Liz Wiseman

[00:02:28] Sean: Liz, welcome back to What Got You There. How are you doing today?

[00:02:32] Liz: I’m doing great. I’m excited for us to continue a conversation we started a few years ago. 

Liz’s Mindset

[00:02:36] Sean: I’m excited as well for the continuation, for anyone listening that didn’t get to hear that, was originally Episode #56 where we dove more into your background and kind of what makes you tick. We’re going to dive more into your recent work, which I am so excited about. I’ve really enjoyed it, but I would love to know since we’re revisiting some things. Is there a mindset of yours that if you could just pass on to anyone starting their career, and this is a mindset that you possess, you would love passing this on to other people?

[00:03:03] Liz: Sean, that is such a great question. And it’s something that no one’s ever asked me. And I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life to share this with people. So thank you. I think there’s a belief that has permeated my career and my work, it’s that we have way more power than we think we have. And I think a lot of people go into situations and say, well, I’m not really in charge and this person in charge, and I can’t do it because of this.

And I have just found over and over that in almost every situation where I am frustrated, that I have a lot more power than the situation would appear. And that if I just assume a sense of like I’m in charge of myself and I don’t know, I think it’s this take-charge mentality that unless someone tells you you’re not in charge of yourself and you’re not in charge of the situation, you have power. I see so many people who don’t use the power that they have.

[00:04:08] Sean: I’m wondering for you, this is an incredible mindset, is this something that was uncovered over time or was there a changing point where there was a fork in the road type moment when you realized this power that you did have?

[00:04:203 Liz: Well, this is one of the things I think I learned at a young age. I had a father who was grumpy and gruff, he just struggled to communicate, and I saw my siblings kind of cower. So I was, you know, kind of in the vernacular, you and I have talked about, I was raised by a multiplier mom and a “diminisher” dad. And my dad was very much a good person, but I saw how other people kind of cowered from him. He was sort of a bit of a bully and I just would stand up to him and say, well, dad, this is what needs to happen, not this. And he would go, okay. 

My siblings started to come to me like, Liz, we want to go out on the boat this weekend, but we’re afraid to ask dad, you ask him. I’m like, okay, I’ll ask him. And so it was little by little, I think, just growing up like, wow, I’m not a victim of my dad’s moods or that like, I can actually assert myself and change the situation. And then I think there might’ve been one, a bit of a turning point. I think I was in high school and I was a new driver. I don’t know that I’ve really shared the story with too many people, but I’m a new driver. And so, I have to like to drive myself. 

This is way before we had cell phones. And so, you know, when you’re in your car, you can’t call AAA and just say, Hey, you know my tire is flat, come help. So I’m driving home from my high school in the afternoon, evening or something coming back from practice or something. And I see that there’s a car pulled over on the side of the road. Someone’s stranded there and he’s kind of waving. And so I stop and pull over. I’m 16 years old, I’m a brand new driver. And I asked him if he needed help. 

And  he’s like, my car blah, blah, and I could use a lift. And so I’m driving my parents’, it’s like a little mini kind of truck, like a little Datsun kind of thing. And so, you know, he hops in the cab. I drove him to his house and I’m dropping him off, and the next thing, his hands are all over me. And I’m like, whoa, this guy has got the wrong idea about this. He’s all over my side of the car and he’s got his hands all over me. And I’m like, wow, this could go bad really fast. 

And it was all sort of in a split second. And I just remember just being outraged. Strangely, I was so mad that he wasn’t thanking me. I kind of pulled away and shoved him to the side of the car. And I’m like, whoa, whoa, whoa, excuse me. I’m like, I think you have this situation wrong. I’m like your car was broken down on the side of the road, and I out of the goodness of my heart gave you a ride home, and this is not how I want to be thanked. And this is so burned into my mind, this image of him, it was like a startled response that babies get. 

And I’m like, no, I need you to thank me for giving you a ride. And he’s like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks. And I’m like, yeah, thank me for giving you a ride, and now get out of my car. And he hops out of my car and the last image I have, and again, this is still like burned in my head, was him waving to me, like, thank you. And I drove away. I pulled over after I got round the curve. I just remember that feeling of, wait a minute, this is my car. I’m in charge here. 

I chose to give him a ride and I’m not going to let him take advantage of me or this situation. I have power here and I didn’t have physical power, but I had like the power of words or ideas. I don’t know what it was, but I very much remember that experience of, oh no, like you’re in charge. I don’t share that in a way to diminish people’s experience with abuse or violence, sexual assault. That wasn’t what was going on there. 

But I just remember learning like when in doubt, be in charge, be in charge of you. And I think it’s carried through my whole career. I can tell you story after story, about times where I was like, no, wait a minute. That’s not right. That’s not how this should go down. We need to do the right thing here. And so there’s just story after story. I think my career was built on, I don’t know, standing up to power, standing up for myself, taking charge of the situations that look like they didn’t have leaders.

[00:09:48] Sean: Liz, I mean, first and foremost, thank you for sharing that, and being open and vulnerable. I can’t imagine that it’s easy to replay that in your head even now. But, it’s a great visual for us to understand. And then it’s cool to hear how that’s continued throughout your career, where you’re continuing to build on that circumstance.

