The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Impact Players: How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger, and Multiply Your Impact by Liz Wiseman

Episode Date: October 12, 2021

Impact Players: How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger, and Multiply Your Impact by Liz Wiseman Why do some people break through and make an impact while others get stuck going through the motions? In every organization there are Impact Players—those indispensable colleagues who can be counted on in critical situations and who consistently receive high-profile assignments and new opportunities. Whether they are on center stage or behind the scenes, managers know who these top players are, understand their worth, and want more of them on their team. While their impact is obvious, it’s not always clear what actually makes these professionals different from their peers. In Impact Players, New York Times bestselling author and researcher Liz Wiseman reveals the secrets of these stellar professionals who play the game at a higher level. Drawing on insights from leaders at top companies, Wiseman explains what the most influential players are doing differently, how small and seemingly insignificant differences in how we think and act can make an enormous impact, and why—with a little coaching—this mindset is available to everyone who wants to contribute at their highest level. Based on a study of 170 top contributors, Wiseman identifies the mindsets that prevent otherwise smart, capable people from contributing to their full potential and the five practices that differentiate Impact Players: While others do their job, Impact Players figure out the real job to be done. While others wait for direction, Impact Players step up and lead. While others escalate problems, Impact Players move things across the finish line. While others attempt to minimize change, Impact Players are learning and adapting to change. While others add to the load, the Impact Players make heavy demands feel lighter. Wiseman makes clear that these practices—and the right mindset—can help any employee contribute at their fullest and shows leaders how they can raise the level of play for everyone on the team. Impact Players is your playbook for the new workplace.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with a great podcast we certainly appreciate you tuning in. Not you, but you over there.

I'm pointing at people. Liz, we appreciate you showing up too as well. I realize I might be, it may appear that I'm pointing you. If you want to see the pointing, which is, of course, the point of the show, go to youtube.com, Forge Us, Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification. When you hit it, you get this completion of feeling or feeling of completion. Either way, we try and be inclusive to people who are dyslexic.

You get the feeling washes over you that you belong to something and that the show loves you no matter what. Very much differently than your family. So anyway, go to there and see that. Go to goodreads.com. Forge that's Chris Voss. See everything we're reading and reviewing. Also, there's just a multitude of things you can do. Now you have something to do with your life. You can go to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, wherever all those cool kids are playing now, so you can see all the things I

was doing over there as well. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader,

and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold, But the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com. On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away. Different collectors, limited edition, custom made numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me. There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beaconsofleadership.com. So be sure to go there, check it out or order the book wherever fine books are sold. Today, oh my gosh, we did it

again. Oops, we did it again. I don't know. Do I have to pay for that as a plug? The attorneys are checking. Anyway, guys, we have an amazing author on the show. She's the author of four different books, and she has her newest book out today. She's going to be talking to us about it. It's going to be pretty freaking awesome. This book is coming out October 19th, 2021. So you're going to pre-order this. It's coming in all the different formats, including the audio CD. Those are really cool. And the title of the book, you may want me to tell us the title, Chris. Impact Players, How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger, and Multiply Your Impact by Liz Wiseman. She's going to be on the show with us today talking about it. And she is a researcher and executive advisor who teaches leadership to executives around the world.

She is the author of New York Times bestseller, Multipliers, How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, The Multiplier Effect, Tapping the Genius Insider Schools, and Wall Street Journal bestseller, Rookie Smarts, Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work. She is the CEO of the Wiseman Group, a leadership research and development firm headquartered in Silicon Valley, California. Welcome to the show, Liz. How are you? You know, I'm great. Today is my birthday, literally. Yeah.

Happy birthday. Thank you. There you go. It's a Thank you. Here you go. It's a birthday show. I feel bad. We didn't probably bring cake or anything. We should be like a restaurant. Somebody get some cake in here. I'm just kidding. There's nobody else out there, but it's fun. So welcome to the show. Give us your plugs, your dot coms

where people can find you on the interwebs and of course order up your fine book. Oh, let me see. I'm not too hard to find on the Internet. You can find me at thewisemangroup.com. You can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, at Liz Wiseman. And if you are interested in any information about the book, you can get it on any of the places where you buy books online.

