With so many shifting rules and cultural norms, career success can feel like mastering a complex game.

Jessica Lindl, Vice President of Ecosystem Growth at Unity Technologies and a Haas MBA alum, shows how a gaming mindset can be an advantage in today’s workplace.

Her new book, The Career Game Loop: Learn to Earn in the New Economy, launches April 29.

Jessica joins hosts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava in the season 3 finale of The Culture Kit to discuss the gamer mindset, strategies for job crafting, and how leaders can build game-inspired workplace cultures.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

3 main takeaways from Jenny & Sameer’s interview with Jessica Lindl:

  1. Embrace chaos and uncertainty: Learn how to find opportunity in  moments of change.
  2. Build durable skills: As AI integrates into the workforce, it’s more important than ever to have durable skills such as problem-solving and collaboration that make you a fundamental asset to your organization.
  3. Look for opportunities to job craft and continually evolve your role: This can spur innovation at the company as well as new opportunities in your career.

Show Links:

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Sameer Srivastava: Welcome to The Culture Kit with Jenny and Sameer, where we give you the tools to build a healthy and effective workplace culture. I’m Sameer Srivastava.

[00:00:14] Jennifer Chatman: And I’m Jenny Chatman. We’re professors at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and co-founders of the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation.

[00:00:24] Sameer Srivastava: On today’s episode, we’ll talk with Jessica Lindl, VP of Ecosystem Growth at Unity Technologies, one of the world’s most popular video game platforms. Jessica’s new book, The Career Game Loop: Learn to Earn in the New Economy, takes inspiration from the world of gaming to reimagine how to navigate careers in the modern workplace.

[00:00:46] Jessica Lindl: I often think about leaders and even my own role as a leader as, essentially, the ultimate game designer for my organization. I’m owning the storyline of this game. What’s the mission? What is it that we’re about? What’s our purpose? What’s the style of game, you know, that we want here? So, what’s the culture that we want to build?

[00:01:08] Jennifer Chatman: Hello, Jessica. Welcome to The Culture Kit. It’s so great to see you.

[00:01:13] Jessica Lindl: Thank you, Jenny. Thank you, Sameer. Great to be here.

[00:01:16] Jennifer Chatman: When we connected last fall, you told me about your book project, and I thought it would be interesting to flip the script on our usual show and look at workplace culture through the lens of job-seekers and employees who are navigating the new norms of modern work. It’s something we haven’t done before, and it’s also so relevant for organizations and recruiters who need to keep up. So, first off, when will your book be out?

[00:01:41] Jessica Lindl: Thank you so much for asking. My book is available right now on pre-sale at the careergameloop.com, but it is officially coming out on April 29th.

[00:01:49] Sameer Srivastava: Congratulations on the book, Jessica. That’s fantastic. And I really look forward to reading it. I should also mention here that Jessica is a Haas MBA alum from the class of 2000. And we really would love to start by asking you about your own experiences and your career trajectory and how that might have inspired this book.

[00:02:07] Jessica Lindl: Thanks, Sameer. I think there are three key themes for my own career trajectory that inspired the book. The first is that I have been focused on economic mobility my entire career. And it’s becoming more and more elusive, as we all know.

Secondly, when I look back on my career, I’ve had this, kind of, natural lifespan of about three-to-four years for each of my jobs. And along the way, there was really a lack of clarity and guidance and, frankly, a huge amount of anxiety and loneliness as I went through those transitions and wasn’t really a playbook out there. And then, finally, I stumbled upon this “aha” moment about halfway through my career that gamers just did a phenomenal job of navigating jobs in the 21st century.

So, just a quick highlight on my background. I was born and raised in the middle of America in a middle class family. I had an incredible opportunity during the summer of my junior year in college to do an internship with the FCC. I walked in the door and they asked me to spend the summer researching this new thing called the internet and if they should regulate it. After a summer of being alone in a dark room, looking at macroeconomic models, I said, “Of course, you should regulate it,” which nobody listened to. And then, a year later, a few days after graduation, came to San Francisco. Like everybody else who comes out here, slept on some couches, finally got a job in tech, and after a couple of years, realized that I needed a purpose.