Understanding Power

I’m wondering, what about people who haven’t had those defining type moments. What should the narrative be like in their head when they say they’re in the middle of their career right now? And they haven’t been in one of those positions before where they can feel that empowerment. Is there anything they can do now to get that narrative in their head correct, to kind of take those additional steps on the path?

[00:10:30] Liz: Okay. I think, trying to understand power. One of the things I’ve really tried to understand through my whole career is power. And how do you exercise positive power in any situation? And some of it comes from understanding when you’re powerful and there are times at work when you are most powerful. And one of the things I’ve learned is that you hold the most power. I should probably qualify this. I know I don’t need to explain this to you, but when I mean power, I don’t mean like exercising, dominion over other people, or like you are surping other people’s power. 

I mean, just owning your own power to be in control of your situation and your actions and affecting what you can control. And you know, there are times when we are at our most powerful and the thing I used to remember is we’re at our most powerful before we say yes, and after success. Meaning once you sign a contract and agree to a piece of work, you kind of lose a lot of your power, but before you’ve agreed to it, you hold a lot of power. And so when someone would be giving me a piece of work like that is when I have power to say, well, wait a minute, let’s talk about this.

What are you expecting? What’s my role? What’s your role? And to really use that power. I think a lot of people are just quick to say, okay, I’ve got it. And then they’re stuck and things are going wrong and they don’t know what to do, but we’re at our least powerful when things are going wrong, but we’re at our most powerful when things have just gone really well. And so that’s when you negotiate. There’s an experience I had at Oracle where I was working with them. Three of Oracle’s senior executives and the nature of my role, I ran learning and education there. 

And so I worked very closely with the executive team and I was working with the President, the Chief Financial Officer and the Chief Technology Officer on a big leadership program. And it was kind of a flagship program for the company. And we were going to put our top 250 executives through it. And the President, the CFO and CTO were all very involved. The four of us had crafted this together and it was like our project. And we had a lot of fun working on it. We ran our first session and it was a success. 

And we were meeting afterward to plan the rollout, and they’re all excited. And they’re kind of high five-ing each other, it has gone well. And we were about to wrap up the meeting and we had seven more of these programs to run over the next year. And I know how busy executives are, and I know how they get pulled in other directions. And I know it’s easy to start things but harder to finish things. And I’m like, you know, I have a feeling that they’re going to get pulled in other directions, I’m going to be left holding the bag on this and it’s going to fizzle out. 

So we’re about done with this meeting and they’re getting up to leave. And I said, wait, hold on. And I turned to Ray, who was the President, who ran a $30 billion operation. He was very busy. And I said, wait. I said, you know me and you know how hard I will work to make sure this is a success, knocking down brick walls if needed, but I just want you to know that the day that you stop working on this is the day I stop working on it. He kind of looked at me and I’m like, if you stop, I stop. 

And then I probably explained, you know, this program can’t be successful without your full and complete involvement. If you stop, I stop. And he’s like, looks at me and I don’t really know where I got the wisdom to do it, but he just looked at me and he said, you have a deal, you have a deal. And then Ray gets up from the table and he goes over to his assistance office just right outside, adjacent. And he said, Terry, whatever time Liz needs on my calendar for the next year, she has it.

And Terry looked at me like, he’s never said that before. And I’m like, yeah, because no one thought to ask him. I needed to exercise my power to say, I can’t do this without you, and I’m not going to. And Ray to his credit, never once backed off the commitment. He was at every meeting, he was on time, he was prepared. But it wasn’t an accident. It was because I said, I need this from you. I can’t be successful for you unless I have that. And that was a powerful position. If I had waited until we were stuck in the ditch… 

[00:15:28] Sean: Completely different.

[00:15:29] Liz: It would have been my problem.

[00:15:30] Sean: Liz, I feel like that could be one of the best stories I’ve heard to illustrate someone who could be earlier in their career or just a few levels down. So many times I know you work with a lot of leaders. I get a lot of questions where people feel handcuffed in their roles. I feel like that is one of the best examples of flipping the switch there and putting the power back to yourself, which I just love so much. This makes me think about something. 

I know our mutual friend, Dr. Michael Gervais in my recent conversation with him, he was talking a lot about setting the conditions for success ahead of time. Getting ahead of things, getting upstream of things, similar to what you’re talking about there prior to sending the contract where you’re locked in and all of a sudden you have to go and correct things as opposed to setting the right conditions early on. That’s one of the things I love so much. I just feel like you do such a good job illustrating these stories. So I’m appreciative of that. 

Impact Players

I do want to dive more into specifics of some of your new work around impact players, but I would love to know how you describe impact players amongst high performing teams.

[00:16:32] Liz:  I would start with the concept of an impact player in sports. What struck me is that an impact player is someone who makes a major contribution. It’s someone who’s talented and skilled and capable, like as an athlete, they perform well, but they also have this extraordinarily positive effect on a team. They’re playmakers, there are people who make things happen and they also raise the level of play for everyone on the team. And that’s kind of the concept of an impact player in sports. 

And I think we see the same kind of people in the work world. They’re the people that are clutch, that you know when it’s an important situation, this is the person you’re going to hand the ball off to, and they’re going to get the job done. They are going to play on the team and the whole team gets better around them. There are people who find ways to make themselves really valuable to a team. And they’re people that we come to depend on and they’re the people we hand the most important work to because they come through and they do it.

