Impact Owners

How well do you own the impact of your actions, decisions, and
communications?

How frequently does the impact of our actions, decisions, and
communications not closely reflect our intentions?

You intend to partner with someone, but you end up alienating them instead.
You propose an aggressive schedule for a project to get people focused
quickly, but end up making commitments that you cannot deliver against.
You select a technology pattern that is common in the industry, and easy to
find resources to staff, but your organization fumbles the implementation
of the required infrastructure, delaying your project, and reducing the
perceived quality of your application.

These are examples of situations where your intentions did not match the
outcomes. How easily do you own the impact? How much easier is it to own
your intentions and assign the impact to others? How easy is it to blame
my colleague for being “difficult” to work with? To blame the project team
for the delivery failure? To blame the infrastructure team for your app
problems?

Leadership demands the trust of those you are leading. Whether you are
leading your reporting staff, a project team, or some other organization or
group, trust is required. Whether leading from a position of authority,
influence, knowledge, or savvy, trust is required. Leadership without
trust is a form of tyranny.

Leaders can be trusted when they are willing to own the impact along with
their intentions.