Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction

00:01:51: What is an impact player?

00:05:55: The skills needed to be an impact player

00:10:20: Your needs vs the needs of the company

00:18:46: Being pragmatic about the trade-offs

00:22:15: Performance guarantee and "fire and forget"

00:27:54: A bit about burnout

00:29:13: Feeling like your work has an impact

00:31:15: How managers develop impact players

00:36:21: Five characteristics of an impact player

00:39:09: Liz's career advice

00:41:34: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Sarah Ellis: Hi, I'm Sarah and this is the Squiggly Careers podcast.  This week is one of our Ask the Expert episodes and you'll hear me in conversation with researcher and author Liz Wiseman.  Together we'll be exploring the concept of high impact players, those people who have influence and make a difference in their roles, almost regardless of where they are in their career, what career stage they're in or what area of expertise they have. Liz is brilliant, she's somebody whose work I've been following for lots of years, so I was really happy when she said yes to spending some time with me.  She's insightful and what I really like is that she's translated her research, which is very comprehensive and very real world, into practical and pragmatic ideas we can all learn from.  I can't think of many people whose work and career wouldn't be a bit better as a result of reading Impact Players, and that's not something I recommend or say lightly. 

So I hope you find our conversation together useful, and I'll be back at the end to say goodbye. So, Liz, thank you so much for joining us today on the Squiggly Careers podcast, I'm really looking forward to our conversation together.

Liz Wiseman: Sarah, it's good to be here.

Sarah Ellis: And so I read Impact Players and there was lots of underlining happening, lots of pages being turned down, which is what prompted me to get in touch for our conversation together today, because we are always interested in when we read research that feels very practical and useful for everyone, and that's what really came across to me when I was reading your work.  So, perhaps we should start so that all of our listeners are up to speed, because I feel like I've spent lots of time with you and your work, with what is an impact player?  How do we get a sense of what it means to be this idea of an impact player?

Liz Wiseman: Well, an impact player, the metaphor is borrowed from sports.  But there are impact players in the workplace.  In the sports world, we think about who are the people that make things happen in the moments that matter?  You know, the kind of person you would hand off the ball to when it's got to get in the goal with ten seconds left in the game, it's those kind of people.  But they're not just these superstars on team.  They're people who create extraordinary value to the team and to the organisation, but they also are people who raise the level of play of people around them.  And they really are the people that we entrust with the high-stakes situations, opportunities.  They're the people we go to in the moments that really matter. 

They're people who are influential and impactful in the workplace. When I started this research, it was clear that everyone knows who these people are.  If you ask a manager like, "Who are the impact players on your team?", they're very quick with a response, but they don't always know why.  And that's what I was trying to do, is really understand what is it that these people are doing that makes them so influential, so valuable, so impactful.

Sarah Ellis: And we're going to dive into some of that what is it that they do, because I think what I found reassuring is that initially, you perhaps read about these high impact players and you, to your point, well, they're the Michael Jordans who are scoring the basket with ten seconds to go, and then you think, "Oh, well, that's not me [or] that can't be for me".  I think what I realised as I was going through, I was like, the majority of what you describe are incredibly learnable skills, or some of it's mindset, some of it's skillset, and even those areas that I think you describe as being slightly less coachable, there is still that potential. I got the sense, and you can tell me if I've got this right or not, but I got the sense that we all have the ability and at least the potential to be a high impact player.  If that's something that we would want to do, it's there for us if that's a choice we want to make.

Liz Wiseman: Yeah, and that's one of the things that was so just wonderful about the research.  So, the essence of the research is, we went out to nine different organisations, all top employers.  We interviewed 170 managers and we asked them to identify two types of people that were on their team they had, currently or in the past, both of whom were smart and capable and hardworking, so we were trying to neutralise those variables.  And one of whom was doing a fine job, we called them ordinary contributors, and another that was doing an extraordinary job, like someone who was bringing inordinate value on the team. What was so wonderful is when we cut all the data, so we have 170 what we came to call impact players, and they were evenly split between men and women; they were well-distributed in age range; and well distributed in ethnicity.

Sarah Ellis: Interesting.

Liz Wiseman: And they were also well-distributed in jobs.  So, these weren't always the hotshot software architects, the sales people who are bringing in trillion-dollar deals.  These were people in all different walks of life, you know, the surgical tech as opposed to the surgeon in the operating room, you know, a nurse practitioner, a project manager, and you could see it was a mindset and an attitude towards your work that you can apply in almost any job.

Sarah Ellis: And I think as I was reading the book and going through it and reflecting back on my Squiggly Career, I think there are definitely moments where I have been an ordinary contributor.  So, yeah, I was doing a good job, I was adding value; and then I think there are certain roles and certain moments where I like to think I might have made some of that transition towards being more of a high impact player.  And I thought, as I started to then read some of the descriptions about, well, what happens when you're a high impact player, I think I started to understand some of these skills and how useful they were. So, let's dive into one of those, because uncertainty and change are very familiar for all of us now, over the past couple of years in particular, but nobody says to me, "Well, my job feels really linear and predictable and straightforward.  I know what's coming next". 

Everybody is sort of surrounded by this complexity in their job, in their career, in their industry, at every layer.  And so that ability to navigate or approach uncertainty feels really important and a bit of a must-do skill I think for all of us.  And one of the things that you found in your research is that high-impact players see uncertainty and change through this opportunity rather than a threat lens, and I thought that sounds helpful.  So, how do we all do that?  Because I think our natural reaction in those moments is fight or flight or to get defensive or to think, "Well, I've tried to look at it through an opportunity lens the first two times, but on the third time, that's it, I can't pick myself up again".  So, maybe we could bring that to life a little bit for us so we get a feel for how could we all do this?

Liz Wiseman: Well, how the impact players handled volatility, chaos, uncertainty, ambiguity, this world that we find ourselves in was the big determinant.  And what there were, there were these five situations that impact players handle differently than others, and they all had to do with ambiguity and uncertainty.  They were messy problems, problems without owners, unclear roles, unforeseen obstacles, moving targets, unrelenting demands.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, all sound familiar!

Liz Wiseman: It's all familiar.  I call these everyday challenges because this is the reality, the perennial reality of the modern workplace.  This is the water we are swimming in.  And what we found in short is that the impact players tended to move toward that stuff.  When there was a problem that was messy, while others kind of stay away from it, they tend to move toward it, and they don't just do their job, they do the job that needs to be done.  When roles are unclear, you know, other people are waiting for someone to provide role clarification, like figure out who's in charge.  They're stepping up, they're taking charge.  And it really was how they see those. I want to, as a backdrop, admit, I don't like messy problems and unclear roles and obstacles that drop in my path.  Most of us don't like any of this.  We like clarity and linear challenges.  But it's the impact players who don't necessarily like it, but they move toward it because they're seeing it a little differently than other people, where other people see these things as a threat like, "Oh, this messy problem, this is a threat to my productivity".  They're like, "Actually, this is a chance to be useful.  This is a chance for me to not just do my job, but to go work on the thing that's hot", because the messes are, we'll call them hot messes, there's usually something important going on there. You know, when roles are unclear, other people might see this as like a threat to my role on the team; others are like, "Wow, this is a chance for me to demonstrate leadership.  This obstacle, we weren't planning on this, you know, this is kind of a threat to my success". 

Maybe you might, if you're feeling particularly strong, you say, "This is a chance for me to build inner strength".  I usually don't look at it this way.  I look at it more like, "Wow, no one could have planned for this pandemic or this crisis.  Well, that means nobody has a plan for it.  And what that means is that the rules don't apply.  That means if no one knows what to do, then I can kind of go in and do the thing I think needs to be done, or the thing I think we've always needed to do.  This is a chance for us to do something different or to shed the rules". So, they're looking at this and seeing opportunity where other people see threat.  And I want to emphasise, this is not about wearing rose-coloured glasses, this is not about being optimistic like, "Oh, I love this, this is going to be fun".  It's more opportunistic than optimistic, which is like, "How do I make something out of this mess?"

Sarah Ellis: And I wanted to talk to you a bit about a potential tension that I was considering as I was re-reading Impact Players before our conversation.  So, you've got a brilliant chapter that's called Make Yourself Useful, and "useful" is our number one value at Amazing If, so it guides everything that we do, it's a big part of who we are as a company, so I was diving back into that chapter.  And one of the things that we often talk to people about is, you will add more value if you make your strengths stronger rather than worrying about your weaknesses too much.  Think about what you enjoy and what gives you energy.  Try and gravitate towards those areas, rather than comparing yourself or feeling like you have to be equally brilliant at everything. 

So, that's sort of what's useful for me maybe in my career.  So, think about what my strengths are, make my strengths stronger, what are the roles that I'm really curious about? Then there's what's useful for my leader and my organisation.  And there must be moments where, well, there definitely will be moments, where those two things are not the same.  And I think sometimes, I was reflecting on this and thinking, I've sometimes created conflict for myself, where I've perhaps been in a role and thought, "Well, this is what I would like to be doing in this role.  This is what would be useful for me in this role.  So, I want to create and have ideas and develop people".  And then actually, what that role needed and what the organisation needed at that time, and I'm thinking of a specific example, they needed a bit of reporting sorted out, they need some compliance stuff because it wasn't where it needed to be, they needed some processes improving; and there was this clash between what was useful for me and what was useful for the role and the team that I was in. So, I was just wondering about your approach to that.  When you spent time with high-impact players, do they spot that and sort of go, "Okay, well, I'm prepared to adapt for now"?  Essentially, that's what I did.  I think I learned quite the hard way, to be honest. 

I think I eventually adapted and thought, "Oh, if I want to do a good job, I need to let go of some of the things I was hoping to do for now in the hope that they are going to come back in the future.  And actually they did, but I very nearly left a job because of that, that kind of tension.  And I'm really glad I didn't, because that job ended up being one of my favourite ever jobs that I did.  And I think I did have high impact in that role, but not for the first six months where there was this tension. I was just wondering that kind of usefulness, are we saying here that high-impact players are very good at putting essentially their team and their organisation before themselves?

Liz Wiseman: I do think there's tension there.  The principle and what we found, to kind of start with the basics, is that while others do their job, the impact players are doing the job that needs to be done.  They're figuring out what's important, they're figuring out what's important now, they're pointing themselves towards things that are useful in the organisation and in that context.  And yes, there is tension between these two. I think the pattern I saw with the impact players is, it's an order of operations, just like in maths.  You know, there's an order of operations.  You've got to do the multiplication and division before you do the addition and subtraction, and they get the order right.  What that means is they probably understand what they're good at, what their strengths are, what's useful to them, but they don't start there, they make themselves useful in the context they're in and that gains them influence, credibility, like they're value contributors. 

And so their influence and their power grows, which gives them greater oomph to be able to do what's useful and important to them. Now, I learned this lesson in a very sharp way early in my career, and I'm very, very grateful for this experience where I got, I don't know if it was somewhere between a slap in the face or a slap on the wrist or a little gentle nudge, but I came into my career knowing what I wanted to do.  I wanted to develop leaders, I wanted to do leadership development. 

I don't know what possessed me to do this, but that was clearly what I wanted.  And so I was looking for a way to do that, and I tried to work for a leadership development firm right out of grad school.  And they were like, "Hey, Liz, if you want to teach people how to lead, maybe you should go get some leadership experience yourself.  And I'm like, "Oh, wow".  And I really remember thinking, "That feels so short-sighted of him.  Doesn't he know this is what I'm passionate about, this is what I'm good at and what I want to do?". I took this backup job working for a software company called Oracle. 

They're now a behemoth in the industry; they were a young maverick company.  And so I take a job as a programme manager because I'm like, "Okay, maybe that'll give me some management experience".  I'm in that job for about a year, and I'm now, through a reorganisation, having an opportunity to go find a new job inside the company.  So, I'm interviewing with several groups and one of the groups I have my eye on is a group that runs training programs for new hires.  So, it's part of HR, they're running these three-week boot camps for all of Oracle's new college graduates, which are primarily, almost exclusively, top programmers out of top technical programmes and the nation's top like 13 schools.  So, it's this very elite group of people. 

They're hiring into the company. I go interview with this group and I know that they run these technical boot camps, but as the company is growing really rapidly, I assume their charter is going to expand, and this is probably the group that's going to start doing some management training.  So, I interview with the Manager, the Director, I'm now interviewing with the Vice President and I answer his questions and it's that part in the interview where I maybe can ask him some questions.  So, I share with him this observation I've had.  I've been working the company for a year and I can see that all these young technologists are being thrown into management positions with no management experience, no management training, they're wreaking havoc on the group, they're having a diminishing effect and I kind of make my case, and he agrees.  Everyone can see this problem. 

It's a legitimate problem. He said, "Liz, like, that's great, and we think you're great, and we'd love to have you join this group", he said, "but your boss has a different problem.  Your would-be boss, she's got to figure out how to get 2,000 new college graduates up to speed in Oracle technology over the next year.  And what would be terrific, Liz, is if you could help her figure that out".  And I'm distraught because I know that they need some technology instructors, programming instructors, but first of all, I'm not a technologist.  I've come out of business school and I want to teach leadership.  And now Bob wants me to teach programming to a bunch of nerds, and this is not at all the job that I want, but I can hear what he's saying.  It's like this is actually the job that's needed. I remember feeling that tension.  And, like, "Do I just make my case stronger and convince him? 

Do I ignore what he's saying and just wait for my moment?"  And I decided, "You know, if that's what's important to the company, I'm going to make it important to me.  And I will learn the technology deeply, I will learn how to teach programming to a bunch of hotshot programmers", and I was actually really good at this because I used the thing I was passionate about, which was teaching.  And I'm like, okay, this isn't my passion, but there's got to be something in here that I am passionate about, and I became passionate about teaching technology.  I became this, I mean, actually a really good technical instructor, and then I was loving my job, and they're like, "Hey, we need someone to manage the group.  You know what, and that needs to be you".  And then I'm getting just bigger and bigger opportunities and a lot of influence and power in the organisation. It wasn't too long before I had earned the right to say, "You know what, I think we need a management boot camp and curriculum and let's build a team to do that".  And now I can do it with a team and with resources and credibility and all the connections and the reputation I need to go do that and do it really, really well.  What he was teaching me was the order of operations.

Sarah Ellis: And also what I really like about that is just how pragmatic it is.  We don't talk very much about pragmatism, but I think sometimes we have to be pragmatic about trade-offs and timing.  And so in that moment, it's sort of your point about what's needed now is then, "Well, okay, I get that what's needed now might not be my ideal, but it's okay for now and it's even better if I can connect the dots between what's needed now, can I find a reason to care, essentially, can I find a reason to connect?" What you've described is exactly what happened to me, where I was working in corporate responsibility, I was hoping to do ideas and innovation and I was doing reporting and process.  And what I figured out was, that is what was needed, and then I figured, "Okay, well, I am going to make this reporting, I'm going to make this data beautiful, I'm going to make this simple and straightforward, I'm going to bring my creativity to the thing that is needed".  And it completely transformed, I think, my performance, but also my enjoyment of that role to the point where, as I said, it's the longest job, actually including this one, longest job I've ever had.  Because then I stayed in it, and as you said, over time, I did loads of ideas and innovation in that job.  I just didn't do it straightaway because that wasn't what was needed. 

And I think that kind of pragmatism and empathy, that ability to sort of walk in your boss's shoes and to be able to take that perspective, it's something where I think we all get quite focused on maybe a bit blinkered on our job and what we think we should be doing and it's that stuff of zooming out.

Liz Wiseman: Yeah, and our passions and it's being pragmatic like, I hate to be the one to say it so bluntly but I feel like somebody needs to; it's like, the world doesn't care as much about our passions as we think the world should care about our passions!  And what the world cares about is, can we channel our passion towards problems and opportunities that the world is facing?  And I had this funny little experience. I went and I spoke at this very large gathering of leaders from evangelical churches from all over the world.  It's a huge gathering and I'm talking about this specific thing about playing with passion versus pushing your passion. 

And afterwards, a very like celebrity kind of pastor came up to me and he whispered, he's like, "Thanks for saying that because, man, can I tell you how tired I am of my staff expecting me to build everything around what they're passionate about.  I really need the people who are passionate about the work that we're doing".  And it was just funny for this pastor who was supposed to be the embodiment of empathy.  It's kind of like, "Man, I've got empathy fatigue trying to care about everyone's passion.  And I wish people had it the other way around.  So, thank you for saying what needed to be said". I have just found, by getting the order of operations right on this, I have been able to have a lot more influence, and it's this pattern I've seen in the impact players.  It's not either of the extremes.  It's not the people who are like, "I'll just do whatever you want, boss.  You just tell me if we need reporting", and they forsake themselves; that does not lead to impact.  But it's not the other extreme of like, "Hey, this is me".  This is like, "Build the work around me, care about me, I want to do this".  Those end up to be prima donnas that kind of get tolerated at best, but pushed aside of true impact.

Sarah Ellis: And one of the things that perhaps surprised me, I'm always interested in what did I not expect to read, is you describe how high-impact players finish well.  That bit wasn't that surprising.  I was like, I get that as a high-impact player, I think when I have been at my best, you're gritty and you're determined and you see things through.  But you also said they not only finish well, but they feel well at the same time.  And I think at the moment, so many people are talking to us about feeling burnt out. We interviewed Jen Moss about burnout a couple of months ago and got lots of reaction to that episode.  And so I think there is a potential assumption that people might have of, "Oh, well, if I'm going to be a high-impact player, that's it.  I'm giving all of my life to my work.  I lose all of my identity.  I become my work".  And that wasn't the sense I got actually from reading how you described how impact players feel that they have energy to move on to the next thing that they're going to go and have high impact on.  I'd love to explore a little bit more about that because it sounds like the nirvana, doesn't it, the nirvana of, "Oh, I can be high impact and feel well and have boundaries", all that good stuff.  What are they doing?  What is that silver bullet?

Liz Wiseman: Well, some of it is getting that order right because, again, when you make what's important to the organisation important to you, you gain influence and power.  And we don't talk enough about power, but power comes with all sorts of benefits about what happens when you are influential in organisations, because then when something bad drops in your path, there's this obstacle, what we find is that ordinary contributors, they tend to take responsibility and take ownership.  But then when something unreasonable drops in their path, they tend to look upward for help, and they escalate up, and they hand off those problems.  Whereas the impact players held on to ownership longer.  They were finishers, they got it done.  But it was not that kind of finish of like, "Okay, let me heroically get it across the finish line, and then let me collapse in exhaustion and wonder why no one is throwing me a victory party.  Like, why am I not on a podium somewhere?  Why aren't people like --"

Sarah Ellis: "Where's my medal?"

Liz Wiseman: "Where's my medal and my fan club; where is all of this; why does no one appreciate me?"  You know, these tend to be pyrrhic victories.  It's not that, it's not a slog either.  It's not this like, "Okay, I'll get it done.  I'll, just suffer and endure this burden myself".  Both of those lead to finishes, but exhausting finishes.  It is finishing strong and that has a bunch of meanings.  One is, "I get it done all the way done".  But that doesn't mean we get it done alone.  Again, once we get known as someone who makes themselves useful, someone who's willing to lead, but also willing to hand off the leadership and someone who offers what we call, I describe it in the book, this "performance guarantee", of someone who just is known for getting things done. I love the term that NASA, one of our research sites, they have this term called "fire and forget", and it's not fire people and forget about them.  It is that sense when you can fire off a request and then forget about it, because you know the person you asked is going to get it done. 

And we all know who those people are where once we ask them, we cross it off to them.  It's as good as done.  So, once you get that sort of halo of the performance guarantee, then you earn power to do certain things.  And one of the things you earn the power to do is to boss around your bosses. So, it's not like, "I'm going to finish it and get it done and it all sits on my shoulders".  It's, "Okay, I'm going to get it done.  I'm going to hold on to ownership, but I need help, and so I'm going to ask for help".  And it's not asking for help of people sort of below us in the organisation.  It's being willing to say, "Okay, we have a problem.  I'm on it, but this is what I need from you for us to get this done.  I will get it done, but I need this from you.  You know what, can you place a phone call to this person?  Can you get a rapid approval on this?  Can you see if we can get an exception on this?  And if you can get these things, then I will keep leading this". I mean, think about the people that we can fire and forget a request to; these are people we trust. 

These are people when they come to us with a request, we're like, "You've got it, put me to work.  I'll do whatever you ask me to do to make this thing finished because I know I'm not the one having to drag it across the finish line", that impact player is doing it.  And so, they finish with great wellbeing, and a great finish, a strong finish usually emerges from a strong start.  And, it's one of the things that I would encourage people to do, is when you're about to start something, particularly something that might be rocky, is stop and ask a few questions.  Like, do you know what a great job looks like?  Do you know what the finish line looks like?  How will you know you're done?  Ask questions like, "Okay, how will we know we've done a brilliant piece of work?  How will I know this is done all the way done?"  And negotiate some of the things that you need beforehand like, "I'm going to need you to do this [or] me to be able to finish that".  And when we get into the ditch, we now have negotiated the help that we need and the criteria we need to finish strong and to finish with wellbeing. You mentioned burnout; there's one more thing I want to add to this.  Part of why these impact players don't experience burnout in their work is because burnout is not just a function of how much work we have.  And I find that more often than not, people don't burn out because they have too much work; people tend to burn out because they're having too little impact, meaning they're working hard, but it's not going anywhere.  Or that feeling of like you're working --

Sarah Ellis: On a treadmill.  You're like a hamster, you just go round and round and round.

Liz Wiseman: Yeah, or I work on a bunch of things, but none of them come to fruition, like none of them actually get across the finish line.  It's the process of getting across the finish line and seeing our work complete and have impact and bear fruit and do the thing it was meant to do.  This is regenerative, this fuels us, it gives us energy.  And so it's start strong, finish strong, get help, like a team of sled dogs.  Sled dogs, they can finish a multi-day endurance race with the same vitals that they began it with.  That's finishing with wellbeing.  And then knowing our work has impact, that just feeds us and fuels us, it creates exhilaration rather than exhaustion.

Sarah Ellis: As you were describing that there, we all want to feel like the work that we do matters.  And so I always ask people, "When you get to the end of a week, does it feel like your time at work was well spent this week?"  And when people start to go, "I'm very busy being busy", which everybody's busy, I think there is a real difference between, "Oh, I feel like I've done a lot" versus, "Oh, I feel like I've had a brilliant impact this week".  I see and feel that kind of week on week and sometimes you start to go, "Okay, week on week I feel like I'm having more and more of an impact, that's a good sign".  And you're more motivated to have even more impact, I think, the week after, the month after.  And if you start to lose that connection with that, like, "Does what I do matter?  How does it matter?" or, "I'm doing a lot of work, but I just can't see where that work's going", I think that just starts to feel really demotivating. Whether that's in a really big company or whether that's in a really small company, I think we all get that sense of like, "Am I having an impact?  Does it matter that I turn up every day, that I wake up in the morning and come to work?"

Liz Wiseman: Yeah.  And it's one of the things that managers can do is, if you want your team to reduce burnout, increase energy, is in some ways demand that people complete their work because that's what's going to fuel them, or shape the work in a way that has milestones and finish points.  I think there's a tremendous loss that happens when we leave the university world or our primary schools and high-school world, where there are semesters and quarters and you start a class and then you finish a class and you get a grade and you get a week or two off between semesters.  You feel like, "I'm done", and you get these fresh starts. We get into the work world and it's just this constant churning.  You start to feel, like you said, Sarah, that there's this hamster treadmill.  And I think we can parse our work in ways where it's like, "Okay, we finished this quarter, we finished this project, let's celebrate, let's rest, and then let's start anew".

Sarah Ellis: Yeah.  One of the things I was reflecting on as I was reading the book is, are high-impact players absolutely the dream scenario for managers and leaders because they're so great, they see opportunity through this brilliant lens of creativity and curiosity, they've got this performance guarantee; who doesn't want a high-impact player, players, hopefully plural, in their team?  When you talk to managers and leaders, what do they do to develop high-impact players; what do they do to try and maybe spot high-impact players?  Because are leaders just thinking, like when I was reading your work, I was thinking, "Right, well, how did you just end up with a team where everyone is a high-impact player?"  Or perhaps it doesn't quite work like that/feels a bit unrealistic.

Liz Wiseman: What managers can do is, first of all, you've already hinted at this, Sarah, is think about it in the plural rather than the singular.  Because if you think about it more like an MVP, the most valuable player, then you're always going to get the pet, the manager's favourite superstar.  Other people feel that's not attainable, or like for me to work that way, I have to bump somebody off the podium to be that.  But think about it in terms of a team and multiple players.  I don't know if you could have a team that every single person is a high-impact player, but I bet you could approximate that, if not achieve that. 

And when managers think about it, which is, how do we ensure everyone's thinking and working this way where they're having maximum impact for the time that they spend working, then that is attainable and it takes the competition out of it, and then these mindsets and behaviours can be shared across a team and everyone can benefit from it. But there's a bunch of things that managers can do.  First of all, it's create an environment where impact players thrive.  And in short, what impact players need is they need these two conditions simultaneously, they need safety.  See, the impact player way of working is not a harder way of working, and I'm not even sure I would say it's a smarter way of working.  It's certainly not smarter in the terms of productivity, like, "Oh, let me work smart".  It's a more intentional way of working, and I'd say more courageous way of working.  And people need safety to be able to do that, to step outside of the bounds of their job description, to volunteer, to lead, to be willing to hand off leadership to another person, to be able to say, "You know what, we've got this big problem, it's bigger than me, but you know what, I'm going to stay in charge. 

I'm going to boss my bosses.  I'm going to be the leader of my leaders as I pull in resources to get this done.  I'm going to adapt on the fly". This requires courage, and people need safety to step out of their bounds, to step up and lead, to kind of keep going longer, to be able to pivot and adapt.  And so leaders need to create intellectual safety and psychological safety.  They have to give people permission to work this way.  In fact, I think it's one of the simplest things that leaders can do is just say, "Yeah, see this, this book, these ideas?  I give you permission to work this way.  Go ahead, don't be constrained by the hierarchy, the job descriptions, because it's how people want to work.  But they need safety. But they also need stretch, meaning part of a leader's job is to make it uncomfortable to be too comfortable just on a treadmill, working in a box, doing your job when there's clearly a job that needs to be done beyond what you're doing.  And to give people challenge and to stretch and to see that people can do more and want to do more than maybe what they are doing today.

Sarah Ellis: If I think back to a leadership team that I was part of, where I think there were multiple high-impact players, plural, because that team was a really high-performing team, I would definitely describe it as high care and high challenge, which is really interesting because that sort of reflects what you were saying there.

Liz Wiseman: Yeah, absolutely.  And you mentioned, okay, this seems kind of ideal, managers want this.  I haven't really found a manager who has read the book and has not concluded like, how do I get a whole team of these people?  But I think the most important thing that managers should take away, which is if you want a team of impact players, you have to be the kind of manager that they would want to play for.  Because people who work this way aren't going to work for anyone.  They're going to want to work for someone who gives them space, who gives them freedom, who respects that they need to be the boss of their own work.  They need someone who's a leader to them, not a manager who's going to keep them on a tight leash.

Sarah Ellis: Before we ask you our final question that we ask all of our expert guests, it was a very small thing that I circled, but I thought this is important, because as you're going through and you're reading all of the characteristics of a high-impact player, I was starting to almost make a mental note and thinking, "Well, do I do that one and do I do that one?"  But I think, if I've understood the research right, you say the average is these five kind of big characteristics.  The average high-impact player has 3.17.  And so what we don't need to do is aspire to an unrealistic perfection of high impact where we get everything right all of the time.  Actually, probably what we need to do is have that work-in-progress mindset and that desire to want to improve and get better, to understand what that looks like, well, how do you approach messy problems; how empathetic are you to understanding your boss's problems; do you keep ownership; do you finish well?  All the things that we've described today.  But I didn't interpret it as, "I need to get all of these things right all of the time".

Liz Wiseman: No, no, you don't, and there are these five characteristics.  Impact players do the job that's needed; they step up and lead, but they step back and they follow others; they finish stronger; they adapt and adjust; they make work light for others.  You know, you don't need to be good at all five of those.  You probably can't be horrible at any one of them. One of my favourite takes on this is the book, The Extraordinary Leader by Joe Folkman and John Zenger, where they looked at all this 360 data and they found that the best leaders have one or two towering strengths, but no real below-the-line kind of vulnerability.  They're not good at everything, but they're not really bad at the important characteristics.  And so as a leader, what you want to do is sort of shore up your significant weaknesses and then forget about those things, and then put your energy into your towering strength. 

And I think the same is true here. If you are kind of high maintenance, you might need to do a little to make work light, but that may never be your big strength.  Your big strength might be this willingness to make yourself useful and do the job that's needed.  And so whenever I read books like this or get exposed to models like this, I try to find the top and the tail, and top off the top and just sort of raise up the tail a little bit.  And you don't have to get it right all the time.  It's amazing what happens when you operate this way by rule.  You earn the right to have a few exceptions and it doesn't tarnish your reputation as a leader or an impact player, it just makes you human.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, which we all are; that's good news!  So, we always finish our podcast episodes when we're talking to our expert guests with the same question, which is, we would love you to leave our listeners today with your best or favourite bit of career advice.  It might be your own advice, it could be some words of wisdom that someone has shared with you and it's just really stayed with you, a quote, whatever it might be, what's something that you'd like to leave us with at the end of our conversation today?

Liz Wiseman: Well, I personally benefited a lot from that VP Bob Shaver's advice, which essentially he was saying, make yourself useful, and I think that is really sound advice.  I've tried to do that through all my careers, like not what do I want, what does the situation need, and how do I make myself useful in this situation.  I think there's one idea I would share based on this research, and that is very simply that we are more powerful than we think we are.  In any given situation, we have the ability to take charge.  We often think, when you work in an organisation, that your boss is in charge of you, or your boss is in charge of your work, and we can put ourselves in these victim mindsets. But really, what I saw the impact players do is they take charge.  They take charge of situations, they take charge of their work, they take charge of their leaders if they need those leaders to help them finish and finish stronger.  And nobody stops them because managers want you to take charge of your work.  And I think that's what I would encourage people, is in any given situation, you probably have a lot more power and room to manoeuvre and to exercise agency and control than you think, so take control.

Sarah Ellis: We always say, the people who we see really succeeding in their Squiggly Careers always have a "create, don't wait" mindset, we always see it, and that's exactly what you've described, that kind of ownership, take charge, kind of take control. Liz, thank you so much for joining us today on the Squiggly Careers podcast.  I'm so glad we've had the opportunity to dive deeper into basically all of my Post-it Notes and scribbles in your book, and I know that our listeners will have really appreciated learning more about how to be a high-impact player.  So, thank you.

Liz Wiseman:  It's been great to be here.  I've had a Squiggly Career and I'm grateful to be able to share a little of what I've learned.

Sarah Ellis: Thank you for listening to my conversation today with Liz Wiseman.  I hope you found it useful and I hope it helps you to improve your impact in your Squiggly Career.  I'd love to get some feedback from you or ideas for topics or guests that you'd like us to cover in the future.  You can always get in touch with us, we really enjoy hearing from you.  We're helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com.  That's everything for this week and we'll be back with you again soon.  Bye for now.