It’s like they get the right work done and they also do it in the right way. And we all know this, it’s the person you’re going to hand it to, that you just know is going to get it done. Almost like I can cross this off my to-do list and not even have to ever check back with this person because it’s as good as done because they’re on it. And they’re also going to do it in a way that everyone wins there. There won’t be blood on the floor when they’re done with the piece of work. A thrill to study.

[00:18:16] Sean: Well, I would actually love to know that before we dive into the origin story of where this idea came to be, to really dive into this and even turn this into a book. This reminds me of a player. I’m not sure if you’re familiar. He went to Duke a long time ago, in the NBA named Shane Battier. There’s a great New York Times article that basically talks about, how he doesn’t lead any single category with points, blocks, anything like that. 

But has the highest impact of anyone in the league in terms of making everyone else around them better. And I always thought how beautiful that is. He doesn’t lead and dominate any single individual category. But we all know there’s people on our team where it’s like, oh, wow. Just because of their presence my level of play is being raised and everyone around us is as well. I just love that, but I love to hear, when did that light bulb go off like, oh wow, impact players. This is it. This is what I’m diving into. When did that happen for you?

[00:19:06] Liz: Well, it took a while for the idea of impact players, just like the metaphor to capture it, to come into focus. But for me, it was about studying the other side of the mountain with multipliers. So I had spent the last 10 years teaching leaders, how do you lead in such a way that everyone can contribute at their fullest? And so that everyone essentially can play big. I think I’ve long been fascinated with this concept of contribution and like, what do leaders need to do so that others can contribute at their fullest? 

I’ve been out there kind of preaching this message for a decade. And then I started to realize that leadership is a pretty important part of that equation, but it’s not the only part of that equation that the way the contributor shows up matters as well. I’ve been studying the mindsets and the behaviors of the leaders, kind of like studying the best coaches, but like the mentality and the mental game of the players matters as well. I think it was brought into focus for me sharply, a few years ago. 

A few years ago I was out teaching a workshop or speaking at Salesforce and one guy was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is great, multiplier. You know, like you want to multiply your people, not diminish people, blah, blah, blah. But Liz, you can’t multiply zero. And I was like, is he saying that the people on his team are ding-a-lings like, does he say he has a team of nothing dummies? And so I’m trying to process like, I mean, and this is coming from a girl who deeply believes that everyone brings brilliance and intelligence to work, it’s like your job as a leader to find it. 

And I’m like, is he saying his people are zeros? And then he goes on to explain like, yeah, yeah. Like I can do certain things as a leader, but I need to work with something. And that’s what really got me looking at it. Wow. Everyone has been studying the art of leadership, but what about the art of a contributor-ship? What does showing up in a big way look like? I don’t mean big as suck-all-the-air out of the room, narcissistic all about me kind of big, I mean, playing big to your full potential.

And so that’s when I started to look at, okay. And in essence, my research was in a pool of equally smart, talented, hard working people. So I tried to hold those variables constant, they’re smart, they’re hardworking and they’re capable and they have talent. Why do some people make a big impact and others don’t and it was fascinating. I interviewed 170 managers asking them, tell me about someone who’s smart, talented, capable, and is doing a solid job. 

Like a great person you’d want 10 of these people on your team. And then it was okay, now tell me about someone who is equally smart, talented, capable who’s contributing far below their potential. They should be killing it, but strangely they’re not. And that was fascinating. And then tell me about someone who’s smart, talented, and capable, and who’s doing work of extraordinary value and impact, and those were the impact players.

[00:22:36] Sean: So we’re not talking about marginal differences here between some of these people who have those prerequisites? We’re talking about just monumental differences here, right? How much do they contribute to an organization, correct?

[00:22:48] Liz: It is. We asked managers to estimate that, and the managers estimated that compared to a solid contributor, these impact players were like 3.4 X, like bringing 3.4 X, the value of contribution. And it’s not compared to someone who’s just sort of average. It’s someone who’s solid, capable. A whole team of these people would be terrific. So it’s more than three times the contribution there. And then when we ask them to compare it against people who were smart, talented, and capable, but who were playing below their capability, it was a 10 X difference.

[00:23:29] Sean: I’m wondering because there’s some small differences here, right? Like you’ve mentioned some of those other people they’re contributing, what are some of those things that as you were going into this you might not have been aware of, but after having talked to 170 of those managers, some different things started to come to the surface and come to light and you were like, oh wow, I hadn’t considered that before. Were there any things like that that came up in your research?

[00:23:50] Liz: Well, there’s always these surprises. And then after I see the pattern play out, I’m like, of course it works that way. And, probably the first was those solid contributors. So I call this kind of the contribution mindset and you know, like, Hey, I’m contributing. All of these people were doing their job. And it was something just so many of these managers said over and over like, oh yeah, you know what? We’ll call this person, Liz. You know, Liz, like, she’s solid. She’s doing her job. She does a great job. She does a brilliant job. Like she does her job. 

But when they talked about the impact players, it wasn’t that they did their job. It was, they did the job that needed to be done, meaning that these were people who weren’t just doing what they were told, filling their position. It’s in some ways they exert their power, their agency. We had talked about going to do the work that really needed to be done, meaning, okay, this is my job, but actually work is full of messy problems that don’t sit nicely into any one person’s job. In fact, in some ways the most important work in any organization, isn’t in one person’s job. 