And the book's website is impactplayersbook.com. The PR department sent us a copy. Let me see if I can get a – oh, wow. It's got a green cover. So the green screen is whatever. But there will be a nice – when we do this in post, there will be a nice beautiful book in the center there. So what motivated you to want to write this?

When you've written several books, I'll tell you with an honest answer, what motivates you about to write a new book it's because you get tired of the old book it's like and i have just had this great opportunity it's this first book i wrote that i was hoping i don't know 14 people would read and i don't know i thought maybe a thousand people would read the book like my former colleagues my mom would be good for two or three. And it turns out the book is, I don't know, we're somewhere close to a million copies on that book. And it just was a book that was really valuable to a lot of people. And it was this idea that some leaders are multipliers to their team and others are diminishers, like meaning some leaders make you

smarter, more capable, better. You play at your best around these leaders and others like suck the life out of you and your team. And I don't know if it was the part about suck the life out of you and your team that got people's attention, but it was a book that a lot of people read and got a lot of value out of. So I'm out there teaching people how to be the kind of leader that allows people to contribute fully. And part of what motivated me to write it is realizing there's more to the story than just leadership. And for me, the decision point was captured in this comment someone made. I'm out there pouring my heart out, teaching leaders. This was at Salesforce. How to be the kind of leaders who are

multipliers and all this and and one engineering manager that sounds great i want to be a multiplier but you can't multiply zero what and i'm like what what does that mean are you talking because i'm talking about like how to use the intelligence and capability of your team and he says i can't multiply zero and i'm like are you saying that that the people who work for you are zeros? That they're like, you've got a collection of dummies? And I'm trying to understand what he means by this. And then he goes on to explain. He's like, yeah, as a leader, I need to bring the right mindsets and practices,

but so do the people who work for me. Huh. Well, didn't he hire him though? Right. But there is a discipline, just like there is a discipline to leadership. And there's a lot of people who've been studying leadership and what does the leader of the future look like? And I'm one of those people who have been trying to articulate these new models of leadership. But the work world has changed. The rules have changed. The environment's changed. And it made

me realize who's been studying what the new model of contributorship looks like. Because it's not the way of showing up of yesteryear where the boss told you what to do. You got it done. They say jump, you say how high. I'm like, it's a very different work world right now where people really need to be self-managing. Like kind of the old boss employee relationship has been broken. And if it wasn't already broken, the pandemic has really ripped it apart. And there is a way of showing up that is new and different. And so, you know what? That seems to be interesting.

And I'm gonna, I used to work at Oracle and the president of the company, he once said, Liz, you are a dog on a bone. That's what you are. Like you're the most tenacious person I've ever met. And that was like meant in both, with both sets of connotations about that. Like Liz, you are amazingly tenacious and you are also annoyingly tenacious.

And I tend to be like that as a researcher. Once I decide something's interesting and worthy of study, I'm like, er. And so this was one that was interesting. Like, what does it look like you know why do some people show up big and contribute even despite the like lack of good leadership and then why are other people just stuck going through the motions of their job like why do some people have big impact particularly when they're not working any harder yeah this is this is a really important thing to learn because it's something I always did. I always just, even when I had an uninspiring leadership,

I just was like, I'm just going to give it my all because I'm practicing to own my company someday. And to me, it's just, it's to my work ethic and what's important to me. So give us an overall arcing rundown of the book. I think you've given us a little bit, but what are some of the details in the book that you... And the book is a contrast and it's a thing I do. I do these sort of contrast studies and it's a contrast between what I call the typical contributor and the mindset that we hold when we're in this kind of like thinking about ourselves as typical contributors versus the mindset of an impact. Impact players is a notion that I've lifted out of sports and

in the sports world, the impact players are the people who make the plays and people you can count on and people who play big, but also make the whole team better. They're like the clutch players on teams. And they're the ones, the managers of the team and the coaches turn to when they're in a really critical situation. And this is a look at what are the impact players of the work world doing differently than everyone else? Why do we have certain people that we turn to in these kind of clutch moments? And when we asked managers, who are these people?

