Impact Players: How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger, and Multiply Your Impact

In contrast, Impact Players take charge of situations that lack leadership. When they see an opportunity for improvement, they don’t wait for permission to act. They step up, volunteering to lead long before higher-ups in the organization ask them to do so. They are disruptors of the status quo who choose to lead rather than let things be. They off

Doesn’t every manager want people who will do what they are asked to do? Aren’t dream employees the ones who diligently do their jobs? That may have been true in the past, but today’s leaders don’t need more dependents, they need extensions—more eyes spotting opportunities, more ears listening for unmet needs, more hands solving problems. When we p

A service mindset alone isn’t enough to tackle the messiest problems; other underlying mindsets are also at play. Add to the service mindset a strong sense of agency (I can act independently and make decisions) and internal locus of control (I, not external forces, control the outcome of events in my life). Now we have a winning formula for dealing

“It’s one thing to be ‘in the room where it happens,’ but the thing about Mike is that he makes it happen no matter what room he’s in.”

THREAT LENS VS. OPPORTUNITY LENS Impact Players tend to see opportunity where others see threat

Typically managers can articulate the more pronounced differences between their top and low performers; however, when it comes to their most influential, impactful players, the top of the top, there seems to be an ineffable quality about them. There is a certain je ne sais quoi in how they approach their jobs and an art form to the way they contrib

While Contributors play their position, Impact Players play where they are needed. They work in the interstitial space, where big, messy problems don’t fall into any one person’s job boundaries, strategic initiatives get stuck, and unmet needs go unanswered and eventually go elsewhere. For these top contributors, job descriptions are starting point

Our study showed that typical professionals approach these difficult situations as if the challenge is a nuisance, lowering their productivity and making it difficult for them to do their job. They see them as problems to run around and avoid rather than tackle directly. What’s more, under-contributors see them as not just threats to productivity b

As problems become messier and mutate faster than a formal organization can respond, agility must come from the culture—the daily decisions and actions of people—not the organization structure.