Developing “Impact Players”
Guest Speaker Liz WisemanIn this episode of WiseTalk, CEO and Executive Leadership Coach Sue Bethanis hosts Liz Wiseman, a researcher and executive advisor who teaches leadership to executives around the world. Liz is the author of New York Times bestseller Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, The Multiplier Effect: Tapping the Genius Inside Our Schools, Wall Street Journal bestseller Rookie Smarts: Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work, and Wall Street Journal bestseller Impact Players: How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger, and Multiply Your Impact. She’s the CEO of the Wiseman Group, a leadership research and development firm headquartered in Silicon Valley. Some of her recent clients include Apple, AT&T, Disney, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nike, Salesforce, Tesla, and Twitter. Liz has conducted significant research in the field of leadership and collective intelligence and writes for the Harvard Business Review, Fortune, and a variety of other businesses and leadership journals. She is a frequent guest lecturer at BYU and Stanford University.
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INTERVIEW SUMMARY AND KEY TAKEAWAYS
Driven by the desire to understand how ‘impact players’ are able to have influence over teams, Liz has studied what makes them different and what makes them so impactful. Impact players are next-level contributors that go above and beyond what’s expected of them to solve problems and get the job done. They are indispensable during these critical times and by learning about what makes them so invaluable we can, in turn, teach and coach others to do the same.
Here are some of the key takeaways from this talk and the 5 practices that make an impact player:
- Impact players can tackle messy problems by stepping up and doing the job that needs to be done, even when it’s not being asked of them. (11:03)
- Even when roles are unclear, impact players see leadership is needed and step up. (13:30)
- Impact players scan for and see obstacles, and rather than escalating or handing off difficult problems, they take ownership and finish the work. (14:44)
- Impact players embrace change and moving targets, prepared to adapt when things don’t go according to plan. (18:18)
- In the face of unrelenting demands, impact players are able to make the load feel lighter for everyone. (21:41)
As remote work has evolved, impact players have appeared as those who are able to handle the constant change, step up when needed, and solve the problems that come up. A main question that arises, is how can we coach this proactiveness into others? These impact players serve as role models on their teams and in turn create other hard-working and driven individuals, but how can we teach this as coaches and leaders? Liz offers that many of these practices are learnable, with some being harder than others. While most natural impact players are shaped by their formative years, by studying how they operate and how they naturally perform, we can see the ways in which we can shape others to do the same. By shifting mindsets and encouraging these practices, we can create more impact players in the workplace.
FAVORITE QUOTES
“That is what an impact player really is. So they’re these standout contributors that make teams better. We see it out in the sports world, but they also exist in the work world.” 8:29
“These are the situations to gain mastery of, to know how to deal with messy problems. To know how to respond when you see a leadership vacuum or roles are unclear. If you want to hire people with these kinds of capabilities, hire people who are adept at these kinds of situations.” (21:41)
“The impact player is building community, is building longing. They’re making hard things feel light for everyone.” (21:41)
“We often think development happens and coaching happens between the manager and the team member, but that pure based modeling, coaching, mentoring, like, ‘Hey, let me give you some of what’s on my plate and help you be successful.’ I think it’s a much more powerful form of learning.” (30:15)
RESOURCES
Liz Wiseman:
Book: Impact Players: How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger, and Multiply Your Impact
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Sue Bethanis 0:00
Welcome, everyone to WiseTalk. This is Mariposa’s monthly podcast. We provide perspectives on leadership. Today we’re excited to welcome back Liz Wiseman. So Liz is a friend and a colleague, and she’s was with us in 2015. Which seems like a long time ago. And just really a treat to have you back. So thank you for being here.
Liz Wiseman 0:22
It’s good to be here. It’s like, that was back when life was easy.
Sue Bethanis 0:26
Yeah, for sure. Let me tell you a little bit about Liz. She’s a researcher and executive advisor who teaches leadership to executives around the world. She is the author of The New York Times bestseller Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. And I’ll say that I give that your article to every client we have. So, it’s a great, great concept and a great book. She also wrote The Multiplier Effect: Tapping the Genius Inside our Schools, to Wall Street Journal bestsellers, Rookie Smarts: Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work, and a new book that we’re gonna talk about today, Impact Players: How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger and Multiply your Impact. She’s the CEO, of the Weizmann group, a leadership research and development firm headquartered in Silicon Valley. Some of her recent clients include Apple, AT&T, Disney, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nike, Salesforce, Tesla, and Twitter, Liz has conducted significant research in the field of leadership and collective intelligence and writes for the Harvard Business Review, Fortune, and a variety of other businesses and leadership journals. She is a frequent guest lecturer at BYU. And that’s your Alma Mater, right? Yes. And Stanford University as a former executive at Oracle, which is where I got to know Liz. She worked there as the Vice President of Oracle University as a global leader for human resource development, a lot to talk about. So I just read your bio, which is obviously super prolific. But what I want to start with is, you know, how did you decide to write this particular book, you obviously saw something on the market? Obviously, you started probably thinking about this before the pandemic. So tell us a little bit about how that all came together?
