Mastering the Game Book Summary - Mastering the Game Book explained in key points

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Mastering the Game summary

Name: Mastering the Game
Rating: 4.2 (60 reviews)
Author: Sharon E. Jones with Sudheer R. Poluru

Sharon E. Jones with Sudheer R. Poluru

Strategies for Career Success

4.2 (60 ratings)

20 mins

Brief summary

'Mastering the Game' by Sharon E. Jones and Sudheer R. Poluru is a personal finance book that provides practical advice on how to take control of your money and build wealth. It offers actionable tips on budgeting, saving, investing, and more.

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Promotion Career Progress Job Hunt Networking

Table of Contents

Mastering the Game
Summary of 7 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 7

What’s in it for me? Unlock the secret rules to the game of career success.

It’s no secret that in the world of business, it’s more difficult for women and people of color to get ahead. Just look at the boardrooms of the companies that made the 2017 Fortune 500 list: only 6.4 percent were led by women, while less than 2 percent were led by people of Asian heritage and less than 1 percent by black men. There are many reasons for this, including conscious and unconscious bias, old-boy networks, and lazy stereotyping.

But there’s another, less-documented hurdle that diverse professionals face on the path to career success. The white male networks that have traditionally dominated the business world created rules for playing the game, which have been passed down through generations of mentors and protégés. Women and people of color have struggled to win at the business game simply because they don’t have any way of knowing these rules.

Until now. In these blinks to Mastering the Game, you’ll find out about lawyer and diversity consultant Sharon E. Jones’s decades of experience learning these rules, together with strategies to help diverse professionals use them to their advantage.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how underrepresented women and people of color are in the business world;
why building, nurturing, and serving your communities is crucially important; and
when to move past discrimination – and when to call attention to it.

Intentionality is a crucial first step on the road to success.

It’s easy to get distracted – and demoralized – by focusing on things you can’t control. But in every situation, there’s something you can have an impact on. Every choice you make has the potential to make a difference, and professional success only happens when you approach your career in an intentional way.

There are two steps to implementing an intentional mindset. First, define what success means to you.

This can be more difficult than it sounds. External validation is important for all of us. At one point in her career, the author decided she wanted the top legal job at a corporation: General Counsel. It’s a prestigious job that pays well, she reasoned, and was a logical next step in her career as a lawyer. But after two unsuccessful interviews, she realized she didn’t actually want the job. Her version of success was doing work that made her happy, not work that others thought was impressive.

Your definition of success might not stay the same for long – it’s normal for it to change as it reflects your stage of life, relationships and family, and personal priorities. And it’s important to remember that happiness doesn’t automatically come with success; in fact, it may be the other way around. Studies by positive psychologists at Harvard show that our brains are 31 percent more productive when we’re feeling content. Therefore, a good strategy for achieving more long-term success is prioritizing your short-term happiness.

The next step to implementing an intentional approach to your success is goal-setting. Envision where you want to be 5, 10, 20 years in the future. Then work backward, figuring out how you’ll get there.

George Doran’s SMART goal strategy has been helping people set personal goals since 1981. As you might have guessed, it’s an acronym. Your goals should be: specific, meaningful, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. When executing your plans, you should both evaluate your goals and readjust as needed.

To hold yourself accountable, write down your goals. Also, share your goals with a friend who can help you track your progress.

But there’s more to mental preparation than intentionality. In the next blink, we’ll learn how to stay several moves ahead in any professional setting.

Getting defensive can slow down your career, while an offensive strategy keeps you moving forward.

There are many roads to success. Unfortunately, none of them are smooth – and for diverse professionals, it’s even more difficult. There’s no well-trodden path to the top, so they need to develop the mental toughness to surmount anything that comes their way.

That includes gender and racial stereotypes, which are unfair, of course, but also a fact of life. All too frequently, diverse people internalize these negative stereotypes. This hinders their performance and, ultimately, success.

Understand the metrics you’ll be evaluated by, then over-deliver.

In order to succeed at your job and move up the ranks, you need to consistently hit your numbers. But you can’t do this without understanding which metrics are most important to your employer. These aren’t always in line with how you personally measure success.

The author has experienced this firsthand. After a few successful years at a law firm, she left to join the US Attorney’s Office. Her goal was to gain experience as a trial lawyer. But the government’s priority, she learned at a dismal first-year performance review, was clearing as many cases from the docket as possible – which doesn’t always involve taking a case to trial. Once she understood this, she was able to improve her performance.

Building your network up and out will increase your opportunities and help you get ahead.

Networking has a bad reputation. For a lot of professionals, the whole exercise feels boring and insincere. But the right kind of networking can both cushion your career in case of a misstep and propel you to ever-greater heights of success.

Take getting a job through a friend – something many people have done. 56 percent of respondents to a 1974 study by sociologist Mark Granovetter reported leveraging personal acquaintance relationships to get their jobs. Imagine how much more likely you are to get a job through an acquaintance if you have many of them!

Paying attention to your personal brand puts you in control of how others see you.

In the past, personal branding was simple: be a white man, wear a suit, have a pretty wife and 2.5 kids. These days, branding is more individual; it’s a balancing act between standing out from the crowd and looking the part. To be successful, your physical appearance and personal brand outside the office have to be just right.

This is especially true for people from diverse backgrounds, whose appearance is more subject to scrutiny because they deviate from the white male norm. While the ideal professional look varies from job to job, you can get a feel for what’s appropriate by emulating how people two levels above you dress. When in doubt, opt for more formal – especially in ambiguous business casual situations. You want to be remembered for your work, not your outfit.

Burnout can hinder your long-term success, so build recovery time into your schedule.

Burnout is a real risk when you work hard – and not only because it impacts your performance. A 1999 study in the journal Ergonomics showed that overwork can even damage your health, which the author experienced firsthand.

Because of her bad habit of working weekends and skipping vacations – along with the stress of moving to a new city – she ended up with extremely low cortisol levels, which can cause a raft of health problems. These days, she’s learned to build recovery time into her schedule. Not only does she take vacations, but as soon as she gets back from one, she books the next! This gives her something to look forward to and provides her teams with plenty of advance notice.

Paying it forward is the best chance we have at changing an unfair system.

As you rise through the ranks of an organization, you’ll have more opportunities to make a positive impact. Lending a hand to other diverse professionals is the most effective way to level the playing field, and it’s never too early in your career to start.

Sometimes, time and attention can best be repaid by paying it forward. Perhaps you want to thank your mentor for a great piece of advice but can’t afford to take her to lunch or send a gift. Instead, let her know you’ll be sharing her advice with your networks, thus amplifying her impact. Later, when you’re in the position to share advice and contacts, let your mentees know you expect them to pay your kindness forward.

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What is Mastering the Game about?

Mastering the Game (2018) aims to level the playing field for women and people of color in the world of business – the traditional purview of white men. This book lays bare the unwritten rules of the game and outlines strategies diverse professionals can use to get unstuck at work.

Who should read Mastering the Game?

People who have felt marginalized at work
Social activists who want to create a fairer and more inclusive world
Allies who want to be even more empathetic

About the Author

Sharon E. Jones is a lawyer and consultant with decades of experience navigating the vagaries of the white male-dominated workplace. Her career has taken her from private law firms to the US government to running her own diversity consultancy.

Sudheer R. Poluru is an MBA candidate at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is also an inclusion specialist at Jones Diversity, Sharon E. Jones’s diversity consultancy.

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