Demonstrating Impact, Showing You Care

Thasunda Brown Duckett, CEO of TIAA
Source:  WSJ

In Google's Project Aristotle, Julia Rozovsky and her team identified the five most important attributes that distinguish the highest performing teams at the company from the lowest.  Impact was one of these five characteristics.  Rozovsky and her group defined impact as follows:  "The results of one’s work, the subjective judgement that your work is making a difference, is important for teams. Seeing that one’s work is contributing to the organization’s goals can help reveal impact."  What happens, though, if workers don't always feel as though they are having a significant impact on the company's broader goals and objectives.  What if some workers never interact with customers, and thus, never see the positive effect their actions have on customer experience and satisfaction? Leaders need to bridge that gap. They need to create a "line of sight" between the workers' actions and the customer. They need to demonstrate and affirm that the workers are having an impact.  In so doing, leaders also can show their front-line employees that they truly care about them and value their efforts.  

Here's a great example of a leader who understood the importance of affirming impact. Thasunda Brown Duckett is the new CEO of TIAA.  Prior to that, she served in several senior executive positions at JP Morgan Chase, including as CEO of their Auto Finance business.  In an interview with David Gelles of the New York Times, she described one of her early moves as leader of that business at JP Morgan Chase: 

When I was named C.E.O. of Auto, within the first 90 days I went to the mail room, and I told them, “Keep doing your job with excellence. If you don’t put that payment in the right chute, and it accidentally goes to mortgage, then the customer doesn’t post on time, they’re upset, and they end up closing their account with us. But you started that process. So when you hear me talk about our customer experience having improved, brush your shoulders off.”  And they go, “You’re welcome. You know we got you.” At that moment I was able to connect them to Chase, to this bigger narrative. And now they know that T cares about everybody.

Making Sure People Recognize Their Impact

Adam Bryant, formerly of the New York Times, interviewed Deborah Bothun recently and posted her comments on LinkedIn.   Bothun spent 21 years at PricewaterhouseCoopers.  The two now owrk together at Merryck & Co, a leadership development consultancy.   Bothun explains that she wants everyone in an organization to understand that they can make an impact on the customer, the organization's mission, and the P&L.   She explains about the latter in this excerpt:

Another one of my themes is that often people don’t think of their role as having a P&L impact. Everybody’s role ultimately has a P&L impact. No matter what functional area you’re in, you need to be responsible for the commercialization of that organization.   Regardless of what you do, you need to understand how what you do drives revenue or drives cost. That way, you become more knowledgeable about the drivers in your area and how they intersect with the drivers of growth in other areas, and you become more integrated into the whole team. And if you can start to think that way, you’re going to have a much better chance of moving in the direction you want.

I'm in full agreement with Bothun.  If people at all levels understand how they can make an impact, they can be encouraged and empowered to bring forth ideas for making the organization more successful.  People will be more motivated if they recognize the ways in which their work matters, and how their efforts can enhance the organization's overall success.