Liz Wiseman 1:57
Well, there’s the noble answer to this question. And then there’s the truth. What do you want? Both? Well, there is a little bit of noble intent is that I think, I think it’s a piece of work that will help people get more out of work. And we can talk more about that I really do think it will create a better work experience for people. Now. Here’s the part that sort of the true reason. So, I want to back up just a little bit on the journey. So, you understand some context and what I’m going to give a fairly truthful answer. Because the truth is I was bored. That’s why I wrote the book. And, you know, when I wrote Multipliers, somebody said, I don’t know. It was like, maybe a year after the book came out, and the book had been shared, and it had been useful. And somebody said, “wow, it must feel so good to have made this contribution to your profession.” Like, wow, I had never thought of it that way. Like I wasn’t trying to make a contribution. I just had a question I didn’t have an answer to and I’m relaying the former president of Oracle once referred to me as a dog on a bone. He’s like you were a dog on a bone like you do not let go of things. And I don’t think he meant like, lack of forgiveness. But it was
Sue Bethanis 3:16
Even in a good way.
Liz Wiseman 3:19
In a good but annoying way. You persist like you personified? Yeah. And so, with Multipliers, I really had this question like, why is it that some leaders seem to amplify intelligence and make everyone smarter, and other people seem to suck the life out of a team and out of a room, and I’m just a dog on a bone like trying to figure out an answer to this. I wasn’t trying to do anything noble. I just, like had this dogged curiosity. And so that’s usually why I get up enough like, oh, to write a book, I just want to know, or I’m bored. And in this case, I was a little bit bored. And it wasn’t I didn’t have things to do. I just was like, I don’t know. Twiddling my thumbs. Yeah. And, and there’s a couple things that really like get me one is, I get bored, having answers to things.
Sue Bethanis 4:15
You want to learn. Yeah, you are a learner.
Liz Wiseman 4:17
Yeah. And I’m like out there teaching and teaching the whole thing and you get into this mode where, you know, it’s the same questions, and I feel like I have the same answers. And then I also get, you know, like, bored of not having an answer. And this is really what drove this book is, I know a lot about what it takes for leaders to create an environment where people can contribute at their best, that I feel like I know a lot about but what I didn’t know a lot about was what does it take for individuals. Like what, what’s the mindset and the practices that individuals need to bring to this and there was this moment of I don’t know if it was a prompt truth, but I was teaching a workshop at Salesforce a place probably that you spent some time too. And, you know, I’m teaching about how to be a multiplier leader and someone in that workshop, you know, raises his hand and I can tell he’s agitated about something he’s like, yay. Yeah, I want to be able to be a Multiplier Leader. Got it? Got it. Got it, but you can’t multiply zero.
Sue Bethanis 5:23
That’s good. Yeah, you can’t the math doesn’t work.
Liz Wiseman 5:27
Well, and, and I am like in horror at first, because I think what he’s saying is I got a bunch of ding-a-lings working on my team, and I can’t do anything with that. Because I was looking at this lens of intelligence. And I was about to, like, you know, like, burst into my speech about, you know, hate. Not everyone’s a genius, I get it. But everyone brings intelligence and capability. And your job as a leader is to multiply that blah, blah, blah. And he’s like, yeah, no, like my job, I have to have a certain, like, approach of mindset to, to bring out the best of people, but people to show up with the right mindset to practices. And like, oh, well, that’s interesting. And what does that look like? And I got tired of like, encountering that situation, and not knowing what that looked like. Okay, so I go into dog on a bone mode.
Sue Bethanis 6:16
And so, so tell us a little bit about this book. And like, how did you different because, you know, you’ve got many books, and you’re so prolific in that. How did you differentiate Impact Player particularly?
Liz Wiseman 6:29
Well, you know, my friend Scott Miller at Franklin Covey, he said, it is like, you know, what, if you’re a leader read Multipliers. If you’re a leader, and you want to, like get the most out of your team, like read Impact Players, and then share it with your team members, that’s kind of I thought that was a very simple way to look at it, which is the book Impact Players is about the impact players of the workforce. So you know, we’re familiar with this term from sports.
Sue Bethanis 6:57
Yeah, I was gonna say you picked it up sports? Yeah, for sure.
Liz Wiseman 7:01
Yeah. And it’s not because I’m a massive sports fan or athlete. It’s just like you, it’s so clear that impact players on a team, these are standout contributors. They’re talented, they’re capable. They, you know, make this amazing contribution, but they also change the team culture, and people play better because there’s this impact layer on your team, you’re like, you know what, we actually stand a chance of doing well, because we’ve got this force on our team. And you know, in some ways, they’re multipliers to the teams. Oh, yeah.
