How to Be an Impactful Leader

Hello and thank you for reading the newest edition of my newsletter! My featured subject for this week’s newsletter is the author of Impact Players , Liz Wiseman! And don’t forget that later today at 12 pm EST / 9 am PST/5 pm GMT for my weekly Newsweek interview series, Better, I’ll be talking with Johnny C. Taylor Jr. about how we can reset company culture. Last week’s conversation really felt like a roundtable discussion with everyone participating in the chat - set yourself a reminder and join us here !

As a small reminder, if you aren’t part of my email list, which has completely different content than this newsletter, sign up here - it has advice on personal branding, strategies to grow your business, and how you can play the long game and reach your goals.

From team members to those on the executive board, plenty have had to show up for others and take the lead through these recent stretches of uncertainty. Liz Wiseman, an advisor who teaches leadership to executives around the world, has studied what leaders can do to strengthen their impact and empower their teams to become impact players of their own. It turns out, you don’t need a managerial position to be an impactful leader. In last week’s interview, Liz and I went through the five things that Liz discovered are habits of strong leaders, and why thinking about the long game to frame her decisions steers her life in the right direction. Here are a few highlights from our talk, and if you’d like, you can watch the interview in its entirety here .

Use your team’s native strengths:

“Great leaders find people's native strengths and they put them to use. I've been managing long enough that I figured out it's a lot easier and wiser to build jobs around people's strengths than it is to try to get people to be strong at things they're not. The multiplying leader creates space for people to speak up and take risks, and that creates space for people to do their best thinking.”?

Encourage debates:

“I think the best leaders are decision-makers on the small decisions, but on the big decisions, they tend to be debate makers. Their job is to say ‘Hey, here's an issue that we need to make an important decision on. Let me frame this issue. Let me pose the question. Let me present our options.’ Then they put the right people in the room and ask them to bring data, to bring a point of view, and then have a hard-hitting debate. It ends up really unifying a team rather than tearing them down.”?

Contribute outside of your comfort zone:

“I looked at the differences between ordinary contributors, and again, these are rock solid contributors, not poor performers or people who are struggling, and impact players. I could count on ordinary contributors to do a good job. But what the impact players did, is when problems were messy and it wasn’t really this department's job or his job or her job to do, they go out into that messy space and they do the job that needs to be done. You can imagine how their managers, leaders, clients, and stakeholders feel about them because they're willing to go out into no man's land rather than stay in their lane.”?

Thank you so much for reading this week’s newsletter - and join me for my interview with?Johnny C. Taylor Jr. !

If you can’t make today’s interview, there’s no need to worry, because we always make sure there is a replay available! You can find every prior Better interview on my YouTube page . If you’d like to be notified when the newest episode is available, subscribe to my channel and you’ll receive a notification.

Wishing you health and success -?

Dorie