It’s all that stuff in that interstitial space, the unmanned territory, you know, like, oh boy, this is a doozy. We’re not organized for this. And what we see is, the impact players gravitate towards that. And it’s not like they abandon their posts, they do their job, but they’re willing to morph their job scope to pull in those messy problems. And their leaders love this because that white space in between job descriptions tends to be the manager’s job. Like I got to pick up all the messes that nobody else is dealing with, but these players are like, Ooh, cleanup on aisle 11, I’m on it.

[00:25:47] Sean: It’s almost like all that ambiguity that most people completely shy away from, they’re being drawn to. They’re attracted to that. I’m also wondering how people deal, because you mentioned some of these messy problems. How do we deal with unknown futures? Like things we just can’t control. Was there a big difference between high impact players or just impact players in general, amongst other people who are contributing, but not to that level, just being able to handle unknowns and things they can’t control?

[00:26:14] Liz: Oh, this was also one of the situations that differentiated people. The five situations we found that really differentiated the impact players from everyone else were, I call them everyday challenges of work, meaning whether you work at Nike or you work at Bank of America, or you work at a middle school, you are going to encounter these kinds of problems. Messy problems, unclear roles, like, I don’t know who’s in charge, unforeseen obstacles, moving targets, goals that are shifting kind of mid project, and the last is just like the sense of unrelenting work volumes. 

It just seems like everyone has more work than they can do. And one of them was how people deal with unforeseen obstacles, and kind of the razor’s edge. The differentiator between contributors and impact players is, contributors take ownership of the work but when these unforeseen things, like things that are out of their control, come at them, they tend to escalate. Which is what, in many ways we ask people to do. There’s all sorts of escalation matrices. 

Like, oh, if this happens, they alert their boss and they assume that that’s the job of a higher up and the impact players tend to just maintain the ownership of these things. Like, you know what my job is to get it across the finish line. And I had originally titled this chapter, “They Finished Wrong” and I ended up retitling it to “They Finished Stronger”, because what happens is they don’t just take this and like, okay, I’m going to drag this thing across the finish line myself.

They’re securing reinforcements. They’re negotiating for what they need. They’re going to get it done, not alone, but they get it done by rallying people, but they never let go of the ownership. So it’s this difference of when the big unforeseen obstacles come, do I escalate or do I just keep ownership and pull other people in? And because of that they finish not exhausted, but they finish actually stronger because they’ve tackled that. They call in for help. They call in for reinforcements.

[00:28:39] Sean: I’m actually really intrigued by that where they don’t finish exhausted, they finish stronger where then the next project they’re able to contribute more on. I am just wondering about the cyclical nature of all this. Our impact players, are they impact players all the time or do contributors also show spikes where they’re an impact player and vice versa impact players kind of dip down to that contributor level. If you’re in that zone, are you there all the time or do you fluctuate between them?

[00:29:08] Liz: I think there’s two ways to think about that. Let me go to this pool of impact players I studied. These people seem to operate with this mentality most of the time. They had track records of working this way, which is why their leaders kind of called their name up when I asked, tell me about someone who made this extraordinary impact. They’ll say, oh, they did it here. They did it there. It tends to be a way of life for them. It’s a way of thinking, it’s a service mentality. 

It’s like an ownership mentality. And we can go a little bit more into the anatomy of how they think, but then as other people have been exposed to the idea, I think we look at it and go, okay, for me there are times when I have very much had this kind of a mindset and I can point to them where I was not just doing my job, I was doing the job that needed to be done. When roles were unclear I didn’t sit around and wait for someone to clarify that I just stepped up and took the lead.

Or when things are moving, instead of just hunkering down, I’m adjusting on the fly. And so I think we can all think about times where we were in that space, like that was our mental game. And I imagine you could think about like, oh yeah, there are times when, like, that was absolutely me. And then I can think about times when I had fallen out of that mentality and I’m like, oh yeah, you know, I’m a contributor. I’m showing up, I’m doing my job. In some ways we’re phoning it in, as they say. And usually for me, that’s where I get very agitated. I can sense something’s not right.

Self-Awareness

[00:31:06] Sean: I think that this internal scratchiness, almost that uncomfortableness. I kind of viewed one of those times, I’m showing up in a way I don’t want to show up. I think about these spirals, we can just spiral up or we can spiral down. And I think about the aggregation of marginal gains. When I show up in a way I don’t want to, one of these times, it’s key for me not to allow the next time for me to show the exact same way.

I want to go the exact opposite way. And then when you do one of those positive moments where you show up as an impact player, make sure to build on top of that. And the next time you come into one of those messy scenarios, it’s much easier to show up in the way that you want to show up. I think about that compounding effect and allow those little wins to keep piling on top of each other.

[00:31:46] Liz: And it’s absolutely a compounding effect. That’s what we saw because the way they work offers this guarantee to their leaders and their stakeholders, like we give the ball to Sean and it’s going to get done and it’s going to get done in the right way. And people are going to end up smiling and laughing at the result of it, rather than like, sort of bemoaning the Pyrrhic victory. And so these people just get handed more bigger responsibility, more control. 

