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Ordinary Contributors vs. Impact Players
An impact player is someone who has kind of an outsized positive impact on a team. They’re someone who contributes extraordinary value, but they also work in a way that makes an entire team better. They’re people who raise the level of play on a team. They’re the people we trust when the stakes are high and when things really matter because they rise to the occasion. In the sports world, we all know who the impact players are. They’re people who make this valuable contribution, but teams play better because they’re on the team. They’re people that we look to to lead even when they’re not in an official leadership role. And what I began to see is that the workplace has impact players as well, the people we turn to in the high-stakes situation and the people we hand the ball to in the moments that matter. People we know are going to go out there and get the job done, but they’re going to do it in a way that secures a win for the whole team.
Changing Your Mindset
Becoming an impact player isn’t just about changing our behavior, it’s about changing the beliefs that drive our behavior. It’s about changing our mindsets, and it’s a change of mindset when we encounter something that is messy, something that is not our job, maybe something that feels bigger than us, beyond our responsibility or our capability. It’s about telling ourselves that I could do something about this, that I have the power to do something about that, that someone would want me to do something about this.
Now, let me tell you what this isn’t. This isn’t about just being optimistic or sunny or positive. It’s about acknowledging what is hard, what is scary, sitting in the presence of that discomfort long enough that you could find an opportunity to add value. That doing something that’s rangy, maybe just a little beyond my job description, maybe a little above my level is not an act of usurping power, it’s an act of service. That I can be of value inside of an organization regardless of the position I hold or the level that I operate from.
What we find is that when we are in impact player mode, we are thinking beyond ourself. We don’t have this single camera lens on a situation. We have this multi-camera lens. We can see it from our perspective. We can see it from our colleagues’ perspective, our boss’s perspective, our boss’s boss’s boss’s perspective, the market perspective. We look at this, and we see this multi-dimensional view of a situation, which is what allows us to get out of our own head, beyond our own concerns, and figure out what is valuable to the people that I work with. Because we can’t create value inside an organization or inside the market unless we understand what’s valued. So being able to get up from our seat in the stadium and go sit in another seat and see what the action looks like there is what allows us to do work of maximum value.
Avoiding Burnout
Understanding how impact players work has really important implications for burnout, for our own burnout, for burnout that’s happening across our organization. Burnout, meaning not just when you’re tired, but you’re inexplicably tired. It’s where you can’t find the energy, the joy, the insights, the ideas, that you have had before or that you typically have in a particular kind of work. What I’ve learned studying ordinary contributors and impact players is that everybody craves impact. We all want our work to matter.
Now, when we ask people, “What is the work experience like when you’re working hard, but yet, you’re strangely underutilized?” Meaning, you’ve got more knowledge and skill and insight than is being engaged, and also when you’re doing work that isn’t landing. You feel like you’re working hard, but you’re not getting anywhere or nobody sees or notices. People describe this as frustrating, draining, demoralizing, and exhausting.
Now, when we ask people, “What is work like when you’re working extremely hard, maybe even overworked, but you’re actually deeply utilized?” Meaning, you’re using all of your skills and knowledge and capability and like every IQ point, and you’re doing work that matters, that’s visible, that gets noticed. What people will say was, “Okay, that might be a little bit tiring, but it’s totally exhilarating, fulfilling, it’s energizing.”
Here’s why I think this is really important to understand now in this moment in time that we find ourselves in is that people are experiencing a lot of burnout. We’re dealing with epidemic levels of burnout in the workplace, and it is so easy to assume that people burn out because they have too much work. But everything in my research points to something different. We don’t tend to burn out because we’ve got too much work. We burn out because we have too little impact. Studying the mental game and the practices of impact players helps us see how small differences in how we think and how we operate can end up creating extraordinary differences in impact. And what that means is without working harder, we can increase our impact. I think the impact player mindset is an antidote to burnout.