The Only Three Ways to Increase Your Impact

According to Imperative’s 2015 Workforce Purpose Index, 42% of people in the workforce report they are not making a meaningful impact at work. Are you in that number? Are you someone who is making a meaningful impact at work but want to make an even greater one?

Making an impact at work isn’t just a necessity for job security. Our brains are wired to want it. The lack of impact can lead to a long list of mental health issues. We need to make progress to feel a sense of significance.

But perhaps you are stuck.

In over 20 years studying impact, I found that many people get stuck. They have the desire to make an impact, but don’t know where to start. They are in a routine, good or bad, and have trouble seeing the opportunities all around.

START HERE: Find Your Seed

To increase your impact, start by identifying what you are increasing. However small, identify one way you are making an impact today. If you’re having a hard time coming up with something, think about it like this: If you didn’t go to work tomorrow, what would the consequences be for your co-workers? Clients? Partners? Why does your work matter?

So, for example, let’s assume you are a recruiter. You work to support hiring for a team of 500 people inside a company. When you step back and reflect on the moments when you feel you really made an impact that matters to you, what emerges are the moments when you really help a hiring manager think strategically about the role and ideal candidate. For you, this is the most important conversation as it focuses the search and sets up a new hire to be successful when they start.

What is your seed? Don’t worry if it is small...all good things start out small.

The Three Dimensions of Impact 

When you increase your impact, it will be in at least one of the following three ways:

1. Breadth of impact
2. Depth of impact
3. Sustainability of impact

So, take your impact seed, and let’s explore what it would look like to grow it in each of these ways.

ONE: Breadth of Impact

How many people, teams, organizations or communities are impacted by your work? What is the ripple of your effort? How could you help one more person per day? How could you get more people to have access to what you create?

How can our example recruiter increase the breadth of their impact? They could serve more hiring managers but unless they are actually opening searches, that really isn’t within their control. What is in their control? They could take on additional teams they support. They could offer a new solution for managers to do an annual team planning assessment together. They could volunteer to do pro bono work for nonprofit CEOs to develop their staffing plan and recruiting strategy.

TWO: Depth of Impact

How deeply are you helping those you impact? Does it make their day better? Their year? Their life? How can you go one level deeper? What would that look like?

Given our recruiter gains the greatest sense of impact from setting up a search for success and coaching the manager, what would it mean to deepen this impact? It could be investing more time with the hiring manager on the design of how the new employee is on-boarded. They might also deepen the impact by coaching the whole team (not just the manager) so that they are really bought into the new hire and own their success.

THREE: Sustainability of Impact

If you stopped working, how long would the impact you have made last? Would it end as soon as you left or did you create an impact that lives on without you? What would you need to do to make your current work have a more sustained impact?

If our recruiter quit, how much of the impact they care most about would remain? The hiring manager would hopefully be better able to do their next search given what they learned. But, research shows, we retain a lot more when we reflect on an experience and internalize the learning. So the recruiter might set up reflecting conversations with the hiring manager for 90 days after each search to maximize the learning. They could also define and create best practices that they share with each hiring manager so they can continue to leverage the recruiter's advice for years to come.

Your Impact Plan

You likely can’t grow in all three directions at once (there are only so many hours in the day). In fact, in some cases, doing more of one will decrease another (at least temporarily). For example, if you help more people it might require a shallower or less sustainable impact.

So, what is the one way you are going to commit to increasing your impact in the next year that is in your control?

What do you need to do now to make it possible?

Purpose-Driven Ambition

Successful, purpose-driven people have an ongoing ambition to increase their impact. It is what enables them to be high performers and grow into exciting new roles. It is a mindset that fundamentally views work as a form of service. Unlike ambition driven by ego, this is what we call purpose-driven ambition. It is a healthy and constructive ambition that isn’t a zero sum game like other forms of advancement.

Stop every few months and take stock of your impact and set a new impact goal in one of the three directions. Start now. Put a recurring reminder on your calendar.

IMPACT-DRIVEN CAREER DEVELOPMENT

My company’s platform, Imperative, is designed to empower everyone on your team to discover the impact that they want to make at work. We are a social benefit corporation that is dedicated to awakening and nurturing the impact ambition of the entire workforce.

If you found this article helpful, request a free Imperative trial and see how you can start a purpose movement at your organization.

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