A friend of mine recently received feedback that if he ever wanted to be seen as successful he needed to take on more responsibility. Otherwise, he could never have enough impact to compete with his peers. I hear this argument made a lot. There is a bias that unless you supervise a large group of people, have responsibility for several program areas, and manage a large budget, you can’t have impact.
I think that made sense in an industrial model. When you product was a “thing”, certainly the more things you could get produced the greater the impact you could have on a company. More people, more budget, and more program areas were a natural way to produce more things.
However, I’m not as sure that this always holds true in an information/conceptual age. If you generally believe the Pareto principle, you know that 80% of an organization’s value is driven from 20% of your resources. Therefore, couldn’t a person managing 20% have a greater impact than the one managing 80%? Isn’t the mantra “do more with less”?
As the financial crisis continues to unwind, we are finding that the people who defined and executed the investment strategies for financial institutions had significantly more (negative) impact than the rest of those institution’s workforces. Those investment teams didn’t have large client bases and probably didn’t have huge teams (compared to the sales force). Yet, they had enormous impact.
Tools like outsourcing and automation allows us to better separate transactional work from value-added work (i.e., splitting the “eighty” from the “twenty”). The result might be that some people have very small teams focused on the “twenty” while others may have large teams or systems focused on the “eighty”. Who is better positioned to have impact?
Some organizations have begun to recognize this, at least on paper. Increasingly organizations try to tie goals to outcomes rather than process metrics or span of control type metrics. However, we still have a long way to go on using truly outcome-focused measure in our goals – but that is a topic for another day. Perhaps we are moving in the right direction. Yet, there still seems to be a belief that people with more “responsibility” (where responsibility is defined in terms of quantifying people, programs, and budgets) have the potential for having greater impact.
This is not to suggest that leaders who have a high span of control don’t or can’t have impact. The point is to change our focus from how much is being managed to what is being managed and assess impact accordingly.
Chief: Thanks for this post. I like the way you deconstruct “impact.” So I’m wondering, how would you “reconstruct” the term so that it could be implemented more effectively in an organization. If you aren’t using the standard parameters for evaluating impact, what criteria do you use? Do you have any examples?
Incidentally, there are similar debates about impact in academe. How do you gauge a scholar’s impact on a field, for example? Is it by the number of times she is cited? The quality of the citations? Number of PhDs supervised? Or something else?
I’m not sure that the issues is as much reconstructing the term as it is in reconstructing our assumptions.
I am using “impact” in the same way that those who use scope as a proxy for impact are using it – a change to the organization.
The real issus is whether the current proxy is adequate. I’m suggesting that it might not be. Instead we need to either stop using proxies and start using the actual outcome measures (sales, profitability, employee satisfaction, etc.) which sometimes is hard (which is why people use proxies) or we need to find better proxies that are easier to measure, etc.
I think that in Academe the question might actually be around defining the word impact int he first place. The examples you gave are also proxies although I’m not sure what academic impact would be. I guess that perhaps looking toward the type of criteria the various Nobel committees use could be a starting point. The sciences are probably a bit easier to quantify than perhaps literature. But, they still have some criteria that have less to do with the proxies you mentioned and more to do with something else about the effect that the author’s work had on people. So, maybe that’s a good place to look.
I’m suspicious of things like number of PhDs supervised or number of citations. They don’t pass my basic sniff test of “Could these things be achieved without a positive change occuring”