Sue Bethanis 7:33
You mean, you can just teach if we could look at the sports in the Bay Area. I mean, you’ve got Buster Posey, who is the consummate impact player, it doesn’t say much, but because of the way he’s played and the way he, what he does say things that are so impactful, and to be a big loss to the Giants. I mean, he’s bad. Yeah. But to me, it’s his leadership, that’s going to be the biggest loss. And then you got Stephen Curry, of course, who I mean, you know, consummate impact player. And so, it’s affecting our sports. I mean, I’m a big sports person. So, I was like, really happy to see that.
Liz Wiseman 8:11
And I love that you bring up Steph Curry. We were just watching the Warriors game, or one of my friends told me she said, Oh, yeah, you know, because I’ve always thought of like Steph Curry as his big shooter, this point scorer.
Sue Bethanis 8:26
He is. he’s had a problem lately. But go ahead.
Liz Wiseman 8:29
But that’s how I always have seen him. Yes, definitely. And she said, they actually have the statistics to show that other people play better when he is out on the court is that they score more points. Yes. And that is what an impact player really is. So they’re these standout contributors that make teams better. We see it out in the sports world, but they also exist in the work world. And I wanted to know, like, how they think and how they work. And that’s really what the book is about. What is their mindset? What are they? What makes them tick? What do they do differently than other people? And what I’m always fascinated in is what are like the small, seemingly insignificant differences in how people approach their work that end up creating this enormous kind of impact and this difference? And, you know, there are two ways to look at the book. One is, gee, how can we get people to work so that they create more value for the team in the company? You can look and you can actually read the whole book with this lens. There’s another lens to read this book in, which is how do I approach my work so that it creates more joy and satisfaction for me? Because, you know, it’s one thing that we saw with these, these high impact contributors are that they bring extraordinary value to the organization to their managers. They’re service-oriented. But it all comes back to them. Give maybe in terms of like remuneration and promotion and recognition, but also just this kind of satisfaction of knowing you’re doing work that really matters, that making a difference that you’ve built influence and power and impact and it’s kind of a good way to work.
Sue Bethanis 10:26
Okay, so let’s, let’s break it down a little bit. Um, first of all, let me ask you one more question. When did you finish the book? Like, I want to know the timeframe?
Liz Wiseman 10:34
Oh, so, I sent off the manuscript about a year ago. So, March?
Sue Bethanis 10:42
Alright, so you’d had a year COVID? Okay. All right. That’s, that’s gonna cover my questions. Alright, so let’s speak a little bit about what is an impact player? Like, what are the five practices of Impact Player? And then we can apply that to what I’ll go into right now.
Liz Wiseman 11:03
Yeah, well, actually, I want to start, if I can, with kind of what we’re going through right now, because so what I did is, you know, I interviewed 170 managers and looked at how do these people think, and how’s it differently then. And this is probably the most important thing if someone’s gonna read the book, or try to get value from it. Is, I’m not comparing high performers and low performers. This is like, high impact versus rock-solid contributor. So we’re looking for like the thin slices of difference between good and great. And so we’re kind of building this model, and I could see what mindsets and practices differentiated impact players from we’ll call them, ordinary contributors. And as I looked at it, it wasn’t even what was interesting wasn’t the difference in behavior. It was the situations that differentiated them because here’s how managers described these ordinary contributors sort of inaccurate, across 170 data points is they took ownership, they did their job, they did their job extremely well. They were talented, they were smart, they were hard-working, they follow direction, they carry their weight on teams, they were focused, like, what? That’s all good. What’s wrong with that, like, if you offer me a resume or a hire with that profile, I’m going to take it. And what was fascinating is that these ordinary contributors were stellar in ordinary times. So let’s get to the COVID thing. And I remember, like, I was on a plane when I just kept pouring through this behavioral data that I had in the situations that seemed to differentiate them. And it popped out to them like, wow, as I kept clustering them, there were these five situations that the impact players handled very differently than other people. And they are messy problems. When it’s not his job, her job. It’s not that departments charter. It’s not this, it’s like it just kind of is out in no man’s land. But it’s important, right? And in that situation, what most people do is they do their job, like, Oh, here’s my piece of that. And I’ll do my part, where’s the impact players tend to do the job that needs to be done. They have a healthy disrespect for their job description. If I guess my job description is like base camp, like where I hang out, do my work, but I’m really here so that when I spot problems, I can go after them.
