Taking Control of Ambiguity with Liz Wiseman

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This week’s newsletter features my conversation from a recent LinkedIn Live conversation with my good friend, Liz Wiseman

Liz Wiseman is a researcher and executive adviser who teaches leadership to executives around the world. She's the author of the New York Times bestseller Multipliers (which is one of my favorite books of all time), The Multiplier Effect, and Wall Street Journal bestsellers Rookie Smarts and Impact Players. She's also part of the Thinkers50 list of the world's top management thinkers and has been an amazing resource and mentor for me as I was thinking through my upcoming book The Experience Mindset.?

In our conversation, Liz describes what it means to be an impact player and how to confidently navigate ambiguous situations or challenges that have no playbook. She shares her findings from her research of the most impactful leaders to pinpoint how we can all learn to be powerful contributors.

Here are a few of my favorite takeaways from my time with Liz:

Every organization is trying to streamline what they’re doing and add value while being more efficient. How do you uncover what the basics are?

I like to look at it as basic needs.

We're seeing a lot of companies shed parts of their business that are speculative and saying, “Let's focus on things that are needed in the market today.” This is kind of the mentality we need inside organizations.

I studied the most impactful contributors, and what I found is that, fundamentally, these are people who don't just do their job but who do the job that needs to be done. These are people who are heat-seeking. Instead of having an inward orientation, they have an outward orientation.

What is your advice for someone who wants to be an impact player and have an outward orientation but doesn’t know how to get beyond their own perspective?

The most impactful people have a multi-angle view of a situation. So when we go into a situation fraught with ambiguity, and we're not sure what will happen, the goal is to get as many perspectives as possible.

Naturally, we see our own angle, but how do you get your boss' angle? How do you get your client's angle? Your senior executives’? Your collaborators’? Maybe your nemesis’ in the organization?

When you can gather those perspectives, it becomes so clear what you need to do to create value or a win for them. It's hard to change without a compelling reason to do something differently. But when we start to get this rich picture of what needs to happen to navigate uncertainty and what value looks like, then it's easier to move toward it because we have a lot more confidence.

Do you think managers should hire for cultural fit or for mindset and behavior?

Cultural fit is so important for people to be successful in an organization, but people don't have to start out as a strong cultural fit.

There's a lot of research that shows that people adapt and figure it out. You shouldn’t be looking for someone who fits a culture but someone who can decode the culture. That requires an outward orientation. And an outward orientation really requires competence.

When we hire talent on our teams, we want people who are competent and confident enough in their own abilities that they can contribute without having to spend their time trying to prove their value. They have an understanding of what value looks like to the people around them and are able to focus their energy there.?

I hope you enjoyed this installment of my Think Forward Newsletter.

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Mahalo, Tiffani