They all knew immediately, oh, this person. Well, why? They're like, I hadn't thought a lot about that before. It was in the process of interviewing people that they're like, oh, yeah, I'm now starting to understand why this is the person I put on a situation when things have gone wrong or when it's high stakes or when it's really report. And this is why this person is my right hand. And so we looked at how do typical contributors approach work and how do these impact players approach work? And the book is really about kind of small differences in how we think and how we act that end up creating huge differences of impact. And there's five in particular. And I think Chris, probably the most interesting thing when I looked at these differences,

it was the situations that differentiated these impact players were how they handled not the big moments of crisis, like where a hero emerges from the ashes, like having saved the day. It's how they handle what I call these everyday challenges. The things that we deal with, whether we work in tech or finance or in hospitality, it's messy problems, things that don't fit neatly in people's one job and unclear roles and unforeseen obstacles and targets that are moving as you're shooting at the goal and unrelenting demands, just feeling like there's just more work than we can really get our arms around. And these are the problems that exist everywhere. Unless maybe you are in a little organization of one, but there are problems that

exist everywhere. And the way that these impact players handle these is radically different. And for example, there's five of them, but let me just start with the first, is that when problems are really messy and our problems are getting more complex, and they rarely fit neatly. They don't line up with org charts. Like, okay, this is a messy problem. It's not my job. It's not her job. It's not his job. It's nobody's job, but yet it's everybody's job.

Most people say, okay, let me do my job. I'll do my part of that. Whereas the impact player says, you know what? Let me do the job that needs to be done. Like they get what's important and they don't let their job description put a cage around that. Oh, I can't really do that. It's not my job. This is the job. My job is to solve problems and respond to important opportunities. So they venture They're like roomy about their jobs. And leaders of organizations love it because they're the people that go do the important things while other people are just turning cranks doing their job. Excuse me. So are most people, is the book helpful for leaders in identifying who their

impact players are? Do they need to fill a whole team with impact players? Is the 80-20 rule always going to apply to you're just going to have better people sometimes? How does that all play? I don't know exactly how people will use the book. That's one of the things that's really interesting when you release a book. You don't quite know what people are going to do with it. It's usually not what you think people are going to do with it. And in some ways, I wrote the book for the contributor. Like this is your playbook for how to do work that really matters and make a difference and not get stuck doing too much of the same kind of work, but to do work where you don't burn out because you're making an impact. But I've already got a little bit of a glimpse that

managers are going to co-op this book because every manager who's read an early copy of it, they've said, oh yeah, like this has helped me see who my impact players are. Like I read this and I know who these people are and now I understand better why these are my go-to and my impact players. And then they very quickly go to, okay, can you help me figure out how to hire a whole team of people like this? And so really, and I guess it doesn't surprise me so much. The book is really, here's how to work this way yourself. And here's how to populate a team of people who are like-minded yeah yeah it's you nail the uh you nail it right on the head i was always one of those people even when i worked for other people i was i was at one of my last company i was an

entrepreneur and so i had like carte blanche to go walk around as a ceo and make changes and adjust and processes and systems and innovate and i've just always been one of those people. And I do get bored with my job description. Even when I work for other people or when I work for myself, people used to always ask me, they go, so you're the CEO of the company. I'm like, yeah, I'm the CEO of the janitor. I seem to be the only one who picks up the trash around here too. That would be the hallmark of an impact player, which is what,

if that's the job that needs to be done, if you're about to have customer visit and there's trash on the floor, like that's the moment of impact. Yeah. And you, I've never seen my job description is like, there's the job description. It's to me, it's job security to go do extra stuff around the office. Now, I don't know. I may not get appreciated, be able to get fired, but probably get fired the way I go. But that's why I work for myself.

Does not play well with others. So you give, so a lot of this too, people could use if they're a player or quote, I guess, an employee and they want to become more impactful or they want to maybe learn to be one of these more impactful players. They could use this as like a blueprint or manual to, to become that sort of person. Yeah, absolutely. And there's, um, it's, it's a manual that probably has more in it than any one person can, can get their arms around. If you want to have more impact, I could probably guarantee you there's something in the book that you could do that would allow you to contribute more value, have more impact and build more influence and really build power. Build power.