Sue Bethanis 13:26
Right? That’s a really good description, and especially obviously, apropos right now still,
Liz Wiseman 13:30
Yeah. Because like, whose job is it to clean up the mess that COVID’s created? Like, whose job is it to solve that problem? What was nobody’s job? You know, now all were suddenly public health officials, the second was unclear roles where, you know, we’re clearly moving to a very collaborative workplace. But we still need to know like, well, who’s in charge of this initiative, or this meeting, where we have these constant leadership vacuums and what most people do I hear it all the time for my friends in the corporate world is like, well, roles are unclear. And like, I need role clarification, we need role clarification, we need someone to come in and tell us what impact players aren’t waiting for this. They’re just stepping in and saying, Well, you know, what, if it’s unclear would it be helpful if I took the lead on this? Yes, please.
Sue Bethanis 14:16
Yeah, yeah, this is great.
Liz Wiseman 14:18
But they don’t need to always be the boss. They can step in and lead a meeting or initiative, but when their work is done, they can step back into their rightful slot in the org chart or what have you, and there’s willingness to follow other people’s lead as they are, their own.
Sue Bethanis 14:36
And you describe some of those as the WIN. What’s important now? Right, I like that the WIN metaphor.
Liz Wiseman 14:44
That was sort of an accidental acronym I usually don’t like those metaphors. In fact, my editor she’s as she sees that she’s like, I usually hate acronyms, but I really liked it. It’s like they have this sense of like, here’s my job, and here’s my base role, but I’m constantly scanning for the WIN: what’s important right now? And how do I channel my energy on what’s important? And how do I step up and lead where I can play an important role. But step back, you know, the third, like it is how they deal with unforeseen obstacles that require no definition, of course. And, you know, and this was the thing, like one of these little nuances that I think has a lot of meaning is that most of the solid contributors, they took ownership, they were responsible for things are like, I got it, I own it. But when they encountered the unreasonable obstacle out of my hands out of my control, above my paygrade, what our default behavior is, is to escalate that up, like okay, let me hand this to the higher-ups. And the impact players just never handed it off, they kept ownership got it over the finish line, but they didn’t do it so low as in, I’m going to heroically handle all these things that are out of my control, right, they were coordinating the response. So rather than, escalate to the SVP, they’re reaching out to the SVP saying, Hey, I’m on this, but I need your help. Like, can I pull you in, I need 10 minutes from you, I need approval from you. But they don’t do the handoff.
Sue Bethanis 16:15
So most of what you’re seeing so far to me sounds like just taking initiative and not just taking it in for the sake of taking it but doing it is most relevant as the way and I wonder when what’s important now and the most relevant situations?
Liz Wiseman 16:29
Yeah. Well cause, you know, taking initiative, there’s a lot of people who take initiative who honestly really annoy me. See, admit it, like it kind of know you to where someone’s like, Hey, this is what I want. Like, give me this, put me in coach. Yeah, that’s they’re pursuing their agenda.
Sue Bethanis 16:48
Yeah, exactly. Right. It’s for the exactly right.
Liz Wiseman 16:51
And the impact player is taking that initiative, like put me in coach, but they understand the moment they’re like, I will do the job. I will, I will help the team secure the win. But this is not showboating. And. Right. So it’s an initiative aimed at what’s in service to the organization.
Sue Bethanis 17:08
Now, you’ve not played sports in your life?
Liz Wiseman 17:11
Oh no, I’ve played sports. I play them particularly well, like poker. Okay.
Sue Bethanis 17:15
Because this so much of what you’re saying is good players and leaders, you know, captains and leaders were taken down to the moment, so it resonates a lot of people. Yeah.
Liz Wiseman 17:26
And, you know, I’ve played some sports and been on teams, but I’ve also been, you know, a 4x Mom, you know, like four-time mom, and I’ve been to a lot of games. And like, there’s this one moment. This is like you toss your kid under the bus just a little bit in this example here. But, you know, I remember when my daughters like her coach said, “Man, that girl-” she’s playing soccer. “She’s like a one-woman wrecking crew.” And like, she would just like blast through everyone. And that’s kind of what that initiative looks like without being aware of what’s going on versus like that same initiative, but total awareness and ability to read the field. And know what does my team need for me right now? And maybe it’s for me to drop back and let somebody else drive to the goal.
Sue Bethanis 18:14
Yep. Yeah. Okay, great. So okay, so we’re on four.
Liz Wiseman 18:18
Oh, four, moving targets, like, the mark is changing, the situation’s changing like we started the project. And how many times do we encounter this, I started the project with one objective, but it keeps morphing on me, it’s changing. And I can’t pin down what we’re trying to accomplish when the targets are moving. And, you know, what the ordinary contributor does is they try to manage and minimize that change, like, Okay, let’s see if we can get this thing. Let’s pin it to the wall. So we can shoot at this target. And the impact players are saying, okay, targets changed. Let me change with it. And the image that I get with this one is like this idea that you finish a day of work, you go to sleep, they sleep for eight hours, this fantasy situation, you know, you wake up the next morning, and you just assume that while you were sleeping, the world changed that your world changed that this project you’re working on, you can’t just pick it up and carry on with it, you probably have to, like check-in like what’s happened, like, you wake up expecting things to have changed on you.