And what’s beautiful about that is that people are just continuing to reinvest in them, reinvest in their development and their careers. Sean, I would love to hear if you don’t mind, like a time when you were kind of like, oh, I’m in that impact player zone, like that was me. And I wouldn’t mind hearing about a time, you’re like, oh man, this is where I feel like I felt out of that. I was spiraling. I want to hear a spiral up, spiral down

[00:32:49] Sean: You put me on the spot here. Okay. So I’ll set the conditions first because we each are all different. We have our own strategy, our own methods. For me, a big part of this all becomes awareness. And I think about self-awareness where I could perform like an impact player but if I don’t have that awareness, then that moment is going to pass and I’m not going to learn from that, whether that’s positive or negative. 

And so I actually think about, how do I zoom out during key moments, during inflection points? I try to do that. And I even think about this even in between meetings. Unfortunately, we tend to overschedule, it’s like I have two o’clock. I have three o’clock. I have a four o’clock meeting and just building in some little moments of reflection, it’ll be 5, 10, 15 minutes. And so after a moment, a big team meeting, I make sure I can actually zoom out and say, you know what, let me assess myself here.

And then obviously we can get this from other people as well. But for me, the big first starting step is being able to actually zoom out, have some awareness there to catch myself in the moment, because what ends up happening…  I just think about some corporate organizations and you might do a quarterly review and your boss brings up a piece of advice, and you’re like, I don’t even remember this, was it three months ago, as opposed to being aware in-the-moment. 

And I think that has to start with you and back to your original point around empowerment. I view that as an empowering moment, whether you’re the leader or someone underneath the leader is taking those individual situations, individual circumstances and having that awareness. And then obviously once you understand that awareness and you can articulate it and distill it down, and then the next time I feel like those early warning signs are popping up for a negative scenario, it’s so much easier for me to catch myself. 

And just even my internal dialogue, right there would be, you know what, this isn’t how I want to show up. This isn’t the person I want to be. I know those aren’t specific circumstances, but I think that might be helpful just providing the groundwork and context in how I approach these moments.

Reflect On The Assumptions

[00:34:39] Liz: I think that’s so important, Sean. And I think if I could make a plea to anyone listening is like, take those moments to reflect. And if you’re going to reflect on anything, reflect on what are the assumptions that I hold. It’s funny when I was studying the behavior of the best leaders and looking at these multiplier and diminished leaders, part of my research was asking people to describe, well, what did the leader do?

And then how did the leader think? And I thought, oh, that’s a ridiculous question. No, one’s going to know how their boss is thinking. It’s funny. People struggle to remember the behavior, but they absolutely remember the assumptions. And like, how did you even know what that person was thinking? Because our assumptions tend to sort of bleed out. The same in this research when I asked the managers, tell me about an impact player versus a contributor. Talk to me about what their beliefs were. 

I’m always so struck at how articulate we are about other people’s assumptions. Like, oh yeah, they work as if they could solve problems. They worked as if they were in charge, but didn’t always need to be in charge. They worked as if their job was an expression of their inner joy. And I think if we could reflect on anything, it’s like, what are the assumptions that I hold right now? What am I believing to be true? For me, it’s like, back in that moment in the cab of my parents’ little mini truck, my assumption was you don’t have a right to do this.

This is my car. I gave you a ride. I’m the boss of this situation, not you. And like, we can go into meetings and think, wait a minute, my assumption is actually, they’re the boss and I’m sort of a victim of bad leadership right now. Okay, wait a minute, that’s not true. That’s not true at all. I actually have way more control over this situation than it may seem. I think if we can catch ourselves doing anything is what the assumptions are because the behavior just follows from our assumptions. If we get the assumptions right, everything else works.

[00:36:58] Sean: I’m just lit up right now because I love this because of the way I think about this. New information, new knowledge is pointless unless those assumptions are in the right mode. I think about these mental models, it would be like having a filing cabinet. But if the filing cabinet, the structure is wrong from the get-go, any more files on top of that is just wasted. It’s completely useless. I mean, you have to update those models, those assumptions, how you view the world.

This is not talked about enough. I don’t know if you’re working on your next book. I hope maybe you’re going to dive into this because this is something that I feel like could just be talked about for hours. Thank you for highlighting that. With regards to assumptions, you were mentioning something a minute ago, just the anatomy of how these impact players think. And I would love for you to deconstruct that I’m just fascinated by this.

[00:37:46] Liz: Well, probably at the simplest level. It was after pulling back and backing away from all of the data and the analysis that I did. It was very clear that there’s two fundamentally different worldviews, the impact player versus the normal contributor operating on it. When it comes right down to it, I can boil it down to its essence. The impact player sees what most people see as threats, messy problems, lack of role clarity, problems that you couldn’t have planned for dropping in your lap like a target that changed.

Most people look at those and go, that’s a threat, that’s a problem, that’s something I want to avoid. And they tend to avoid them kind of like the way… I live sort of near the coast and when a big wave is coming at you and you’re like, ah, scary and flee, run away like a Monty Python scene. You try to run away from it and then it just topples you. And then you’re tossed in the surf. That would be like me out in the waves. And then I would compare that to my son, who’s a surfer. And when the big wave is coming, what does a surfer do? 