And that was really how I arrived back at Haas, and thank goodness I did. I’m so grateful for the experience I had over 25 years ago, just being around people who had the same belief around it’s not just about how Haas will shape my career, it’s about Haas helping me understand how to shape the world. And so, for the rest of my career, have been at the intersection of workforce education, and then, again, gaming about halfway through.

[00:03:59] Jennifer Chatman: So, you introduced what you call the core career loop framework. Can you break this down for us? Like, how does it differ from a traditional view of career paths?

[00:04:09] Jessica Lindl: Sure! I mean, just to ground ourselves in what the traditional career path sounds like, I think we’re all raised with this model. And in fact, many of us are raising young people with the same model — just work really hard in school, maybe you’ll go to college, once you graduate you’ll get this amazing job and live happily ever after.

And I think we all know that it wasn’t true when we were younger, and it’s even further from the truth now. Instead, job markets today, on average, I wasn’t unique. We’re each in a job on average for about four years. We have, essentially, 10 to 15 very different jobs throughout our career. And half of those, for young people, haven’t even been invented yet.

So, we looked at this model. And as I mentioned, I took a lot of this inspiration from watching gamers go through their careers. And a lot of the career looks like what we call a core game loop. So, I have to ask, do either of you play any games? They don’t have to be video games. Any games at all.

[00:05:07] Sameer Srivastava: Scrabble and bridge are popular in my family.

[00:05:10] Jennifer Chatman: I play hearts and spades.

[00:05:12] Jessica Lindl: Excellent. All right. So, we’ll just take a traditional game like Scrabble that I think everybody’s played. The core game loop in Scrabble is you’re going around in a circle and you’re taking turns putting tiles on a board. And that mechanism, that core game loop is what defines what the game is.

That same application is applied to all types of video games as well. And it’s meant to be highly engaging, addictive. And at the essential core of it are a couple of key stages that very much match how careers and jobs look like today. So, if you look at a core game loop and a core career loop, the first thing you’re doing is you’re just being put into a game.

Oftentimes, in video games, we’ll just take Legends of Zelda as an example, you, kind of, are plopped into this universe. You have no rule book. You’re, sort of, bumping around, trying to discover things. And you’re essentially going off on a quest. Very similar to, “What do I want to do with my life?”

You, then, have to acquire new skills in a video game and in your career. So, that second step of the core loop is leveling up. You’ve got to get that next job. We call it hacking the grind, which is how you actually master that level and get the ultimate win, which is getting the job. And then the fourth step of the loop is you’re actually job crafting into your next opportunity.

[00:06:27] Jennifer Chatman: Wait. So, before you go on, are we the first two people you’ve ever run into who don’t play video games?

[00:06:33] Jessica Lindl: Well, actually, I would posit that you probably do, because oftentimes, people are like, “Well, while I play Wordle, but I mean, I don’t play video games.”

[00:06:40] Sameer Srivastava: And I will confess that, in my 20s, I owned a Sega Genesis set, but that’s a long, long time ago.

[00:06:47] Jennifer Chatman: We’re, like, complete nerds, Sameer, I think.

[00:06:50] Sameer Srivastava: Yes, I know, I can’t escape it.

[00:06:51] Jennifer Chatman: Sort of, hopeless, yeah.

[00:06:52] Sameer Srivastava: Can’t escape it. So, one of the core ideas in the book, Jessica, is that gamers have some advantages in navigating the modern career landscape. Can you tell us a bit more about what gives them this advantage?

