What Is Personal Impact?
Personal impact refers to the way a person influences, motivates, or engages others—either positively or negatively. When you demonstrate the ability to share your talents and use the power of relationships to influence others and drive results for yourself, people around you, and the organization, you have a positive personal impact. People with personal impact have the characteristics and competencies needed to step forward, initiate change, introduce new ideas, and work effectively with others to make things happen. When you have personal impact, you combine your skills, knowledge, and experience with personal values and qualities that enable you to produce results through other people—even people with whom you do not have authority. The principles and practices of effective personal impact govern every action, communication, and decision. These core principles serve as a guide and approach to business and life and are key to building a career with greater meaning and purpose.
How Can I Improve My Personal Impact on Others and Our Business Culture?
As people strengthen their personal impact, an organization is better positioned to operationalize the skills people have. CMOE’s original research for discovering how practitioners of personal impact think and what they do revealed some key skill sets that make them successful.
To improve your personal impact and ability to naturally influence other leaders or team members, you must clearly identify your personal set of core principles and code of conduct that guides you each day. Next, identify the behaviors you believe will improve relationships, strengthen trust, and establish credibility with others.
Consider asking and answering these questions as you embark on improving your personal impact:
- What am I doing today to enable the success of others?
- What personal behaviors and actions will better support the vision, mission, and goals of the organization?
- What do I believe in and stand for in my life as I work and interact with others?
- What are my strengths? How can I better leverage those to achieve desired results?
- What are my opportunities for improvement? What steps will I take to improve?
- What can I do to manage adversity, manage emotions, and overcome challenges?
- How can I cultivate collaboration, tap into diverse perspectives, and build respectful relationships with others?
Finally, make a choice to take one or more actions each day that will personally impact the organization and influence the people you serve and are served by.
How Do You Measure Personal Impact?
One way to measure and understand the degree of influence and personal impact occurring in an organization is to deploy and review employee engagement surveys or other similar feedback tools like an employee experience assessment. This will give the organization an overarching measurement for the entire organization. Leadership 360 assessments or Employee Performance assessments are other helpful measurement tools. Some organizations choose to have a custom designed measurement tool that looks specifically at the dimensions associated with personal impact.
As you review the data and feedback that come from assessments or other measurement tools, examine the areas of leadership and culture practices that receive a high score. Those scores indicate areas where a commitment to people and culture are working favorably in the organization. Then, look for opportunities for improvement which can become the focus of development initiatives.
When analyzing the data, reflect on:
- What would a collaborative, people-centered culture initiative or development specifically do for leaders and team members?
- What tangible and intangible measures need to be put in place to engage in leadership and team-member development?
- What development programs and tools do we have now that support a culture where team members and leaders can influence each other and have personal impact?
- What are the critical few skill areas related to personal impact that are lacking in the organization?