This spring was a busy speaking season, with lots of conferences and keynotes on one of my favorite leadership topics: career development. A challenge I heard time and again from leaders across industries was, “I’ve got the skills and the tools, but I’m struggling to make career development meaningful and doable given the ambiguity and complexity of the workplace … and today’s tense and uncertain workforce.” 

Career development has spent years getting heavier — more forms, more competency models, more nine-box grids. Somewhere in all that architecture, we lost the thing that actually moves people: a conversation good enough to make someone feel connected, capable and hopeful about the next step in their career.  

Managers Need a New Approach to Career Development  

What I found while speaking with line leaders and supervisors around the U.S. is an appetite for an approach to engaging their teams in meaningful but different ways around growth. It would be easy to frame this as a need to “lighten up.” But leaders aren’t looking for permission to take career development less seriously. They’re looking for something else. 

The counterintuitive solution I presented was play. As group after group played their way to career development, they came to a powerful conclusion: Where process might fall short, play carries through. 

We can’t administrate our way into enthusiasm. Frameworks and processes offer a necessary structure, but they don’t tend to inspire excitement and enthusiasm for growth the way fun, discovery and games can. 

So, if you’re looking to lighten up career development in your organizations, here are a few “game frames” to consider 

Two Truths and a Stretch 

Try this variation on the old “Two Truths and a Lie” game. Invite people to introduce themselves with two true things about their career and one honest stretch — something they’re hoping for but haven’t yet made real — and the group guesses which is which. What emerges isn’t a plan. It’s understanding. Teams learn what their colleagues are reaching toward, which makes it easier to support each other later, in the moment it matters. And for the individual, saying a hope out loud in a low-stakes setting, before it’s a goal on a form, is a way to try it on and see how it feels. 

Forbidden Words: The Career Development Edition 

Words carry meaning. And sometimes that meaning gets stale and out of date. Even worse, it can begin to limit what’s possible. This is certainly true for the language we use for career development.  

Feedback. Engagement. Promotion. Depending upon the organization, these words can take people down narrow corridors of thinking.  

But not after a few rounds of a Taboo®-style game. Imagine inviting teams to describe some of these workplace terms without using the normal language. For “feedback” for instance, the person couldn’t say things like “information,” “mistake,” “review,” etc. A few rounds of describe-it-without-the-obvious-words forces people to reach for language they don’t already have worn grooves for.  

Fill It Forward 

Consider the multi-page career development worksheet — the one everyone means to finish and nobody does. What if we translated that to a 10-minute fill-in-the-blank template (think MadLibs® for careers)? My experience is that this approach gets more honest self-reflection out of people than the worksheet ever will, because low stakes lower defenses, and lowered defenses are where the real answer lives. 

Notice what’s happening across every one of these experiences: play isn’t a break from the real work of career development. It’s a faster, more honest route to the same destination. It works because it doesn’t feel like work. 

None of this requires overhauling your talent processes. It requires borrowing fifteen minutes and a game people already half-know from childhood just slightly retooled to give it a development twist.  

The only question is: Are you game?