Impact Players

Liz Wiseman

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780063063334
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Workplace Culture
• Index: Business

Thinkers50 Top 10 Best New Management Books for 2022

Why do some people break through and make an impact while others get stuck going through the motions?

In every organization there are Impact Players—those indispensable colleagues who can be counted on in critical situations and who consistently receive high-profile assignments and new opportunities.Whether they are on center stage or behind the scenes, managers know who these top players are, understand their worth, and want more of them on their team.While their impact is obvious, it's not always clear what actually makes these professionals different from their peers.

In Impact Players, New York Times bestselling author and researcher Liz Wiseman reveals the secrets of these stellar professionals who play the game at a higher level.Drawing on insights from leaders at top companies, Wiseman explains what the most influential players are doing differently, how small and seemingly insignificant differences in how we think and act can make an enormous impact, and why—with a little coaching—this mindset is available to everyone who wants to contribute at their highest level.

Based on a study of 170 top contributors, Wiseman identifies the mindsets that prevent otherwise smart, capable people from contributing to their full potential and the five practices that differentiate Impact Players:

• While others do their job, Impact Players figure out the real job to be done.
• While others wait for direction, Impact Players step up and lead.
• While others escalate problems, Impact Players move things across the finish line.
• While others attempt to minimize change, Impact Players are learning and adapting to change.
• While others add to the load, the Impact Players make heavy demands feel lighter.

Wiseman makes clear that these practices—and the right mindset—can help any employee contribute at their fullest and shows leaders how they can raise the level of play for everyone on the team. Impact Players is your playbook for the new workplace.

Part I

The Impact Players

Chapter 1

The Impact Players

Talent is everywhere, winning attitude is not.

—DAN GABLE

Monica Padman left college with two degrees in hand—one in theater and one in public relations, the latter acquired to appease her parents. She moved to Hollywood to follow her dream of becoming an actor and comedian—to make people laugh and feel. Like most striving actors, she worked a variety of part-time jobs in between auditions and small roles.

Padman scored a small part on Showtime’s House of Lies, where she played the on-screen assistant to the actress Kristen Bell. They became friendly, and when Padman realized Bell had a young daughter, she mentioned that she did some babysitting. Bell and her husband, the actor Dax Shepard, took her up on the offer. As she became a trusted part of the household, she saw the challenges Bell faced juggling multiple acting and producing projects and offered to help her with scheduling. Though it might have been tempting for the aspiring actress to ask the Hollywood A-lister to help her get on-screen roles, Padman worked where she was needed—ironically, as Bell’s off-screen assistant.

When Bell and Shepard asked her to work for them full-time, Padman was understandably reluctant—how would she find time to audition? The job could be a detour. But she decided to take it. Over time, she became more than just a trusted employee; she became a friend and creative partner to both Bell and Shepard. She worked energetically wherever she saw a need and was soon reviewing scripts and collaborating on projects. “Everything she does is at 110 percent,” Bell said of Padman, “but she’s so not a person who walks around showing you that she has 110 percent. [She has] no bravado.” Before long, Padman had become so essential that Bell wondered aloud, “How did I do any of this without Monica?”¹

While working for the family, she spent many hours sitting on the porch debating with Shepard, known for his contrarian ways. Their arguments were as fun as they were fierce, so when Shepard suggested they develop their banter into a podcast, she was up for that too. Thus was born Armchair Expert, a podcast where cohosts Shepard and Padman explore the messiness of being human with experts and celebrity guests. Smart, funny, playful, and thought provoking, the podcast became 2018’s most downloaded new podcast and has continued to grow in popularity.

Two years and roughly two hundred episodes later, Padman reflected, “It’s very, very easy, especially in pursuit of a career in the entertainment industry, to have tunnel vision. I think that’s universal about any job. You have your sights set on something, and you have a tunnel to that goal. In my experience, it’s better to have a looser grip on that.”²

Padman could have pursued a direct path to her passion. Instead, she worked wholeheartedly where she could be most useful. By playing passionately where she was most needed, she found a bigger opportunity and, perhaps, her true purpose.

THE IMPACT PLAYERS

Professionals such as Monica Padman, and many more like her in other industries, are the all-stars of the workplace who bring their A-game everywhere they go and to everything they do. They are people who could be dropped into any of a dozen different roles and would find success. They are professionals who become instrumental to their organizations and thrive in times of economic hardship and change. They work with purpose and passion, but their passion is channeled, focused on what matters most to the organizations they work for and the issues of our time. These professionals often become influential voices in the world, known as much for their unique capabilities as for their broad impact.

They are Impact Players: players who make a significant contribution individually but who also have an enormously positive effect on the entire team. Like an Impact Player in sports, the superstars in the workplace all have “game.” They are smart and talented and have an extraordinary work ethic; but as with Impact Players in athletics, there is something more than just talent and work ethic at play. There’s also their mental game: how they view their role, work with their managers, and deal with adversity and ambiguity, and how willing they are to improve.

In this chapter, I’ll share the insights gleaned from our study of Impact Players and will introduce the practices and the mindsets that cause their work to land with impact and differentiate them from other hardworking contributors. First, some definition is in order. In the research, my team and I studied these three different categories of contributors:

High-impact contributors: Those who are doing work of exceptional value and impact

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Typical contributors: Smart, talented people who are doing solid (if not great) work

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Under-contributors: Smart, talented people who are playing below their capability level

This book will focus primarily on the distinction between the first two categories in order to explore the subtle, often counterintuitive differences in mindset that become big differentiators in impact. Throughout the book, I’ll refer to the two groups as Impact Players and Contributors. You can find a full account of the research process at ImpactPlayersBook.com, including our interviews with 170 managers from nine companies who worked in ten countries, surveys of 350 managers from broader industries, and in-depth interviews with 25 high-impact contributors.