Sue Bethanis 19:23
Yeah, that’s awesome. You expect that you expect the uncertainty.
Liz Wiseman 19:26
And I that so I think you’ve nailed one of the themes of across this is that the impact player and, and really, it’s the mindset that allows us to have a lot of impact is when we just normalize problems. Yeah, you expect them, you’re not trying to avoid them. You’re like my job is to solve problems. I will have problems this will be hard. This will change on us. This is our reality, you know, and the last difference is, how they deal with just unrelenting demands when the workload just feels heavy. You know, most people are looking for help which ends up adding to the burden that managers and their colleagues are already feeling. They’re sort of high maintenance. Like, here’s what I need and the impact players finding a way to just make work light. For everyone like this. It was this word that just kept coming up in all these interviews is like they were easy. Not easy going.
Sue Bethanis 20:18
I wouldn’t think so. Yeah, they are trying to make things easier.
Liz Wiseman 20:21
They just made things easier, like if they’re going to forward. So I’d like to think in very practical terms on this, you know, if they’re going to afford a long email chain, where it’s like, everyone’s been weighing in on this, they forward it to their colleague or their boss, they wouldn’t dare forward it and say, What do you think? Your thoughts question mark, which then creates this burden, like, okay, great. Now I have to read that whole thing. They will have summarized it saying, this email chain, you know, we’re debating these two issues, we need to decide if a or b, I think we should do a, you know, do you agree? Or, like, they’re, they’re making themselves easy to work with.
Sue Bethanis 20:57
I love it.
Liz Wiseman 20:58
They’re low maintenance. They’re like these cars that just go but no, require this like constant trip to the shop.
Sue Bethanis 21:06
Right? Okay. I love it. Okay, so let’s take these, they’re all amazing. And let’s apply it to what you’ve noticed in just in general, how were really, focused on tech right now. Most of tech is still remote. I mean, we keep saying the hybrid. But there’s, you know, we keep saying we’re going to go back, and we’re not going back yet. It’s been two years now, I think people get used to being home. So how has this? How are these practices that you just outlined? How does the impact player have as much impact remote as they would in the office?
Liz Wiseman 21:41
Well, I think it starts with, like, kind of what is the impact player mindset do with our current reality is these five situations and they’re probably a few more, but these are the biggies. This is the reality of the modern workplace. And you know, it’s, these aren’t the exceptions, these are now the rules like these are the situations to master. Like, in some ways, when you write a book like this, you think, Oh, I’m trying to advocate for a set of mindset to behaviors. And in some ways, what I’m really advocating for is, you know, what, these are the situations to gain mastery of like, know how to deal with messy problems. You know, know how to respond when you see a leadership vacuum or roles are unclear. If you want to hire people with these kinds of capabilities, hire people who are adept at these kinds of situations. Yeah. You know, what does this look like in the remote world? You know, the remote world is just generating more and more of these kinds of problems. Can I just rant a little bit about the problems created by the remote world? Yes. So let’s think about the problems generated, then this would be a great thing for people who are logged on to add to, so it creates a whole set of messy problems. It also creates, I’m going to do this in no particular order. They come in my head, it creates social isolation. Just I’m listening to a book this morning. See, No Stranger, I think is what it’s called, talked about. Technically, if a prisoner is in solitary confinement for 15 days, it’s equivalent to torture. So it’s like now raises that to experience of torture, like 15 days in solitary confinement, like We’re way beyond that. Like, there’s a lot of people are like, oh, yeah, I passed the 15-day mark, all by myself a long time ago. Yeah. And so we’re coming out of this experience where our community structures are being broken down. I’m out for a walk in the morning. And I’m like, oh, yeah, those are my neighbors. I remember once talking to them, knowing them, sharing like bread with them. And it’s happening in our workplace. And you know, the impact player is building community is building longing. They’re making hard things feel light for everyone. There’s just one story in the book about Sue Warnky, and a woman named Lynn at Salesforce that just is emblematic of what this kind of community looks like. It’s acknowledging that you know what, everyone’s going through hard stuff. Let’s not add to this phantom workload, being remote. I think some of the most insidious problems is it really, really easy for a lot of would-be impact players to go missing, that the loudest person is the one who gets attention. And I think there’s, it’s so easy for people to get off their game because they’re not getting all of those subtext messages about what’s important. They’re like, oh, I’m just doing my work. And they don’t look up to realize, Wow, the priorities are shifted, and you miss that conversation. It’s all that hallway connective tissue that we get when we’re in person. And so it’s so easy to miss the mark right now. And it’s really easy for some people more than others to go unseen
Sue Bethanis 24:59
Well, it takes more for an impact player would have more effort to connect. You can’t just sit around in your house, you have to make an effort to do extra calls or connect on Slack or whatever. I mean, there’s a lot to do or say, Hey, let’s go for a walk. It’s safe to go for a walk in the park even now. Yeah, it takes initiative. You can’t just sit around. And this is everything you say, it comes back to taking initiative.