Because it is absolutely true that when I look at the anatomy of these impact players, they are not your classic superstar. It was so fascinating to me. I was surprised actually that in the 170 impact players we studied, not a single one of them was described by their manager as a prima Donna, a bully bull in a China shop. They're not these kind of, I don't know, glory seeking superstars. They are, they're serving like their orientation isn't, Hey, look at me. I'm building my brand. I'm big. Their orientation is outward on other people. What's important to my boss. What's important to this company. What's important to my colleagues and how can I do work? That's value add to that. But in the process, they become extremely valuable.

And when you're working on what's most important, and when you're stepping up and taking these leadership roles, when you're getting things done, when you're known as like the clutch person, you're building a lot of influence and a lot of power. And you end up building that kind of power where you're not like, oh yeah, this is our clean up guy. This is our go to person. But then we take them out of the closet when we need them and then we put them back in the closet. You have an incredible power base and voice in the organization. So you become not just a doer and not the person who's exploited. You become someone who's powerful, who's shaping the agenda. So I would be really interested if you took a study, and I suppose it would take a while, to see how these people evolve through an organization. Do they become CEOs or do the power players who are all about building brand and making a bunch of noise and I'm doing so good, which of them usually ascend to the highest levels of the echelons of the company? Well, we see two tracks.

There's a pattern we see across all the impact players is that they're given bigger opportunities for certain. And some of that looks like in the form of bigger opportunities that like rises through the ranks. And then they often do become senior leaders of organizations. And there are some organizations where the most egotistical rise to the top. They're rarely the best organizations. If you look at the best organizations, those senior leaders have to manage ego. There are people like, I'll be seeing Tim Cook this week, Tim Cook, who is one of the best examples of someone who holds such a powerful position in the world, but knows how to contain his ego and focus on other people and on the customer. So we do see a lot rising in organizations, but we also see other cases where people, they're like, I don't want to be a manager.

That's not what I want. That's not the impact I want. I'm not trying to rise through some sort of hierarchy. I want a bigger voice in the world, or I want more control of my career, of my work. They're using that influence and power to shape the terms of their employment. Okay, this is the kind of work I want to do. Here's where I think I could be most valuable of this overwhelming workload. Here's the part where I think I can be most useful, so let me work there. And because they have this track record, they deliver, they're these impact payers, people shape jobs around them. Yeah. So you would say that these folks, basically, whatever you give them, they're going to really expinate it. They're going to make it their own. And instead of

working in the confines of, this is my job and I go home at five and I give the least amount I could possibly do, you know that as a leader by identifying them and making sure that these people are taken care of, that as they go through the organization, you're going to be able to give them stuff. They're going to keep applying that same sort of thing. That's why eventually just I saw everything I did as CEO training. So owning my own business training. So I always give the 110% because for me, I was educating myself and I was like, yeah, they could fire me tomorrow during our session that happened. But it's not that I didn't give tons of value, but it's what I learned.

And then now I'm taking someplace else. Is that a good analogy? Yeah. It's that they're, they're people with, they deliver value and they build influence and impact. And that influence can be used in a lot of different ways. I can validate what you're saying. I don't have to validate what you're saying, but I'm going to throw my two cents in saying, yeah. When I had our biggest company at 100 employees, you would always have the people in your face that would be the raw people. I'm doing so great, Chris. I'm doing, I'm kicking butt and whatever. And then the quiet ones were really the impact players.

They're the people that I would, at five o'clock, I'd go over to the processing department and be like, hey, I need to have something printed off. And everybody's in that runner stance for the sprinter race. And it's like 4.59. And they're just like looking at me going, now you can take that for a hike and five o'clock hits. And they're, they're, they're usually have the punch clock thing sitting at the top there,

the little swipe card. My, my impact players are always there day in and out. They usually I'd find them late working late and I didn't expect them to work late. In fact, that's one of the ways I would usually identify them, but they would be these quiet people. They would always be under the radar. They wouldn't be the rah-rah people. And one thing I found that was really interesting is the more people would kiss my butt and come rah-rah in my office about how great they were doing, those are the people that I really need to go check their work. Because you're compensating for something.

Exactly. And Chris, you bring up a good point. It was one of the things I looked at through the whole research process. And it was one of those things that I constantly, the whole time writing the book is we see this larger pattern for certain, like managers know who their impact players are. They appreciate them. They love them. They see that value. They give a bigger opportunities.