UNDERSTANDING THE IMPACT PLAYER

So what did we find? For starters, we found Impact Players across a wide variety of job types, at all levels, and in every industry we encountered. Some of them serve in highly visible roles, such as Monica Padman, or receive public praise, such as Dr. Beth Ripley, a medical researcher who was awarded a 2020 Service to America Medal by the Partnership for Public Service for her pioneering work in 3D printing.³

Others, such as Arnold “Jojo” Mirador, a scrub tech at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, work in less visible roles. The surgeons he works with agree: when you step into Jojo’s operating room, the procedure will go well. When Jojo prepares for surgery, he doesn’t just lay out all the right instruments; he lays them out in the order in which they will be used. When a surgical resident asks for an instrument, Jojo doesn’t just hand over the one the surgeons-in-training requested; he provides the instrument that they should have asked for, the one Jojo knows they actually need, and offers a gentle suggestion.

Something else was very clear: Those considered typical contributors were no slouches. They were capable, diligent, hardworking professionals. They did their jobs well, followed direction, took ownership, stayed focused, and carried their weight. In many ways they were the type of employees any manager would want on their team.

However, in analyzing the differences between high-impact players and other hardworking contributors, I discovered four key differences in how they think and work. We’ll begin with the fundamental difference in how they see everyday challenges.

Impact Players Wear Opportunity Goggles

The approach taken by Impact Players isn’t just marginally different, it is radically different—and it’s rooted in how these professionals deal with situations they cannot control. The typical contributors excelled in ordinary situations, but they were more easily flummoxed by uncertainty and got stuck amid ambiguity. When others may have freaked out or checked out, Impact Players dove into the chaos head-on, much as a savvy ocean swimmer dives into and through a massive oncoming wave rather than panicking and being tumbled in the surf.

Virtually all professionals deal with waves of ambiguity, regardless of where they work. These challenges are problems everyone can see but no one owns, meetings with many participants but no clear leaders, new terrain with never-before-seen obstacles, goals that morph as they get closer, and work demands that increase faster than one’s capability grows. These challenges, once considered extraordinary, have become the everyday, perennial realities of the modern workplace, and the way Impact Players view and respond to these external factors is at the heart of what makes them extraordinarily valuable.

EVERYDAY CHALLENGES

Impact Players respond differently to these perennial forces and frustrations at work

A Problem to Avoid

If you work in a complex organization or a dynamic environment, you know that challenges are unavoidable. Still, many of us do our best to avoid them. But what happens when we try to sidestep these problems? Former NFL wide receiver Eric Boles recounted a moment of weakness in his rookie year with the New York Giants. As a wide receiver, his role was to run, catch passes, and keep running. So his mentality as a player was to avoid getting hit. But in addition to playing wide receiver, he played on special teams as a flyer. During the kickoff, his job was to sprint down the field toward the opposing players and break up their offensive formation called “the wedge”—a human wall of massive blockers who run in front of their kickoff returner to prevent the receiver from being tackled. In one of his first season games, as he came face-to-face with this enormous obstacle intent on destroying anything in its way, his instinct to avoid getting hit kicked into effect. Instead of hitting the wedge head-on, he cut to the left and ran around it. He then successfully made the tackle from behind, but on the 45-yard line rather than the 20. That 25-yard advancement ultimately cost the Giants the game and a chance to advance to the playoffs later in the season. As Boles put it, “Fear is expensive.”⁴

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 but personal threats that could jeopardize their position or organizational status. Where others may spot a single bee but fear an entire swarm, the Impact Player is figuring out how to build a hive and harvest the honey.

An Opportunity to Add Value

The Impact Players in our study see everyday challenges as opportunities. To Impact Players, unclear direction and changing priorities are chances to add value. They are energized by the messy problems that would enervate or foil others. Lack of clarity doesn’t paralyze them; it provokes them. Invitations to make changes are intriguing, not intimidating. Perhaps most fundamentally, they don’t see problems as distractions from their job; rather, they are the job—not just their job, but everyone’s job.

THREAT LENS VS. OPPORTUNITY LENS

Impact Players tend to see opportunity where others see threat

For example, when Jethro Jones interviewed for the job of principal at Tanana Middle School in Fairbanks, Alaska, he learned that the school was being considered for closure due to declining enrollment. The school would continue operations for the next year or two, but without a major turnaround and increased enrollment, it would be shuttered. Unsurprisingly, the staff felt hopeless and were fairly pessimistic about the school’s future.

But Jethro accepted the job, sensing an opportunity to innovate on behalf of the students. In his first staff meeting, he acknowledged the challenges, but told the staff, “We’re in a great position. Everyone predicts that this school will be closed. We have nothing to lose, which gives us a unique opportunity to take risks and do things differently.”⁵ Willing to give the new principal a chance, the staff began thinking of ways they could personalize the learning experience for each student, which Jethro supported with staff training and other resources. Instead of feeling threatened by the possibility of the school’s closing, the staff became energized and got students involved, too. In collaboration with the teachers, the students built hockey rinks, repaired furniture, and made escape rooms. They started programs and clubs; soon they had a dance team, a service organization, and programs to teach sign language, raise awareness about suicide, and prevent bullying.

By treating this threat as an opportunity for reinvention, the te...