Liz Wiseman 25:26
It does. It was fun. My young son, my youngest, who’s just started his freshman year at college. He said his word for this year, it was kind of a new thing. He said, “Mom, do you know people like come up with words to like, instead of New Year’s resolutions like New Year’s words, and mine’s gonna be proactive.” Oh, good. And, and you know, he’s an introvert who’s gone off to college, with his last year and a half of high school, like, from his bedroom, and from his bed and you know, hasn’t really reached out to people. So yeah, it’s really easy to get isolated, it’s really easy for people who aren’t in a dominant demographic group, yep. To go unseen, it’s really easy for people who do work behind the scenes to be missing for their managers not to see the value of their contribution. And I think one of the things that we don’t really talk about a lot, is that working remote breaks chains of impact in consequence. So let’s say I am a financial analyst, and I do a piece of work and now an analysis and I send it off to my boss or my client internally. And then, you know, they go and do something with it. Now, if I’m working in the office, someone might say, Oh, hey, you know what, Liz, you know, the analysis you did, it was actually really useful. Because we were in this meeting, we had to decide if we were going to invest in A or B, and we decided to invest in B because of your analysis, like, hey, at a girl. Whereas if I send it in over email, I upload it to Box. Like, oh, yeah, it’s a black hole and managers right now, I try to plead with managers, it helps people see how their work has an impact. Yeah, it’s, we’re, we’re losing it. Really.
Sue Bethanis 27:11
I love when you said how people need to be seen, it’s like, and that, again, takes effort, it takes extra effort to get on their calendars, it takes effort to follow up on with a phone call after a group meeting it. We have clients who will get up jump on Slack, real quick after or pick up the phone and I call it lingering. Linger after or linger before, you know get on early noon. Number one, no one ever gets on Zoom really. So let’s assume they’re going to stay on for a little extra time after, stop the meeting early. So you can linger.
Liz Wiseman 27:50
And the efficiency of online meetings and connections allows us to concatenate all of these interactions and work and not have that whitespace that down space that’s lingering to kind of cleanse the palate.
Sue Bethanis 28:06
Yeah. Yeah. And then you just go on to the next one. Right? It’s just it’s really, and then exhausted. I mean, I when I’m on Zoom for 5/6/7 meetings, which I rarely do. This is what our clients are doing every day. They’re doing 7/8/9 meetings every day. And I don’t even know how that even happens. Like there’s such an exhaustion of just having to be up.
Liz Wiseman 28:27
Yeah. And it seems great. It’s like Disneyland with the Fast Pass, or the VIP pass, which I once got because I did some work for Disney. And you can hop from ride to ride riding. You’re like, this is great. This is so efficient. And then at the end of the day, which is what you know, what did you like? I’m like, I don’t know. I’m just like catatonic here. Like it was so overwhelming. And I think that’s what’s happening is we’re not getting that reflection, that lingering and connection. Yeah, because we’re so efficient.
Sue Bethanis 29:02
Okay, so this is great. Everybody, you’re welcome to jump in here and ask Liz questions or make a comment. We talked a lot about many things, messy problems, unclear roles, dealing with them, seeing obstacles, moving targets, and unrelenting demand. So those are the five practices to comment on those or you could just ask anything, Jim, you were on first go ahead.
Jim 29:25
I think it was a great book. And I work for a company called Drift. We’re big in like books and stuff. And so we read a lot of books and I think it was it was great. It was very, like direct and really relative to a lot of what’s going on. The one thing the one comment I would also have and I liked all your comments around impact players, is I think the other thing that we have seen is the impact players then drive other impact players underneath them, other people underneath them to become impact players because, in fact, they take on these special projects, and therefore they have to push some of the stuff that’s on there, but down to other people. And I think that is another important characteristic of how to develop people in an organization.
Sue Bethanis 30:11
So, definitely assist. Go ahead.
Liz Wiseman 30:14
Yeah, that, you know, we often think, oh, development happens, and that coaching happens between the manager and the team member, but that pure based modeling, coaching, mentoring, like, Hey, let me give you some of my, what’s on my plate and help you be successful. I think it’s a much more powerful form of learning. I agree with you.
Sue Bethanis 30:37
Cool. All right, who’s next? Kari, you have a comment?
