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Impact players finish stronger. When unforeseen obstacles drop in their way, we find that the impact players, they finish the job. They don’t finish at cost to their wellbeing. It’s not the kind of finish where you’re like, “Okay, there’s a big problem, I’ll handle it.” It’s also not a suffer in silence kind of finish, where it’s like, “Okay I’ll just suffer and endure,” where they put their head down, they carry this heavy weight. But they finish with wellbeing, meaning that they finish the job with the same energy with which they began the job. It’s they stay with the problem longer.
Lead your leaders
When we are thinking like an ordinary contributor we’re looking at this big problem and we’re like, “Ooh, that’s bigger than me.” Like, “I don’t have the power, that’s beyond me, it’s above my pay grade, it’s above my authority.” So we hand it off to someone bigger. The impact-player mentality is to be big, to say, “You know what, this is a big problem, but I kind of need to be at my biggest to solve it.” And what we find is they not only finish, they finish stronger because they built that muscle, that capability, that deep belief that “I can handle hard things” in that process of holding on, and pulling in help.
Okay, so how do you do this? How do you hold onto a big hard problem that is bigger than you? So when you encounter one of these obstacles that feels beyond you, yes, you want to alert higher-ups, people who maybe have more power, authority, control over the situation than you, but you just don’t want to hand it off to them. So alert people, but then don’t go it alone. Now start to invite people in.
Okay, so let’s say you’ve just had a big deal that’s going to fall out of the pipeline and it’s really an important customer, important revenue. Instead of just handing that off, like, “Okay, you know what they’ve said no, maybe you can save this deal.” You stay on it. Alert the leaders, alert the finance people, “Okay, we’ve got potential risk here in our pipeline.” And then start to take charge. Rather than hand to the senior VP, you say, “You know what, Senior VP, if I could get you to make a phone call to this customer … okay, product folks, you know what, do you think you could perhaps provide them a roadmap that shows how to address those concerns.” And once you’ve invited higher-ups to join you once you’ve called in for reinforcements, then continue to lead. And what it means is that we allow ourselves to lead our leaders. So instead of handing it off we’re inviting them to work alongside us, to work for us as we drive this problem across the finish line.
Get a strong start
If you really want to be a finisher that gets things all the way done and finishes with wellbeing and with greater strength for yourself and the team, actually the best way to do this is to make sure you start strong that you get a really strong start. Here are two things you can do every time you take something you know is going to be complex and you take the lead or take ownership of that. Make sure you know what the finish line looks like. Instead of just taking it on, stop, ask your colleagues, your stakeholders, your clients, your boss these three questions. Number one, what does great look like? How will I know that we’ve done something that is a great piece of work? Like describe that outcome for me. Number two, how will I know I’m done? Like how will we know that we’ve got this done, all the way done, that we haven’t stopped a yard short of the goal line and celebrated too early? And number three, ask what’s out of bounds? What do I not need to worry about? When you have that kind of clarity on a piece of work then you know how to drive something all the way across the finish line.
When you begin, negotiate for the necessities, ask for something. You know, we often think what we need to be able to finish a project on time, on budget is headcount and budget. But we find what professionals more often than not need is not resources, they need access. Maybe you need access to information. Maybe you need to be invited into a meeting. Maybe you need a rapid turnaround on a purchase rec or an approval. Ask for what you need before you need it so that when the cart is in the ditch you’ve got that help ready to go to get you back out.