How do you think about your impact as a leader? Is it the bottom line of the business? The culture? Or is it on the people around you more individually? In this Coaching Reflections video, I talk about impact on a personal level.
Transcript
Intro
[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: How do you think about your impact as a leader? Is it the bottom line of the business? The culture? Or is it on the people around you more individually?
My name’s Andy Polaine and every week I spend my days coaching design leaders. And in these videos, I reflect upon the common themes and questions that come up in the week.
And this week I want to talk about impact on a personal level.
The Ripple Effect
[00:00:20] Andy Polaine: We tend to focus on the big things when we think about impact, we think about business, industry, environment, social impact and all those things are important, don’t get me wrong. I think those are the things that we should be caring about.
But you may find, and I have definitely found in my career, the impact is greater closer to you. And it’s very much like throwing a stone in the pond. The ripples are strongest nearest to you, but they travel wide and they can have a great effect.
Just today I had a message from a student who I taught 20 years ago. She said, I was thinking about my own leadership journey. And there was a thing you said to me in one of the first weeks of the semester, which was "the jobs you say no too often define your career more than the ones who say yes to."
And she said it was something she had really carried with her and had been somewhat of a north star for her and shaped her career choices.
I was blown away that she got in touch with me about this. I was so happy to hear from her. I kid you not. I was in tears today when I was reading it. And it made me really realize, wow, that one thing I said that one time and this has had a real impact on this person’s career. And I think it’s really important to remember this as leaders as just human beings and the people we work with.
It’s certainly a thing I think about a lot as a teacher. You can have an effect on one or two or three people around you that you work with. Those people have an effect on three people around them that they work with. And that ripple effect is really exponential. And before, you know, it, you realize you’ve actually had a much, much greater impact on people, whether that’s the industry or just a group of people that have crossed paths with you over the course of your career, than you might think.
And as a leader, you might find you have a larger group of people over whom you have some kind of influence. And it really makes a difference.
And so while on a big universe level our significance is tiny. Your significance to those immediately around you can be huge and I think it’s worth remembering that.
Outro
[00:02:15] Andy Polaine: I hope that’s useful for you. If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it is at polaine.com/coaching, and I’ll put the link below.
If you’ve got any of your own experiences or stories about that, please post a comment below, I’d love to hear them.
Thanks very much and I’ll see you again soon.
