Plan, Act, Impact (eBook)

A Playbook to Elevate Your Perspective and Unstick Your Career

Colt McAnlis (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
246 Seiten
Lioncrest Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-5445-1888-6 (ISBN)

On the fast track. In the corner office. In the right place at the right time. You undoubtedly know people who epitomize these sayings, as if their career is on a constant upward trajectory and nothing can bring them down, in spirit or success. They're calm, happy-impactful. Perhaps you want to be this person; perhaps you once were this person. No matter where you are now or how you feel about your progress, you can make changes to get out of survival mode and onto the path toward your true potential. You just need a plan. In Plan, Act, Impact, Colt McAnlis shows you how to let go of cynicism, gain traction, and achieve the goals that matter to you. By introducing you to his step-by-step approach for charting your unique course, Colt shows you how to escape the mania of the moment, establish objectives, and recognize the impact you can make (and how to make it). Finding your place in the workforce can be a difficult journey, especially when the right mentors are hard to come by. Let Colt be your mentor and give you the tools you need to succeed and the mindset to know that you can.

INTRODUCTION

Joanna’s smart. She’s got the right education. She’s driven and she’s focused. She’s so committed to her job she knows where all the light switches are—that’s a side effect of being the first one in every morning and the last one to leave every night.

Yet, she was passed over for promotion, again, this year. Why?

Because, despite working hard and putting in all the hours, every six months Joanna’s performance appraisal is summed up in three words: not enough impact.

For most of us, the concept of impact permeates our professional lives. It is the benchmark corporations measure against to decide where resources should flow and who gets rewarded for serving the corporate good. The value of making impact is immense. If the company you work for has an impact, its stock goes up. If your group makes an impact, it will get more funding. And, if you have impact, then promotions and pay raises will fall from the sky upon you.

However, the inverse is true, as we see with Joanna. And if she doesn’t create enough impact this year, yet again, the chances are slim that she’ll receive a promotion or raise. Even worse, should the company itself not make enough impact, then she may not even see the guarantee of a job.

But despite the constant murmur in the background about people making an impact and the perpetual push to do work that is impactful, it seems there’s a lack of agreement over what impact means. If you ask ten different coworkers for their definition, you’ll likely get ten different answers.

• It’s about producing results.

• It’s about doing what your manager wants.

• It’s about doing the right thing, even if it’s not what your manager wants.

• It’s about customer happiness.

• It’s about the bottom line.

• It’s not about customer happiness but just doing enough to keep them paying.

The list could go on, but we think we made our point. Your coworkers are likely as clueless as you are. So perhaps you could look beyond your coworkers to the managers, leaders, and owners of your company. Surely, they would know what impact is, right? After all, they are the ones doing the evaluating against it. They are the ones driving the big decisions based on making impact. And didn’t they achieve their positions and rank by mastering it? They must be able to define it.

Sadly, that’s just not always the case. We see confusion about impact play out at the upper levels, too. It frequently takes the form of a new VP joining the company and bringing with him a bold vision to turn things around. He makes daring moves. He gains resources, pivots the organization, keeps everyone on track, and drives them towards his vision. The pace is relentless, but he assures everyone it’s going to be huge.

But then, the project goes nowhere. The impact isn’t made. Everyone is burnt out. And eighteen months later, there’s an announcement stating he’s leaving the company to “spend more time with his family.” The replacement steps in and unveils new grand plans while the rest of the division heaves a collective sigh and shakes their heads. “Here we go again,” they think in unison.

Perhaps it only makes sense that many of us are frustrated. We cannot rely on our leaders to offer us a guide to sustain impact or on our management to give us a straight answer on what impact is, yet every twelve months, we sit in a room and hear them lecture us on how we didn’t create enough of it. Meanwhile, some of our peers seem to have it down.

We watch them get promoted again and again with a natural skepticism. From our perspective, they seem to be doing the same work we are but getting the right kinds of credit. What do they know that we don’t? Is it a secret handshake? The right presentation template? Did they download a premium font? Or is it something more nefarious, like being drinking buddies with the boss?