Kari 30:40
A question. Hi, Thank you, Liz, I just have your new one on order and love multipliers. I recommend that all the time. I specialize in women’s leadership. And obviously, we’ve all seen the issues that have happened with women over the pandemic. And what I’m curious about, because this, this really describes a lot of my high power eight type clients. And a lot of them are getting burnout because they take on too much. So how do you balance that? Yeah,
Liz Wiseman 31:09
Well, thank you for bringing up this topic of burnout of workload, I think there’s an important distinction between doing more work versus doing harder work. And what tends to generate burnout is when we have too much of the same type of work, and we feel like we’re turning a crank. In fact, this turning a crank was in some ways, the metaphor that I would choose for people who were stuck in this contributor mindset, which is like I’m doing my job, I’m turning the crank, you know, more work and giving someone more work and being constantly taking on more work can lead to burnout. But what actually is the antidote to burnout, in my perspective, is doing harder work, not more work, you know, work that is inherently challenging work. Like that taps into, like, oh, I don’t know how to do that. And so I think it’s easy for us to look at burnout and say burnout is a function of too much work. Let’s take our foot off the accelerator. Let’s take time off. Let’s, you know, take sabbaticals, let’s do a four-day workweek. And those are great, they provide temporary relief, but they don’t actually address burnout. And I think if we really want to address burnout, it’s helping people see the impact of their work. Now, you know, being a working woman, I think, working women and mothers are amazing, and they can do incredible things. And what we need is we need challenges that we put our energy behind rather than, like energy that just spins in the cycle. So I some of this is time-based, and we need to figure out how to let women who are now doing more roles than they then they reasonably can like, the answer isn’t just to go easy on them. Because I think what we’ll do is leave these women in a cycle of under contribution for a long period of time. So I think we have to be wise to say, actually, what we need is deeper engagement, not just a lighter workload. This is, I think, a more complicated topic than something we dress quickly, but it’s actually one that’s close to my heart. And I have a number of women on my team who during the pandemic were like, I’m out I can’t do this. I can’t homeschool three boys. And do this work. Um, so I’ve experienced this firsthand.
Sue Bethanis 33:49
Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Kari. Good to see you. Thanks. You too. Yeah. Richard, you have a question or comment?
Richard 33:57
Question. Hi, Sue. And hi, Liz. Thanks for the discussion. I’m curious about your five characteristics. And whether you have an opinion or a hypothesis, or even have done any research into whether they are more innate, or more learnable. And if the ladder, What do you have some hypotheses on how the best leaders can learn those types of impact behaviors?
Liz Wiseman 34:22
Yeah, thank you for that question. And I do and I would say I have a hypothesis, not a conclusion on this. So I come from the world of learning and development. And I am a natural-born optimist, like kind of too many a couple extra helpings of can-do attitude. And so my first reaction is I’m going through this is Oh, yeah, I’m gonna like, decompose what impact players doing what they think and then I’m going to write about it so that everyone can learn to do this. And that’s my sunny optimism at work. And you know, somewhere in that process of like, oh, yeah, some of these aren’t that easy to learn. And so there’s a little piece of extra research that my team and I did was going through once we knew here’s what this looks like is to stratify. Which of these are the least coachable, and which are the most coachable? Now, I don’t think there’s anything in there that I would say is unlearnable. But like, let’s say, you know, some of them like if you go to the root of some of these practices of mindsets, it comes down to like, internal locus of control, like how a sense of your agency and these are things that get built into us pretty early in life, like formative experiences in the workplace, in our families, and they can be altered, but that’s hard work. So there’s a little section in the book and it’s right at the end, if you wrote to info@theweizmanngroup.com, we would just send it to you. But it’s, it’s right here on page 339, it looks like this, I took all of the different mindsets and practices and put them into three buckets, least coachable relative, most coachable, that was based on serving, you know, the Marshall Goldsmith 100 coaches, so kind of a global population of coaches and said, If you have experienced coaching these, what has been your experience in like the act of coaching itself, and that’s what it’s based on. So I think it’s interesting, but I would see this as very much tentative and I hypothesis like, and one of the things that we’re doing is
Sue Bethanis 36:28
I wonder what the impact players themselves would say?
Liz Wiseman 36:31
As part of the research we went and I did a double click interview with the 25 of these impact players, and like, where did you learn how to do this? Yeah, like, and like, I’m trying to trace it back to how early did this happen? And a lot of it was kind of I learned it at my mother’s knee. Like, oh, my dad always encouraged me, he told me, you know what, I should always be my own boss. Yeah, she now works at Google and worked for, you know, Cargo, like these big companies. But she always said, like, no, no, I was taught to be my own boss.
Sue Bethanis 37:07
Which one’s the hardest?
Liz Wiseman 37:10
Now, I guess go back to that page, is it? Well, okay, so it’s on page 239, and the least coachable is our internal locus of control? I think that is very, very difficult. Like when you get a colleague, an employee, a friend who is stuck in a victim mindset, which is kind of the opposite of internal locus control is, other people are doing these things to me, right? Think about how hard it is to help that friend see a different reality.