But what about the ones who don't? What about the quiet ones? What about the ones who work behind the scenes? Like the larger pattern we see is that managers are extremely loyal and customers. So this applies whether you work in a company or if you're being an impact player for the customers, the clients that you serve. And people are loyal to them and they promote them. Because they know they're not shining a spotlight on someone who's going to take that and pursue their own agenda. These are people who are pursuing the right agenda.

We see that larger panel, but what about the person who works behind the scenes, who's quiet? What about maybe like the introvert? What about someone who is in a minority population? Maybe they're a male in an all-female organization or the other way around, or the person who maybe comes from a racial or ethnic minority. What about the person who comes from an underrepresented group or an underseen group who are doing all the right things, but it's so easy for that person's contribution to be overlooked? And so it's one of the issues I try to deal with in the book. And I guess in short, you know what? First of all, managers, that is your job it is your job to a create an environment where people can show up and play but don't be a diminisher be a multiplier kind of leader create an environment where

everyone's ideas get seen and used and heard and people feel like they can contribute them safety there's a whole there's several management books that can help with that but it's also your job to make sure that there are people who don't get passed over for opportunities to contribute and don't get passed over for recognition because they do this quietly. Yeah. They are the most quietest players. They do not stick out. It would take me time to figure them out because I wasn't looking for them because I didn't have your book list. Why didn't you write this 20 years ago? But no, they are the most quietest ones. And like I said, the more, yeah, often they can be quiet. They're not always quiet. Now, some of them are like loud and driven and

they're people who are like, put me in coach, you know, put me in, like I can do this. And, and they're visible and they're loud. And I don't mean just volume loud. They show up, but it's not, look at me. It's, hey, I can do that. Let me have at it. I will do that. It's just really about where their orientation is. The impact player's orientation is around helping to serve a larger agenda rather than driving your own agenda. You almost use a sports analogy there. Would that be the same sort of concept? You see a Michael Jordan. Clearly, he doesn't play within his own box of what his job description is. There's probably lots of other sports players you can put in that thing. They're just Tom Brady.

They just go above and beyond and to them it's natural. Yeah. And that concept really does come out of sports and impact players are these standout contributors. They're talented. They contribute in really big, meaningful ways. But an impact player in sports is not just someone who's got individual talent. It's someone who raises the confidence level of the team, which is we got Brady. So we're going to win. And so people tend to play bigger around them as well. Man, when we got this person on our team, I feel like I can do more. I'm going to win. So I aspire higher. I play bigger. So is one way to identify them that they're leaders or sub leaders in their own right in inspiring the team, motivating the team, they make good like assistant underlings technically, even if whether they have the

title or not. Yeah. They tend to be people who are willing to step into leadership roles without needing the formal authority and kind of the leadership model that they follow is very much, it's a fluid model. So it's not, okay, I want to be the boss. I always need to be the boss. Like I'm in charge, I'm in charge. I like to think of those people who always need to be charged as the parents in the PTA who are always signing up for the big jobs, like always want to be room leader, always want to run everything. At first I'm like, wow, I really appreciate those people who are taking the difficult voluntary assignments. But then I'm very skeptical of those people. Like what's like, how's that going to play out? If you're always the boss of the school,

like I have a feeling like this is to benefit your kid, right? Like I see how this is playing out. The leaders that I really admire, whether they're the community in the workplace or when people see a problem and they're like, you know what, this needs fixing. This is a leaderless situation or leadership vacuum. I'll raise my hand and I'll, I'll lead this. We need someone to do this. And they step into that. They take on a big leadership role. They don't need formal authority. They lead through influence. They rally the team, they get the job done. But when the job's done, they're done with their leadership assignment. And then they step back and they let other people lead. It's like they can follow people as gracefully as they can lead people.