Someone who’s an experienced ocean swimmer, they dive into it and through it. And it really is the difference in how the impact player tends to see things. They’re like, you know what, I’m going into that, not away from that. And like a problem that’s messy, some people might see that as well, that’s not my job. That’s a distraction from my job. If I go there to that mess, and by messy problems I mean things that just don’t sit in any one person’s job, like then I’m not going to be able to do my job.

It’s a distraction and it’s a threat to my productivity. Whereas the impact player looks at that and goes, oh, that’s an opportunity. If it’s messy and it’s no one’s job, but it’s important to the organization, that’s a chance for me to add value. That’s a chance for me to be of service. That’s a chance for me to be useful. And it’s a fundamentally different mentality of, oh, I see all these things that other people see as threats, like their everyday challenges. They’re not going away.

And that was what struck me in the research as I was looking at the situations in which they act and think very differently. I’m like, oh, these are the situations that…  I’ve been out of the corporate world for 15 years now. When I have lunch with all my friends who are in the corporate world, these are the challenges that they talk about. This is lunchtime conversation and they’re everywhere. They never go away. The impact player sees these as an opportunity and I’m going to go into it because it’s an opportunity to serve. It’s an opportunity to learn. It’s an opportunity to innovate. 

It’s an opportunity to do things differently. One of my favorites is these unforeseen obstacles, well, I can escalate it like this big old boulder drops down on my project. Well, I can escalate that and let someone else deal with it, but then I have to deal with how they decide to deal with it. Or I can say, wait a minute, you will probably see where I’m going to go with this. That was unplanned. And everyone knows that we couldn’t have forecasted that, like a COVID pandemic. So I’m going to use this as a chance to solve this the way I think it should be solved.

I’m going to self-empower and solve it. And it’s actually I love the volunteer teacher of this Bible study class, when the pandemic kit, nobody knew what to do with this class of teenagers early in the morning. And everyone was sort of waiting for direction. I’m like, oh, well, if no one else is in charge, I’m going to solve this the way I think it should be solved. And it was an opportunity to totally innovate and kind of reinvent what we were doing. And it’s just a different lens. It’s essentially choosing to work with opportunity goggles on.

[00:42:03] Sean: I love that. It’s almost like these little light bulbs are popping off these little green lights when these opportunities come up as an ability to skill up, not only yourself, but your organization as well. It’s so funny because these things are going to pop up all the time. I feel like so many times people think everything works linearly and like the world’s just a complex adaptive system where we are all these unique variables that we can account for and contribute for they’re going to factor in here.

And so if you’re one of those people, that’s like, I don’t want to touch that, that’s too messy for me. Just think about how that’s gonna play out over the long-term for yourself personally, for the organizations you’re in. I love that you uncover how productive some of these impact players are. And there’s this great story I love. So Bill Gates’ mom, she used to conduct a lot of meetings and dinners. 

Focus

And there was this dinner with a lot of highly successful people, a lot of people doing some big things in the world and two people, there was her son, Bill Gates, and then Warren Buffet, potentially the greatest investor of all time. And she asks what’s the one thing that everyone in this room can attribute your success to. And Bill and Warren at the exact same time, they just shout focus. And so I’m wondering about these impact players, their ability to get things done, are they doing a lot more or are they just able to focus more and use the same amount of hours just more productively?

[00:43:22] Liz: Focus, I think is a really interesting word. They didn’t necessarily work harder than anyone else. A lot of them were hardworking people, but not the effort wasn’t the differentiating variable. It was how they thought about their work. And when you mentioned focus, it’s a particular form of focus. It’s not, I am focused on what I think is important, which is kind of invogue. Some ways right now, which is like, oh, I’m going to choose my focus, and I’m going to focus on this. 

They focused on what was important to other people. In some ways there’s a part of me that just wants to, you know, there’s things you want to shout from the rooftops and hope somebody hears you. One of the things I want to shout, and particularly to people who maybe are earlier in their career is I’ve been really skeptical of this advice that we often hear of follow your passion, do what you’re passionate about, follow your passion, because it wasn’t the way of the impact player. 

What they did is they worked passionately on the most important problems of the organization. So rather than coming into the organization and saying like, oh, by the way, here’s what I care about. They found out what their leaders cared about, what the stakeholders cared about, and then they focused their energy there. So it’s focus, but it’s not, I’m going to focus on what I want. And they weren’t even as focused on their own career as much as I am going to work in service to what is most important.

But do you know what happens to your career when you go into an organization and you say, I am going to work in service to what is most important to the mission of this organization or department or boss, or my teammates. Boom, your career blows up big because people are like, wow, you’re going to like actually help me get the most important things done, here, join me here, come into this important meeting here, take more here, represent me here. And so they make what’s important to others, they serve important to them.

Can You Have an Entire Team of Impact Players?

[00:45:39] Sean: I love paradoxes in life and that’s one of them. The more you help others, the more it’s going to come back to you. It’s cool to actually hear about that coming out into the real world. I’m wondering across all your work, did you come across certain organizations where the number of impact players they had was almost mind-boggling? And I’m wondering if you came across this, did that have any negative effects or did only good things come from this?

[00:46:03] Liz: It’s an interesting question, but one I can’t answer because it wasn’t how I structured the research. I didn’t go out looking for which organization has impact-players. We went out and we interviewed managers and asked every manager to identify an impact player and the other. So we got kind of an even distribution. It is a question I’ve been thinking about a lot, which is, can you have an entire team of impact players? I don’t think you can have an entire team of MVPs because it’s assuming that one person’s contribution is more valuable than another. 