[00:07:04] Jessica Lindl: Sure. Just like I was discussing, every video game you go into doesn’t have a set of rules. You essentially just open up this universe, and you’ve got to figure it out. You’re not just bumping around and discovering new opportunities, but you’re actually really relying on your community, just very similar to relying on your social network, as, you know, you’re looking at these career opportunities.

In addition to that, one of the steps that I took before I was at Unity was running a learning game company called GlassLab. That was actually focused on creating game-based assessments in partnership with Electronic Arts, Pearson, and ETS, very unlikely partners. And what we learned from those five years of building those games is that video games actually really develop what we call durable skills or soft skills. And what you discover is that, through any video game, you’ve got iteration, strategy, lots of failing forward, and lots of resilience being built.

One of my favorite video games, to use as an example here, is an indie game called Getting Over It. If you’re not familiar with it, it is perfectly designed to make you fail and fail hard. When you lose, you don’t just get put back into the same level that you’re in. The game designer makes you start over again. And if you Google this, you can watch on Twitch or any other live streams, just gamers losing their mind over this game, but obsessively playing it. And so, you see this failing forward tenacity and grit that’s required in our careers today just coming to life.

[00:08:35] Jennifer Chatman: So, Jessica, let’s talk a little bit about job crafting, which, actually, there’s a kind of academic field around this. It’s a big theme in your book. Why is job crafting so important in today’s workplaces? What are your recommendations for how people would go about it?

[00:08:50] Jessica Lindl: I think it’s really important for two key reasons. One is that all of the organizations that we’re a part of are going through a significant amount of change that’s only increasing. So, as our organizations need change, we, as employees, have to be changing with it. And you don’t want to keep rehiring to meet those needs.

In addition to that, our own values and interests change. And so, rather than, you know, leaving an organization and taking all that intellectual capital with us, being able to continuously learn in the organization that we’re a part of is critical for both our own happiness and for the success of the employer.

[00:09:27] Jennifer Chatman: Yeah. So, this is actually very typical for Haas students. They’re big job crafters. Can you share some examples that you’ve seen in your career?

[00:09:36] Jessica Lindl: Sure. I mean, one example that is top of mind for me is a mid-career woman that we profile in the book. She came into an organization and was a content creator. And she kept stumbling across this key challenge that, within the company, similar products and similar features were being called completely different things between engineering, marketing and sales. And so, she couldn’t actually get a consistent piece of content written because she couldn’t draw from all of these different resources.

She decided to start tackling that problem. And about a year later, using collaboration and problem-solving, completely transitioned her role into an information architect for the company, creating a whole taxonomy that now makes their work much more efficient and actually drives their AI models more efficiently, too.

I would just recommend that, when you’re looking at job crafting, you think about a couple of key things. One is that you’re really identifying what energizes you, like, where do you get excitement, and obviously, what drains you, and think about bringing more things into your work that energizes you. And then just start experimenting, add on a few projects, a few different skills that you want to bring onto your role, and be really vocal with allies, like your manager and other peers, around how you want to shape your career next.

[00:10:53] Sameer Srivastava: So, I wanted to come back to the term you used a few minutes ago, “durable skills.” And you draw this distinction between technical and durable skills. Can you say a little bit more about that distinction and give us some examples of these durable skills and why you think they’re so important?

[00:11:08] Jessica Lindl: Sure! Technical skills are really the skills that get you hired, we like to say. And the durable skills are what drive and propel your career. So, a technical skill would be like coding or data analysis or financial modeling. Durable skills are adaptability, problem-solving, storytelling, collaboration.

One of my favorite examples of this is another young woman that we profiled in the book who has had an incredible career at Microsoft. She was at Unity with me. She was a director of our technology, leading the machine learning and AI work. And she actually didn’t graduate from high school in the traditional path. She actually went back and got her GED and never finished any advanced degrees after that.

But she, in her words, approaches every job like a video game. She jumps into it. She starts learning and bumping around and iterating and tackling new challenges head on. She knows how to work with people from incredibly different backgrounds, because again, most people playing video games are on Discord as well and, you know, playing with people from all over the world. And so, she’s brought all of those skills into her almost 20-year career now without a traditional education path into the opportunities.