Because we all know people who can't lead, but we also know people who can't follow. Yeah. In fact, I promoted someone into management by mistake and found out the hard way. And so not impact players, but just people that a lot of it was salespeople. And the thing I found out the hard way is sometimes salespeople don't work good at management of other salespeople. They're good at the sales part. So you talk in the book about how to identify these people and how to empower them more. Yeah. The first part of the book is really decoding the impact player. How do they think? How do they see situations differently than other people? And how do they respond differently in these

situations and in particularly these five situations? So what's the mental game and the playbook of these impact players? So that's the first, I don't know, two thirds of the book. And then in the last third of the book, it's okay. If you want to increase your impact, how do you go about doing it? And there's a couple, I call them master skills. There's a few things that like sit under all of these practices that you want to get good at a few fundamentals. And then here's how you can build a team of these kinds of folks, either like by hiring them, for starters. Here are the things you'd want to hire for.

Which, the short list of this, and you need to read the book to get this, is hire for people with a very strong internal locus of control. For a very strong sense of personal agency, which is like the terms that the psychologists use for simply hire people who see themselves as in charge of themselves. Oh, would you say, would that be self-actualized? I think self-actualized is maybe a little bit different than this. This is like a building block to this, which is it's self-managing, self-driven. It's seeing oneself as an actor rather than someone who is- That's going to be really interesting. Hiring people is always a curious thing and the art of

it. There really is an art to it. And I don't know. I don't know. Do most HR departments, do you see, I'm thinking of some of the stuff I've seen on LinkedIn, do most HR departments, are they good at identifying this right now? Or do they really fail it at just trying to, do they really fail at trying to identify these people or are they good at it? Oh goodness. I think historically HR has hired for skills. I think at the worst, let's do the worst to the best. I think the worst approach, and I'm going to wind a little bit about the worst. The worst is like when they hire for experience. This makes me crazy. You need 10 years of experience. I know people who put in 10 years working on something who haven't built any skills or good judgment about it. And people who've done

that for zero days, who actually have the skills and the mindsets to do that job. So I think at worst, you hire people for experience. Okay, notable exception, maybe like a pilot might be one where you want a certain number of hours in that seat, having not crashed planes. I think at worst, you hire people for experience. A little bit better is hiring people for skills. And then above that is hiring people for the right mindset rather than how do they tend to behave? It's like, how do they think in a situation which generates it? And then I think at the very best, it's knowing what mindsets are really hard to develop in the workplace. When people come to us in the

workplace, they come from all walks of life, all kinds of life experience. And so I ran a corporate university for a bunch of years. I worked at Oracle and was in charge of human resource development, talent management, and ran the university. And it's very easy to say, okay, here's the kind of mindsets we want here. Here are the practices, here are the skills, here's what we're going to train people to do but not realizing that some people have got such hard wiring on certain mindsets that you can spend a lot of time in a classroom and in coaching and not have much effect changing that and other mindsets and like are really easy to learn in the workplace. And so one of the things I tried to do in this research was look at, okay, what are all the mindsets and practices of these impact players? And which one of them are hard to learn at work and which ones are easy to learn? Because the ones that are hard to learn at work, these are things you want to hire for the immovable and then train for everything else.

So this is pretty interesting. You've got me thinking a lot about this right now, which is why you're on the show. But so is it trainable? Is it trainable over short term? And is this a life skill? Because to me, I just brought my life skill into my work. I was already built this way. I was already a machine going into this.

So is this, I guess those are the three questions I have. Oh, I think it's absolutely a life skill. I think this is the way we show up at work. And I think a lot of it is an orientation, which is, do we drop into an environment and think, here's what I want and how do I get other people to give me what I want, which is about creating value for ourselves? Or do we drop into situations, whether it's work or family life or community life or a church organization? And do we drop in and say, what's important to this group that I'm part of? And how do I make that important enough to me that I can contribute value? It's about where our orientation is.

And it's also about how much ambiguity and uncertainty we're comfortable in, which is a life orientation as well. And it's probably the thing if, you know, to boil down everything I learned, like the fundamental difference in orientation is that most people, when they look at these messy problems and unclear roles and obstacles and moving targets, they look at this and those are problems. And those are threats. And I'm going to do my very best to avoid those threats, to figure out how to skirt them, how to run around those kinds of threats. Whereas the people who really have impact, look at those very same situations and go, yeah, those are messy. Those are inconvenient. I don't like it. I don't like all that ambiguity and uncertainty, but there's opportunity in there. I don't like it if I can't figure out who's in charge, but you know what?