But, I think you can have an entire team of impact players. And I have talked with many managers who have said, yeah, I’ve worked on an entire team like that. And I think a lot of us can point to periods in our career where we’re like, man, the whole team was playing at their best. Everyone was thinking this way. I think it’s possible. And in some ways the mindset is infectious and it tends to spread and it gets spread across the team because it’s not about who’s got the most talent. It’s about how you play your talent.

Liz’s Deepest Talents

[00:47:22] Sean: For you personally, where do you think you have the most talent?

[00:47:27] Liz: Where do I have the most talent? Like do I have a talent?

[00:47:33] Sean: I certainly think you do, and I know you work with a lot of leaders, a lot of executives helping them out. I guess I’m just wondering, because one of the things we were talking about a few minutes ago is just being able to assess yourself. And so I’m wondering, you contribute a lot to the world and the people you work with and the books you write. I’m just wondering where you think your deepest talents are.

[00:47:54] Liz: Yeah. So, okay. I’ll tell you where my deepest talents are. First of all, I have no outward talents. My family makes fun of me because I’m like, I could never win a talent contest. I have no party tricks. I have none of that, but I have a couple of mental capabilities and I think what I’m good at is I’m good at synthesizing. So like my mind is built to take in lots of disparate data points and information and find patterns. So I’m a pretty good pattern finder. And I can usually sit in a meeting and go, I hear three things. 

There’s three things in this. And I do that pretty well in my research. So I’m a bit of a synthesizer and it was actually my first executive coaching assignment. And at the end of it, my client, he said, Liz, we’ve been talking a lot about things like my talents and my genius and such. He says, I want to tell you what yours is. I’m like, oh. He goes, you have a way you could tell people the truth, but you do it in a way that they can hear it. And I thought about that.

And I think that is something I do well. I think I help people see things that might be hard to see sometimes like the way that they’re sabotaging their own efforts. It’s something I saw in this research. And I think one of my hopes with this book is that people see the ways that they’re sabotaging their own desire for impact, like focusing on what you’re passionate about versus finding out what the organization is passionate about and channeling your energy there. It’s funny. Those are probably two things.

Frequency Counts And Analysis

[00:49:49] Sean: I would just love it if you actually dive just a little bit further on your synthesizing capabilities. Because I think moving forward, obviously we know we live in this world where information is coming out. It’s non-stop and those people who can synthesize, distill down to the key, important bits of information that’s essential moving forward here. I’m wondering if there’s anything you’ve uncovered in order to synthesize really well that others could learn from you.

[00:50:15] Liz: It is something that my mind does pretty easily, but I have a little technique that I generally use. I kind of just do frequency counts on things, which if I’m doing like qualitative synthesis, I’ll just like, oh, here’s something I heard in that interview, in that discussion, and I’ll write it down and then I’ll put a check mark on it. And then I hear it again, check mark. Hear it again, check mark. And I could show you some crazy binders full of how I do that. Then I kind of look at things in all their different iterations, and so I just like, okay, wait a minute, that was a loud issue. 

It’s small, like one or two data points, but it’s loud. That’s different than an issue that we’re hearing over and over and over again. And I’m going to focus on the ones that we’re hearing over and over again. In some ways it’s like uncovering ambient problems, which is like the things that are just out there. They’re like low grade problems, low grade high-frequency problems. I look for those. Even keeping a frequency count of, I learned this little technique that I was very dismissive of initially that turned out to be helpful.

I got a little bit of a sucker punch when I volunteered for… I have four children, and so I was looking for a volunteer job in one of their classes. And I signed up to be a discussion leader for the junior great books program. And I’m like, oh, that’ll be easy. I’ll go down, and lead a discussion of little great pieces of literature for third graders. It will be so easy. And they’re like, oh, you need to go to a one day training program. And I’m like, no, no. I had low power in this situation, actually. So I went down to this one day training program. And one of the things that they taught us to do is, they taught these three principles, which I use all the time in debate.

And the first principle was as a discussion leader, your job is to ask the question, but not give an answer. The second was to ask for evidence, meaning don’t let anyone get away with an opinion. And I had so much fun with these little kids, we were talking about Jack and the Beanstalk. And well, why do you think Jack went up the beanstalk? I’m like, well, why do you think that, what evidence do you have to support that claim? And at first they were like, what? And then I’m like, yeah, and they were like, oh, okay. And they got so good at it. Like, okay, on page 12, it says this. And so that makes me conclude that. I’m like, very nicely done. Here’s the third thing they said, ask everyone.

Okay. I’m down with that. That’s great. I’m going to ask everyone. And they said, I should make a seating chart and I’m like, what? And so they said, make a little seating chart, draw a circle with everyone’s name on it, like this. And then just put a check mark after they’ve said something. And I’m like, I can do that in my head. And I’m like, okay, I’ll make a chart. I was like, wow. That was really illuminating actually, because you start putting check marks on things and you see how that person’s really dominating. So it’s just another form of frequency analysis. Like what’s coming up over and over.

Develop The Contributors Or Look For Impact Players?