Sue Bethanis 37:40
Yeah, it’s up in which one is internal locus control? With the practices, which one is that related to? I mean, it’s really into all of them
Liz Wiseman 37:47
It kind of sits underneath all of them. But it’s a very it drives ‘do the job that’s needed rather than do your job’. Because he’s like, oh, yeah, no, I have the power, step up and lead. You know, I don’t need to have formal authority, like, I can act for myself. Um, okay. You know, another one that shows up as really hard to coach is what I call this opportunity lens on things, which is, do I see ambiguity as a threat? Or do I see ambiguity and uncertainty as an opportunity for me to shape like, you know, someone with an opportunity lens is like, oh, yeah, like, it’s not clear what we should do. There are no rules here that are completely off the rails, this is a problem, versus someone who’s like, well, yeah, but nobody’s telling us what we can’t do either. So therefore, we have like, power to go in and do it. Like, let’s take this sort of chaotic scene as an opportunity to advance our cause. Yeah, that shows up as harder to coach, which frustrates me because I want that to be easy to learn how to do.
Sue Bethanis 38:50
Well, I think both of those have to do with this idea of, you know, how you deal with uncertainty. And I go back, keep going back to that, like, what is your, as a leader like, how do you deal with things that come up, you don’t expect? and so what I’ve, what I try to do for myself, especially raising a teenager is this expect, and you’ve been through this now, four times, and I didn’t realize your last one was already at college that’s amazing, is that you just expected stuff to happen. You expect them to be in bad moods in the end and expect things that with COVID that you don’t, that you didn’t expect? And that and that when that happens, you don’t you’re not going to freak out as much. And the question is, where do you learn that? I mean, some of it, you learn because it’s happened to you, you know, from experience. Yeah. But some of it is a very positive, like you can always get over something. I mean, that’s a that is a locus of control that locus control, you can always get over something.
Liz Wiseman 39:46
Yeah. Yeah. And I think we have to look at the broad stripes on this, which is what we people of my generation have done to the youth who are now entering into the workforce because we’ve done some great things, and we’ve done some disservice, like, I think we were sort of raised a generation to say, hey, you can do anything you want. But you know, like, take charge show initiative, like, contact the CEO, make stuff happen start a company. But we’ve also created this soft messaging that says life should be easy. Because a whole generation of parents that Oh, my job is to like clear obstacles for you. And, you know, make it easy for you to get into college to get a good grade. Hey, I packed your lunch. Hey, I went ahead and took the liberty of like, we’ve created ease for our kids. Yeah, I’m sure it’s contrary to I think the reality is, oh, by the way, it’s hard. College will be hard. You will, you know, you will get grades that disappoint you; life’s supposed to be life is hard. And good point. How do we undo some of what we think we’ve done to young people who are entering the workforce?
Sue Bethanis 40:53
Yeah, it’s a great point. Richard, I just want to say thank you for your question. So any last thoughts in terms of how we can as managers and coaches, how we can teach and guide? I like the idea of giving guidance rather than feedback. I like that part of what you said in your book. This is about guidance.
Liz Wiseman 41:14
Yeah, it’s giving people information that they need. Like, I feel like we just need to demystify the whole feedback world, and maybe even accept that people aren’t going to be good at giving it and people aren’t going to be good at receiving it, like feedback, like, makes us all itchy. But like instead be dispensers of information. Like wow, here’s the information you need to know what’s important. Here’s the information you need to know to know how that session went. It’s like instead of, you know, causing people to sort of work without sight and vision, and Intel, it’s just like, open that up and give people the information they need to be successful.
Sue Bethanis 41:57
Yeah, I totally agree with you. I just simplified it down to what’s worked and what’s working and what’s not working. Yeah, you know, it’s like, it’s all practical. And let’s move on. And I agree with you demystifying de- We’ll talk about that next time.
Liz Wiseman 42:13
So we want feedback. Nobody wants advice. You know, even my mom, she turned 80 this week, and she came bursting into my house on Sunday. And she’s like, I love being 80, I feel wise do you want some life advice? And I literally just knee-jerk said “No, no, I don’t.” She was so disappointed. Terrible daughter. But I was like, no, because like who wants to unsolicited advice, not even me from my 80-year-old mom.
Sue Bethanis 42:39
Like, we’ll end on that. I love it. So, everybody, you can get ahold of Liz through LinkedIn of course. And you can go on her website, wisemangroup.com. The book is Impact Players: How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger and Multiply Your Impact. So again, just thank you so much for being with us. I love your stories and your metaphors. And so thanks again for starting us out this year with such an impactful, insightful set of ideas. And as always, I appreciate you very much.
Liz Wiseman 43:09
Oh, thank you. And so keep doing all that work that you do.
Sue Bethanis 43:12
Okay, thanks, Liz, everybody.