and the belief that men are edgier). The agency was run by a kind, brilliant man. I asked him straight out what inspired him to hire so many women.

“I’ll always hire a woman before I hire a man,” he said proudly.

I was stunned. I’d never heard an agency leader think in terms like that. Then he finished his thought…

“Men will just steal your clients and start their own agency. Women are more loyal.”

Because loyalty is a virtue I value, I took this statement as a compliment at the time (and I think he probably meant it as one). But something about it didn’t sit right with me. He was a great guy, but because he was from a different era and didn’t worry that saying things like this would be a problem, I was granted a fantastic glimpse into the thought process of someone who knew he was the King on his chessboard.

When you’re the King, you don’t bring in someone who wants to take your game from you. You bring in soldiers who will be loyal to your goal for long enough to get you closer to the win. And there’s not a damn thing wrong with that.

The problem? His worldview cast men as competing Kings, and capable women as dutiful, loyal Queens, Rooks, and Pawns. He wasn’t alone in this thinking then, and he isn’t now.?We still hire women in support roles more than leadership roles, even when they're qualified. We don't promote them as quickly, even when they're better performers. Female leaders are often hired by male leaders who view them as allies or easy-to-command soliders whom they'll never have to worry about as potential competition.

Worst of all, for some reason, so many women can’t see themselves as the King. Instead, they use all their talent to become the top soldier and to advance the agenda of someone they’re loyal to. The result? Many of their own goals go unfulfilled … and often entirely undefined.

Welcome to the Game Stack

The good news is that you don’t have to be the King on every board. What you do need is to identify your own, long-term career game and what the win looks like. After that, identify the other boards you’re playing on…boards where you’re not the King, but still have something to gain by playing.

These boards? They’re your Game Stack.

Imagine a stack of staggered chess boards, one on top of the other. At the top of the Game Stack, there’s one giant board – this is your Long Game. And it’s the only board that really matters.

As you play on any of the lower boards or leave one game for the next, each victory and defeat generates a new move within your Long Game. The higher a board is in the Game Stack, the bigger and more significant the move it creates within your Long Game. When you’re playing multiple games, the Long Game is the only game you need to be King in.

And make no mistake, you are playing more than one game. And every one of them impacts your Long Game. It’s a complex, exhausting, and interconnected strategy web that’s often just easier to forget about, put your head down, and grind on the goal in front of you. After all, winning for someone else is still kind of like winning, right?

If you’re interested in winning at your Long Game, however, you need to navigate the convoluted multiverse that is the career Game Stack. And in order to do that, you need to know the rules of each board, who’s the King on each board, and how each game will impact your Long Game. Most of all, you need to be crystal clear on the objective of your Long Game because, without that, none of your moves have any purpose.

Confused yet? Yeah, an overwrought metaphor will do that. Let’s get our heads around the rules of the Game Stack.

RULE 1: Identify your Long Game.

What do you want? It’s the simplest question and the hardest to answer.

What is the career outcome that will give you the most fulfillment, the highest sense of accomplishment, and the greatest joy? If you don’t know the answer to this question, you can stop reading. None of the games you're playing in – your job, your ongoing education, your volunteer positions/community leadership – will move you close to a Long Game W if you don’t know what a W looks like.

Take a few days off and get out of your everyday grind. Determine what you want your life to look like. Create that Long Game objective. Maybe it’s more about earning and wealth, maybe it’s more about particular types of accomplishments. But get very clear on what the win is.

Once you know that, you can work backward. What are the milestones required to hit that W? What are the things I need to learn to reach those milestones? What game boards am I on right now that can get me the learning I need? Taking an inventory of the current games you’re participating in will help you identify which ones are moving you forward, and which are just sucking away time.

Knowing all of this will make it easier to say no to opportunities, extra projects, and office housework that don’t ladder up to your Long Game win. And saying no to the wrong things is required so we’re available to work on the right things.

Herein lies the challenge for women: Putting your goals first means you won't be able to do all the things that everyone else wants you to do for them. And we struggle to put our own goals first. Being selfish, after all, is the worst thing a woman can be. We know we'll be praised for being helpful, diligent, self-sacrificing, and team players. But for playing our own game? People might actually think we care about ourselves and our own happiness.