Like it or not, it appears there is an “in” club where all the members seem to have impact down to a science. We’ve all known someone on their roster: a rising-star coworker perfectly aligned with company goals and tapped into the right resources. Passionate about what they do, they have a series of successful endeavors and they rocket up the ladder. People like Joanna, meanwhile, are left spinning their wheels in the proverbial dust tracks.

I was a member of the impact club early in my career. Then I was kicked out—or rather, I wandered out. I wish I could say my departure was because I never mastered the secret handshake or that I didn’t follow the directions given by the underground podcast. But the truth is, I never really knew I was in the club to begin with, nor understood what it took to stay in there.

See, I joined the club through grit and dumb luck. And once inside, I didn’t know the rules I was expected to play by. So, when I got booted, I really had no idea what caused the change.

The good news is that I am back in the club, this time with intention. Finding my way back reads like a badly written detective novel, but in short: I focused on figuring out why some people were consistently successful and some were not. I analyzed why my managers and executives would get obsessed with goals that only wasted time and money, and I discovered that those patterns of behavior that led to a lack of impact were prevalent, regardless of what company I was looking at.

I even took a long look at my own past to figure out what I did right (and wrong). After quite a bit of research, questions, hordes of misfires, and perhaps too many bottles of whiskey, I finally stumbled across what I was looking for. It had been right in front of me all along, I just didn’t recognize it. I found the art of making impact.*

MAKING IMPACT

Over the past decade, I’ve had the pleasure of being able to mentor peers and consult with companies, which besides being fulfilling in its own right, provided quite a bit of insight into the behavior patterns and anti-patterns that go into making impact.

Behavior patterns that lead to the right goals being targeted and achieved lead to making impact. Conversely, anti-patterns either lead to the wrong goals or they enable unimpactful actions.

After witnessing many anti-patterns, I can categorize them into three main camps. First (and most common) is getting caught in the quagmire of focusing on actions and work that “feel” right or that “seem” right, but in the end have no ability to create measurable results that matter to anyone. Joanna, from above, specialized in that kind of work. Second, are actions that create impressive impact but no one signed off their approval saying those specific results were wanted. And the third set of anti-patterns involves putting in massive amounts of time and effort only to create unintended consequences that are so large or so numerous, that you can’t see the impact among all the chaos that’s created.

In short, for folks in the not-making-impact group, the antipatterns involved encouraged them to put in high effort but the outcomes were either unwanted or net negative. Interestingly, I also noticed there was a cyclical nature to anti-pattern behaviors that seemed to get folks in this group stuck without a clear sense of how to break their habits. Instead, they’d often find blame in other directions, only to move on and follow the same failures as before, despite the often-quoted definition of insanity.

The idea of doing things that feel right, or taking actions that seem right, and even playing the blame game are all symptomatic of what I discovered is the prevalent driving factor behind the non-impact group. Their behaviors were emotionally driven and therefore often detrimental. They were more prone to giving up, of making mountains out of molehills, to pivoting their careers in directions they didn’t want them to go, and in general, spending a lot of time without getting a lot done.

Meanwhile, the impact-makers had patterns of behavior of their own, as perhaps expected, theirs were well defined. At the core, members of this group tended to have a big vision and a clear goal. Having a defined goal gave them energy and the ability to focus despite what was going on around them. That clarity of vision then gave them a sense of grit and determination. While embracing the passion to reach a goal, they kept their emotions in check as they spent a large amount of time planning. They researched what was needed to reach their goals so well, that they knew where things could go sideways and made contingencies to address them should they happen.

With these traits, the impact group continued to achieve higher and higher results. While the non-impact folks wallowed in trials and tribulations, the impact-group followed a cycle that perpetually ramped upwards. With each success and failure, they added to their tools and knowledge base so that future errors and snags along the way to their next goal would be easily overcome. They reveled in learning from mistakes and took pride in getting better. The folks who were masters, or experts in this space, were amazing to watch. In a few moments, they could gather all the information they needed, then with a year’s worth of...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	4.5.2021
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Beruf / Finanzen / Recht / Wirtschaft ► Bewerbung / Karriere
ISBN-10	1-5445-1888-9 / 1544518889
ISBN-13	978-1-5445-1888-6 / 9781544518886

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