That's an opportunity to step in and add value. Kind of by metaphor, it's the difference between someone who sees a bee and says, okay, there like a swarm of bees and I'm just going to run. I'm going to freak out or I'm going to run versus the person who sees the same bee and goes, Oh, there are more of those. And I'm going to build a hive and harvest honey. Yeah.

That's good. Same situation, two totally different ways. And I guess I should like, sorry for the trigger warning. People are like deathly allergic to bees, but I'm not. So maybe you should have been more sensitive to that terrified of bees. But for most people, if you just remain calm, that is not a threat and it can be an opportunity. And so it is this life skill of saying, okay, things are messy. I can't control a lot of things, but how do I find an opportunity

to add value in situations where I feel like I can't really control? That's a really good analogy. You've got in the book two different sections, the impact players, and then developing the impact player mindset. So you've given them a blueprint to sit down and figure out, okay, how can I develop one? But it almost seems like it would almost be better to hire them built as impact players than it would be to try and develop them. Is that true or not? This is absolutely true. So I told you, I came up through the HR organization and I was on the development side, the people development, talent development, organizational development. And my colleague, Joyce, she ran the recruiting side, the operational side of it. So my natural reaction is, oh, just coach people, develop people.

But this is one where my natural reaction is wrong. Best way to build a team of impact players is hire people who have, this is their track record. And most important, hire people who have the components of this mindset that are really hard to coach and teach. And I'll give them to you. I'll just skip that. Let me see. I just pulled out my list. Okay. The assumptions, there's a bunch. First of all, there's a bunch of parts of this that are very coachable, like building a growth mindset or like a sense of proactivity and resilience and seeking feedback and offering help and seeing the big picture, influencing other very coachable kinds of things are all part of this mentality. Here are the parts that are a little hard to coach, meaning

you'd be wise to hire people who already have this on the assumptions. It's having this strong internal locus of control. The sense of I can control the outcomes of events in my life. Like I'm not walking through life as a victim. So if someone has a pretty hardwired victim mentality, you as a leader are probably not going to do a lot to change that. Yeah, that's inherent. Yeah, that kind of comes from experiences we had probably as like a little girl, little boy, early experiences in our career that shaped that. It's not impossible. It's just not. The other mindset, I term it informality, but this orientation around hierarchy. Some people just have this really strong orientation of,

oh, fat person is my boss. They're my superior. I salute. I do what they tell me. I don't go around them. And some of this is cultural. There are parts of the world where there's a lot of hierarchy, power distance in the culture. That's a little bit harder to change according to the coaches I surveyed on this. I don't know. I don't think I know enough to say whether individuals who come out of the military come with that sense or not. They really have a hard wire to hierarchy and they respect their bosses. They respect the uniform. There's some interesting- Oh, absolutely. I'll tell you, here's where impact player mentality meets up against us. I had been working at Oracle for a number of years. I had been working very closely with our president,

Ray Lane, and I was considered to be, I don't know, his like go-to, I think he would say I was probably his like impact player. And I worked with really closely with him on a lot of initiatives. He hired a chief of staff, Mike, who came out of the military. And Mike had this like really strong sense of hierarchy built into his kind of way of working. And he knew the role I had played. He knew the role I was playing in the company, shaping a lot of things. And so he sat role I had played. He knew the role I was playing in the company, shaping a lot of things. And so he sat me down and he's like, okay, I'll be back. And he's like, Liz, this is how we're going to work. If you want to get something in front of Ray, what I want you to do is put together like a brief, give that to me. I'll take it to Ray. And then, and he describes this of like how he wants me to operate.

And I knew like in my head, I'm like, Oh, I'm supposed to just say, yes, Mike, I'll do that. But I couldn't bring myself to do it because I just don't buy into this kind of like process and hierarchy. And I said to him, I said, and so Mike wasn't like my boss or anything. He was raised chief of staff. And I'm like, Mike, I need to let you know. And I should also say, Mike was probably 15 to 20 years older than me at the time. And I said, Mike, I need to let you know, I have absolutely no intention of doing that. His reaction was not that. And I said, no, Mike, I'm not going to do that. That's just not the way I work. I said, I make really careful use of Ray's time.

