How Gaming Strategies Can Help You Climb the Corporate Ladder

Ascending through a large organization or corporate entity has never been more difficult, with most workers usually being forced to move jobs in order to get the raise or promotion they so richly deserve.

Of course, the option of upping sticks and abandoning ship is not always one that people can turn to in the short to medium term, meaning all that is left to do is knuckle down and do everything possible to shine in the eyes of upper and middle management.

Below you will find some tips and strategies that have be gleaned from the world of games, some of which might just help you break through that glass ceiling, whether you are a busy marketeer learning the art of link building or a rabid sales hound on the hunt for new customers.

Developing Differing Approaches to Games and Work Tasks

How you hold yourself in any arena, be it an online gaming setting or in the work environment, is key to how your peers judge your performance and your ability to succeed. However, being one-paced in your approach to work or gaming can ultimately be detrimental to your progress in either field.

This usually manifests itself in people being too passive in the workplace, something which players of games such as monopoly, poker, or chess know only too well to be a fatal mistake, leaving you open to attack from other more ambitious and daring players.

Letting a work rival or gaming opponent dictate how the action unfolds every time you take a seat at the poker table or in the boardroom will inevitably mean that you come off second best. To avoid this, you need to mix up your attitude to both work and games, adopting different approaches, styles and ways to compete, so that your opponents are always kept on their toes, unable to read which strategic moves you will make in the future. This way they will only see that checkmate move, huge bluff, or push for promotion when it’s too late and you have already won.

Caption: Classic games like chess can help career-minded individuals to think multiple moves ahead of their would-be competitors and office rivals

Do Not Let Frustration Get the Better of You

There are two common terms used in gaming to denote the state a player gets in when they let anger get the better of them to the detriment of their play.

These are being ‘on tilt’ or ‘steaming’. Everyone will have felt this extreme range of emotions a few times in their life, where an outcome of a game or business meeting is so untoward that your brain cannot begin to contemplate the immensity of the injustice it has just suffered.

What games like poker and battle royale console titles can teach you is how to departmentalize such outbursts of emotion, accepting them as a part of the game or business, so you can power on towards the next lucrative opportunity.

Learn When to Bluff

Legal and business dramas on television and Netflix are full of gung-ho lawyers and bankers who do whatever it takes to force a deal through, including running bluffs left, right and center.

Of course, the real world of business does not work that way, and neither do the strategy games that we often associate with bluffing, such as poker, or the board game Sneak and Snitches.

Get a reputation as someone who is willing to bluff and you will lose your coveted joker card for the rest of your career. Keep your powder dry, wait for the perfect moment, and no one will ever see your audacious business bluff coming until it is too late. Then, you’ll have bloomed into being the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates.