How to Make an Impact at Your Company
The following is adapted from Plan, Act, Impact by Colt McAnlis.
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 anti-patterns 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 context in their minds, make accurate, on-the-spot decisions that resulted in huge impact. This led to a clear observation: making impact was a skill that can be perpetually honed.
That’s an important thing to realize: these folks weren’t born into the making-impact club the way Simba was born into ruling everything the light touches. They earned their way into it. They’ve got stories of trials and tribulations and about how each success was built upon their prior lessons learned.
So there’s good news here: making impact is a skill you can learn. You have to train yourself to be good at it, but once you do, you’ll have full access to the impact-makers club.
To learn more about making an impact in your company, you can find Plan, Act, Impact on Amazon.
Colt McAnlis is an engineer, mentor, consultant, and lover of pumpkin pie. As a developer advocate for Google, his content has helped more than 4.5 million developers learn to build better, cheaper, and more performant applications. Prior to Google, Colt was a graphics and performance engineer in the games industry for Microsoft’s Ensemble Studios, Blizzard Entertainment, and Petroglyph Games. He has been an adjunct professor at Southern Methodist University and takes the opportunity to lecture at UCLA every now and again.