[00:12:19] Jennifer Chatman: So interesting. So, I wanted to shift gears a bit now to talk about how this looks from the leadership perspective and how workplace cultures need to shift to support cyclical career paths, job crafting, community building, things that you talk about. What lessons can non-gaming leaders, perhaps, even those who came up through traditional career paths, take from gaming culture to improve their approach?

[00:12:44] Jessica Lindl: I would say, even though they identify as a non-gaming person, just like both of you did, we discovered that you actually are gamers. And so, I often think about leaders and even my own role as a leader as, essentially, the ultimate game designer for my organization. I’m owning the storyline of this game.

What’s the mission? What is it that we’re about? What’s our purpose? What’s the style of game, you know, that we want here? So, what’s the culture that we want to build?

I can define the mechanics and, sort of, the operating principles — so, those game mechanics and core game loop — the reward and incentive structure that you have in a game. So, all of these, actually, when we think about it, I think, in this more playful way for a very serious opportunity of, how are we building culture and promoting this mindset of continuous learning, iterating ourselves as leaders, just, essentially, being the game designers of the world and the company and culture we want to create.

[00:13:56] Sameer Srivastava: Yeah. So, let’s just push on this a little bit further. So, say you’re a leader and you have part of your team that is embracing this approach and wants evolution and change, but another part that really craves stability and structure. How do you think about navigating that tension?

[00:14:01] Jessica Lindl: Yeah. I think, in the era that we’re in right now, I would say that more people, even if you’re pushing for change, change is actually happening around you at this incredibly dynamic pace. And so, I would want to continue balancing both of those for the employees and finding employees who can balance those.

First and foremost, just introducing change in an iterative way, just like when you design a game level, you don’t want it to be too challenging that people just jump out and don’t come back. You, kind of, want to be in your zone of proximal development. The same thing with change, allowing people to feel the change, feel like they’re accomplishing that change.

Secondly, really leveraging those different strengths that you have in very different roles. And so, for those risk takers that want to push the boundaries, having them in roles that are driving the innovation, the stability seekers, being in roles that are much more about maintaining institutional knowledge and efficiency and operations.

And then, finally, just being really deliberate about how you’re building community across these different mindsets. We’re really lucky at Unity in that, most of our offices, unsurprisingly, have game rooms where, you know, teams of employees are playing with each other. But we also do card nights. And I think, even if you’re not having a culture of gaming in your company, you can find ways to be deliberately building community across these different points of view.

[00:15:26] Jennifer Chatman: So, back to your distinction between durable skills and technical expertise. You advocate for hiring based on durable skills rather than just technical expertise. This is actually something that aligns with some research I’ve done as well. How can organizations go about identifying and measuring those durable skills in the hiring process?

[00:15:48] Jessica Lindl: I agree that it can be really challenging, the durable skills. We all have human bias and subjectivity, especially in these areas. In addition to that, our hiring approach is usually focused on past achievements, as opposed to how you went about achieving those key areas. And so, oftentimes, the durable skills don’t come out. Unsurprisingly, I highly recommend game-based assessments. Companies like HireVue and Pymetrics have game-based assessments on these durable skills to just provide a more unbiased perspective.

Secondly, I think, just having candidates talk through their learnings over time on a specific durable skill, like collaboration, and how they failed to do it and what they learned from that failure and how that informed their approach to collaboration. And then, finally, one thing that we do at Unity is really focus on the key durable skills for a role. And we all try and interview on that durable skill, so we can bring very different points of view to try and also eliminate that bias.

[00:16:51] Sameer Srivastava: What about once you’ve actually hired someone and you’ve selected them on the basis of the durable skills, how do you, then, measure their performance on those dimensions and reward them accordingly?

[00:17:02] Jessica Lindl: Excellent question. The performance assessments, I think, are really key when it comes to durable skills. We set goals, not just on, kind of, the traditional KPIs, but we also set goals on how we’re improving in durable skills. And what our plan is, over the course of 6 months or 12 months, to build up one or two durable skills that we’re really focusing on.

[00:17:24] Jennifer Chatman: Well, here’s now a huge question based on your research and the book that you’ve written. Given this gamified approach, do you see the fundamental relationship between companies and employees evolving and changing over the next decade? And if so, I’m guessing your answer is yes. So, what do you think is going to happen?

[00:17:47] Jessica Lindl: Well, I think it’s important to recognize the time we’re in. I know, Jenny, you’ve done a lot of research on this, and so have you, Sameer. And the AI evolution, a lot of your podcast episodes, have really emphasized this importance, also, of durable skills, as AI takes on more and more of the technical skills.

And in our own research in the book, we worked with LinkedIn and with Meg Garlinghouse, just showing that these durable skills are becoming much more important. And in the relationship over the next decade, we see, not just AI, but also the macroeconomic changes and cultural changes that are happening for employers and employees to be co-designing, even more than ever, as a result of the innovation and needs that come their way.

So, just continuously thinking about, even though it feels like a playful sort of light approach, with gaming, the substantive changes that can happen as we are focusing on how we’re improving innovation in our own employment and our own future opportunities through this co-design methodology, just like you would if you were in Minecraft, you know, building games and modding games together.

[00:18:56] Sameer Srivastava: Well, this has been a super thought-provoking conversation. Thank you so much, Jessica. It’s actually motivating me to dust off my Sega Genesis and maybe even try out some new games today. But we try to wrap up these sessions by summarizing some takeaways. I wonder if you could summarize two or three main takeaways from your book.

[00:19:16] Jessica Lindl: Yes. I think the first takeaway is that there is a lot of chaos and uncertainty; and with chaos and uncertainty comes opportunity. So, there isn’t just one job for the rest of your life. There will be multiple, and you have the mindset and behavior, because all of us are gamers, to be able to tackle that.

The second is that, being able to continuously build those durable skills, it’s what’s going to make you stronger throughout your career and make your organization stronger.

And then, finally, that co-design and modding and close partnership that comes from job crafting between an employee and an employer will unlock innovation and opportunity in your career.

[00:19:56] Jennifer Chatman: Well, thanks so much, Jessica. I think we learned so much. And I’ll wait to see whether Sameer can actually find a way to plug in his Sega equipment. I’m skeptical. This was a really great way to end our third season of The Culture Kit.

[00:20:12] Jessica Lindl: Thank you, Jenny. Thank you, Sameer. Really an honor to be here.

[00:20:16] Sameer Srivastava: Thank you, Jessica. And that’s a wrap on season three of The Culture Kit. We’ll be back with some bonus episodes over the summer.

[00:20:24] Jennifer Chatman: Before we sign off, I wanted to take a moment to thank all our wonderful guests and the team that makes this podcast possible. That includes executive producer, Laura Counts, Martha Gerhan, who’s the executive director of our Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation. Producer, Xandra McMahon, Project Manager, Sheena Simon, and the whole crew at Professors.fm.

Until next time! Thanks for listening.

Thanks for listening to The Culture Kit with Jenny and Sameer. Do you have a question about work that you want us to answer? Go to haas.org/culture-kit to submit your fix-it ticket today.

[00:21:09] Sameer Srivastava: The Culture Kit Podcast is a production of the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at the Haas School of Business, and it’s produced by University FM. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to hit that Subscribe button, leave us a review, and share this episode online, so others who have workplace culture questions can find us, too.

[00:21:30] Jennifer Chatman: I’m Jenny.

[00:21:31] Sameer Srivastava: And I’m Sameer.

[00:21:32] Jennifer Chatman: We’ll be back soon with more tools to help fix your work culture challenges.

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