Play the Corporate Game or Get Played (Secrets of the Career Game #6)

The game is real—and most people are losing.
In this final secret of Secrets of the Career Game, Kendall Berg breaks down the ultimate truth of corporate life: if you don’t understand how leadership shapes culture, you will keep getting blindsided.
The real culture isn’t in the handbook—it’s in your manager’s behavior.

This is the sixth and final episode in our special podcast mini-series. And the book? It’s officially out now.

🎧 Stream this final secret and pick up your copy of Secrets of the Career Game—available wherever books are sold.

📌 In this episode, we discuss:

• What determines company culture?

• How does leadership impact team dynamics?

• Why is your hiring manager more important than the company?

• What’s the danger of taking a job when you don’t vibe with the manager?

• Why is cultural alignment the most overlooked part of the interview?

 

Episode Transcript

Kendall Berg (00:00):
I'm so sad that this series is coming to an end, but welcome back to week six of the Secrets of the Career Game. We are going through our last secret. I'm so sad. But the positive news is that because this is our last secret, this means it's our last week, which means the book is launching. So if you have not pre ordered your copy, make sure to do that. I'm super excited to talk about it all with you guys this week. Secret 6 is the leaders that you hire determine your company culture. This is undervalued. Logically. When I say this secret. Most of you guys are probably like, yeah, duh. The leaders that you hire are going to make your company culture. That seems obvious, right?

(00:41):
But when you are interviewing for a company, you are also interviewing for a team in which the leader's culture style is setting the tone for the culture of that team. This means that the smaller the company, the more consistent the culture is. Good or bad generally, right? If you're going to work for a startup that has less than 30 employees, culture across every team is probably mostly going to be similar. Now, it could be really good, it could be really terrible. I'm not about to tell you what your company's culture is like, but the bigger the company gets, the more different the culture can be from team to team within the organization.

(01:22):
This means you could get hired into one team in marketing where you feel like you have a really great culture alignment, only for there to be a reorg where you end up under a different leader in which you have no alignment. When you are an executive and you are at the top, the leaders that you are hiring under, you are determining the culture that your employees are actually experiencing. So if you have one bad leader in a sea of 10 leaders, that entire organization under that one bad leader is going to have a completely different perception of how the company operates, what their culture is, than the rest of your team.

(01:58):
This means the more senior you get, the more important it becomes that you're hiring great leaders, great managers, and that you're coaching them actively on how to maintain culture, on the importance of culture, on how to handle difficult situations, how to give constructive feedback. I've worked with so many individuals and I have been so many individuals who have experienced a toxic culture. And most often, a toxic culture is not company wide. There are exceptions, right? But for the most part, a toxic culture tends not to be company wide. It tends to be isolated to a specific leadership team that is creating negative space. So the more senior you get, the more Important it is that you're hiring people whose cultural values align with yours.

(02:41):
Not only that they can technically execute the job, not only that they're technically proficient in their space, but that culturally they're going to create a similar feeling in their team that you're trying to create in yours. It also means that as an individual, if you are interviewing, your relationship with that hiring manager is probably the most important thing you're trying to determine from that interview process. Yes, your hiring manager could change down the road. Yes, there could be a reorg. We cannot prepare for that at the time of interview. But what we can prepare for at the time of interview is do we have a good relationship with the hiring manager? Do we feel we have cultural alignment and do we feel that they value the same things that we value in a workplace environment?

(03:22):
That company culture, that's the reality of your day to day. I've worked with so many clients who come to me and say, hey, the interviews were great, the job's great, the pay is great. The only person I didn't like was the hiring manager. I'm going to tell you to run like you stole something. That hiring manager is going to determine more of your day to day experience than anybody else you meet. This is the biggest lie of company culture is that we think the company culture is the placards on the wall and the mission statement in your orientation manual and what's on the company's website. But the reality is what you experience in the day to day is the culture of your most senior direct leader.

(04:07):
Hopefully you guys found this secret helpful and you are more interested in learning about how to play the career game more effectively. If you are again, please head over and pre order my book, Secrets of the Career Game. It is on Amazon, it is on Barnes and Noble, it is everywhere that books are sold. I am so excited to share this with you guys and check back in next week for another amazing secret.