RULE 2: Talent will only get you so far.

Talent gets you in the door. It gets you noticed. It makes a name and reputation for you. Your talents are absolutely worthy of development. But eventually, you hit a point in the game stack where the work and how well you do it isn't what matters. It's the relationships you build and your ability to navigate the politics and influence the personalities in your world.

For women, this is a problem. I can personally attest that whenever I encounter a career roadblock, my go-to is to learn more and do more. I'll get more credentials, take more classes, sign up for harder projects, and I know I'm not alone. That's why professional women are generally more educated, more accomplished, and more qualified than their male peers.

I call it Knoping.

Leslie Knope can't understand why Mark Brandanowicz (the guy everyone likes) and Ron (who doesn't do anything) get to be Kings on their boards.

"Hey! I'm the best at this! Look how smart I am and how good I am at all the things I do! Do you see how I'm outperforming the dude you just promoted who doesn't know half of what I do but is fun to go drinking with?"

Yeah, they see you. And the King is super grateful that you're so talented. It makes you a better soldier. But it will never make you the King.

The additional problem is that engaging in politicking and the intentional working of people is usually distasteful to women. I know it is to me. It makes me feel gross. Someone once even accused me of refusing to lead because of my aversion to actively manipulating others. I have to remind myself that failing to engage in this way ultimately means sacrificing my goals so others can get ahead simply because they're more comfortable being conniving. That's not a great outcome for anyone, and those "greater good" arguments tend to motivate women like me.

RULE 3: Know why you’re on someone else’s board.

I was more than happy to be a pawn, then a rook, then a Queen on that agency CEO’s chess board. I knew who the King was, and I also knew that everything I learned on the board would advance me in my own Long Game. My big goal at the time was to become an agency creative director. The agency gave me a great place to let my talent and hard work move me forward – I won the awards, landed the clients, learned what I needed, and met my big goal quickly. It worked out great for me, and it helped the King advance his own goals. ?

It was a great experience because I found the win-win. I got the learning and experience I needed, and I gave the CEO next-level work to grow his business. Everybody was happy. But I was only able to do that because I knew two things:

1. The end goal of my Long Game
2. How the CEO’s game could help get me there

A woman I used to mentor often expressed resistance to the idea that the work she was doing for someone else should be seen as a means to an end for her own long-term career goals. She felt that thinking like this meant she was selfish, disloyal, and (the dirtiest of dirty words) ambitious.

I have never met a man who would express a sentiment like this. Of course the work you do, your position, and your achievements should help advance you to what’s next in your career. Otherwise, what’s the point? That means we all have to get comfortable with the idea that the work we do for Kings on other boards, even if they’re people we deeply respect and admire, have an objective utility to us and can serve our own Long Game.

And guess what? Benefitting from our own work doesn’t make it any less valuable to others. The only way for everyone to win is when you get as much payoff from your work as the King does. Full stop.

Know why you’re on someone else’s board, playing someone else’s game. Does it move you toward the W on your Long Game? If yes, keep crushing it. If no, find a board that does and make your exit.

RULE 4: The king stays the king…so know who he is.

In season 1 of HBO’s masterpiece The Wire, street lieutenant D’Angelo Barksdale explains the rules of chess – and the hierarchical structure of drug trafficking organizations – to the “corner kids” he oversees (one of whom is an adorable pre-adolescent Michael B. Jordan). When one of them asks how the pawn becomes the King, D’Angelo explains that a smart pawn can become the Queen under the right circumstances. But never the King. Those are the rules.

The game at the ad agency worked for everyone because we all knew exactly who the King was. But one way a King can motivate the troops is by making them think that they're Kings too.

Why would the board’s King let you believe that? Because when you think it’s your game, you’ll work that much harder to win. And the harder you work and more loyal you are, the more you achieve, and the more success you’ll create for him. And since it’s the King’s job to win with the army on the board, he gets to decide how he motivates you. In this situation, you’re dealing with a Hidden King.

While it’s a pretty manipulative approach, it’s an effective one. Especially with women.

“My goals are your goals.”

“I have your back and I want you to succeed.”

“I care about you. We’re in this together.”