[00:53:37] Sean: Aren’t those moments in life that are so unexpected that you mentioned that the volunteering there left you with something and in this invaluable skill that analysis through lines throughout the rest of your life. I love those moments. I want to circle back, I know we’re going to wrap up here shortly, to one of the original things you were saying. You were talking to that group at Salesforce and that leader mentioned you can never multiply by zero. You’re just going to get zero. 

If you’re a leader and you have a team and you have certain people who are contributors, and then you have those impact players and those contributors have been around for years, is this something you should continue to try to develop? Or should you get just out there and start looking for more impact players? I know this is a messy scenario. I’m just wondering how you think this through for other leaders who are listening to this.

[00:53:23] Liz: I love that you brought up that scenario because it gives me a chance to share. It’s a belief. This is something I really believe. Most everything I write about, I teach, I share, I think it’s this way, but I’m not totally sure here’s something I’m absolutely sure about. And I’ve learned this by studying leaders and leaders who bring out the best in others and leaders who have a diminishing effect in studying this and teaching these ideas all around the world. This thing I’ve learned is that it’s not about leadership, it’s about contributorship and that’s it, that all over the world, people come to work every day, wanting to contribute a hundred percent of their capability. 

I have asked so many people about their experience with diminishing leaders. Well, what percentage of your capability do they get on a 30, 40, 50? Thousands and thousands of data points on this. And then I ask, what percentage of your capability did you want to give? A hundred percent, a hundred percent, or well, it started as a hundred, but then it went down to zero. And this is the thing I’ve learned is that people desperately want to contribute a hundred percent. People don’t want jobs. They don’t want to be job holders. People want to be difference makers. People want impact. 

And I think we’re seeing it with our response to the pandemic, this great resignation that people are questioning, not just where we work, but why we work and what we’re willing to put up with. And I think that the most important thing to understand as a leader is that the people on your team that you’ve stacked, ranked, that you’ve evaluated, that you’ve stratified in some way, every single one of them wants to contribute everything they have. And every single one of them wants to do meaningful work and have an impact. Now, some of them have had that trained out of them. 

Some of them have had it beaten out of them, diminished out of them, but it is the human condition. It is deep, deep, deep, deeply wired in our psyche and our souls to want to contribute, to want to make a difference, to want to serve. And so I think the most important thing is to know everyone on your team wants to do this. And it’s painful for people when they can’t, when something is holding them back, either their leader, so it might be you as their leader or themselves. I see part of my work is to help leaders get out of the way of people wanting to contribute all of their capability and development, and then helping us get out of our own way.

And I think that’s what managers can do. If you want a team of impact players, figure out what is getting in the way, what is impeding their impact. It might be you, I mean, maybe you just need to give people permission, which is like, by the way, unless someone very explicitly tells you not, you are in charge, take ownership, do what’s needed to get the right job done. Maybe people just need permission. And then there’s a number of things you can do to coach, to develop, to recruit this kind of talent, to bring in some starter talent that has a positively infectious effect on a team. The will is there, I know that.

[00:58:14] Sean: Yeah. I mean, you want to talk about something that’s not gonna change for a hundred, 500, a thousand years. I mean, that’s a universal law of nature, we want to contribute. We want meaning in our lives. I love that you just bring light to that. So many people, we just tend to forget that for some reason. And that should be the starting block. Liz, you know how much I appreciate you, your work, the new book, Impact Players.

Obviously we’re going to have all of that linked up. Anything else that people should know about the book? One of the things I love is, the number of visuals, graphics, key takeaways you bring to light to make it easier for leaders to be able to distill this down and learn what an impact player is versus a contributor. Then also, how do we understand the teams that we’re working with to help get more impact players, but anything else you want to bring to light about the book?

[00:59:00] Liz: Oh, you know, here’s my guilty confession. If someone’s going to read the book, feel free to skip the parts that aren’t helpful. I put a lot of like takeaways and playbooks and here’s a summary and synthesis because that’s what my mind does. But like, if that’s not helpful to you as a reader, just skip over it, find the parts that are valuable for you.

Conversation With Anyone Dead or Alive

[00:59:24] Sean: I love that. Liz, final one here, before we wrap up, If you could do this long form conversation, sit down, anyone dead or alive, just not a family member or friend. Who would you just love having one of these deep discussions with?

[00:59:40] Liz: Oh, wow. Let’s see, like everyone. I’m a researcher, I love the dig-deep discussions. Oh, I wouldn’t mind. I wouldn’t mind, you mentioned Bill Gates. I wouldn’t mind really understanding how he has grown and changed as a leader over the arc of his career. He’s been a fascinating one. I wouldn’t mind trying to understand that a little bit better. I think I might want to have, let’s say, really have some long-form conversations with our leaders in Congress, who I know are trying to do the right things, but seem to lots of us, like they’re doing the wrong things. I’m on both sides of the political spectrum.

[01:00:40] Sean: I appreciate it, Liz Wiseman. I cannot thank you enough for joining us once again on What Got You There.

[01:00:47] Liz: You know what, Sean, thank you so much for the conversation and for the work you do.

[01:00:51] Sean: Thank you. You guys made it to the end of another episode of What Got You There. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I really do appreciate you taking the time to listen all the way through. If you found value in this, the best way you can support the show is by giving us a review, rating it, sharing it with your friends and also sharing on “social”. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. Looking forward to you guys, listening to another episode.