The idea of shared goals is a powerful motivator for women. We love winning for ourselves, sure. But we love winning with friends even more. When we feel like we’re co-Kinging, we experience the fulfillment and joy that only comes from meaningful connection.

Unfortunately, co-Kinging isn’t a thing. You can certainly have complementary gameboards where Kings from different games win together on a shared goal, but that’s a result of honest communication and mutual understanding rather than deception. If you ever start feeling like you could be the King in a game you didn't think was yours, look around for the person who:

• Keeps advancing when others don’t
• Leaves a trail of Pawns, Rooks and Queens with failed projects, unsupported initiatives, or damaged reputations
• Exercises incredible relationship-building prowess and creates near-unbreakable loyalty bonds among his troops

That’s your Hidden King. You’re on his board and the King stays the King. So ask yourself if you’re getting what you need for your Long Game on his board. If you are, great! Find that win-win. If not, find your next game.

RULE 5: The rules are different on every board.

If every game in the career Game Stack were a straight-up chess match, winning would be a total no-brainer. The rules wouldn’t change from board to board, and you’d get better with every move you made.

That is very much not how this works. Each board has different rules that are determined by two things:

1. Explicit goals set for an organization and each role within it – these are easy to identify, parse out, and direct your effort toward
2. Covert expectations that are set by organizational culture, historic relational dynamics, and biases you may not be aware of

Imagine walking onto a field of play, being given a ball, and told, “OK, go put it through that hoop over there.” You start running toward the hoop and are then disqualified – you were supposed to skip, not run. The ball through the hoop was the explicit goal. The skipping is the covert expectation.

Covert expectations are the unspoken ways of doing and being within a culture that indicate whether you belong there or not. In male-dominated industries, many of these covert expectations revolve around interpersonal communication. If one-upmanship and ribbing are a norm in a professional setting, a woman’s failure to adhere to these norms may have her seen as unlikeable or too passive. Conversely, in a culture where passionate debate is the norm among men, a woman who engages in a similar way may be seen as unprofessional, abrasive, or "too emotional."

Illogical and inconsistent? Yes and yes. Covert expectations are, by definition, unexamined. They’re not rules anyone has thought through. But for women in finance, technology, sales, construction, or other historically male fields, we’re often up against a host of covert expectations we never see coming. And when you don’t know the rules, you can’t win. Even when we achieve our explicit goals, women are often dismayed to learn that we still lost the game because of how they achieved those goals. We communicated too much or too little. Too strongly or too passively. Too much like others in our organization, or too different from the norm.

Even when we win, we somehow lose. And we usually don't understand why.

Learning the secret rules is hard...and sometimes it's impossible. You can’t just ask someone, because no one can articulate them clearly. It takes time and acute observation of how the King responds to the actions of others. And the truth is, sometimes covert expectations will apply differently to you…just because. And worst of all, these covert expectations can keep changing every time you adjust, and become a non-stop moving target designed to keep you from winning.

Try to learn the unwritten rules, and see if adjusting to them helps. If you find that the rules keep changing, you're in a game you'll get nothing from. Find a different path to growth.

The final score.

Your Long Game is the thing. Sometimes we're clear on our ultimate goals, and sometimes we lose sight of it in the fog of the day-to-day battles on our various boards. But a complete understanding of what your big win looks like needs to be at the forefront of our minds in order to make the best moves possible within games and between them.

Let’s be clear: There’s not a thing wrong with being a Pawn, Rook or Queen on another King’s board. You need to. It’s the only way to move the pieces on your Long Game.

The problem arises for women when they fail to maintain situational awareness.

When we don't know whose game we're in, whose goals we're pursuing, and how any of it gets us closer or further away from our own goals, there's no way to win. We're spinning our wheels.

And if you forget your Long Game and start believing your big win will come from funneling your talent into someone else’s goals, you’ll lose. And you won’t know what hit you.

That moment when you get knocked out of a game you think is yours is disorienting as hell. And it’s awfully hard to get back into a new game after that – any new game. You’ll need to reacquaint yourself with the rules and objective of your own Long Game. ?That’s the only thing that will point you to your next right move.

The TL;DR for women is this: The Queen has a lot to be proud of. She's talented as hell. But she doesn't get the win. Put your goal first and be the King of your Long Game.