But the way I work is if I'm working on something important, I'm going to talk to whoever I need to get that job done. And if I need to talk to Larry Elson, our CEO, Ray, I'm going to use their time wisely. But I'm not afraid. I will go to them when I need them. And I'll go to anyone at any level of the organization. That's the way I work. And I said, so I'm sorry.

I'm just not. And I was like, I know I'm supposed to agree to this and then go around it. But I'm like, I can't bring myself to do it. And he just was like, okay. And you ended up not lasting long in the company because that's just not the way that you work. If you want to get, it doesn't lead to a lot of impact. Yeah. Just building roadblocks really.

And people that are go-getters, players like you were or are. Or I was in that moment for sure. Yeah. You are your get it done people. And you're like, we can't, especially in the corporate world works today and business works today. It's speed. You can't be sitting around going, well, we should spend a year doing research and figuring on all that. You've got to go because your competitors are going. And if you don't beat them to the market, they're going to be you to the market, or they're going to take market share from you. I really love this chapter, build a high impact

team. The one you're referencing, there's a lot of great data in here. Hiring technique. This is pretty cool. Situation, outlook, action, and result. I'm going to be bookmarking this so I can go back through it. And there were some other things I saw here. Promoting desired behaviors, containing contrary behaviors. This is really cool. I love this chapter. Oh, I'm so glad because you know what? I was like, oh man, did I do a bad job on that chapter? But this is part, Chris, you and I talked about you know what? I was like, oh man, did I do a bad job on that chapter? But this is part, Chris, you and I talked about it. Once you write a book, I go through this existential crisis and I have days where I'm like, oh wow, that's a really helpful book.

I think this is a good book. I think people are going to get value out of this. And then I have, this is the dumbest book in the world. Like, why didn't I write this? This is so stupid. It's common sense because I've been working with it so long that I get like a nerd to its virtues. That's the challenge of being an author and writing. And then the editing process, you're just like, I'm so sick of this.

Yeah. Like surely someone else is sick. And they're like, no, we haven't started it yet. We're not sick of it. And I'm like, I know, but given time. And the beauty of thinking about top contributors as impact players, not MVPs is you can have a bunch of them on a team. In fact, you could with a well-managed team, you could have an entire team of impact players. And that's like a pretty cool team to work on. Yeah, I'd like that 100% if I could. If the 80-20 rule doesn't always kick in,

I'm always fighting that in my business and hiring. No matter how much I try to put my thumb on the scale, sometimes the 80-20 rule would always apply. You have the top 20% who bring in 80% of your work and business and success. And no matter how much I tried to hire, and I never tried to hire with some of the principles you have in the book here, so I'm going to be applying those, I just never could hit the mark. And so I'm really interested to see how this plays out. We could talk for hours, you and I, Liz, about this because I love this data, and it's a great book.

Anything you want to touch on before you go out, because we want people to go buy the book instead of just watching the podcast. I think I've been an author long enough now where my goal isn't for people to buy the book as much as for people to experiment with the ideas. And I guess there's one thing I want to add. We're recording this right now, October 2021. The world is just coming out of this pandemic and we're now facing a different sort of epidemic of burnout. And we've got this great resignation thing happening and people are leaving companies. People are skeptical about their jobs. People are burning out as an

epidemic. And I just want to leave maybe this thought. I think the normal way we look at burnout is that burnout is the outcome of working too hard. Like when we have too much work, we burn out. And that can be the case. But here's what I've learned studying leadership is that the best leaders don't like just give people more work. They give people harder work. And when they do, work is exhilarating. And then when people are underutilized, work is a drag. It's draining. It's unfulfilling.

And we burn out. I think burnout is more often the result of too little impact, not too much work. And I think the way out of this burnout epidemic is not just giving people time off work or taking time off work. I think it's more, it's less about slamming on the brakes to work and more about putting our foot on the accelerator, which is like, how do we as leaders give people a bigger opportunity to have the impact? How do we as contributors at all levels, how do we orient ourselves so that we have more impact? Because I've never really known someone who was having a lot of impact who said they were feeling burnt out. I've been watching a lot of this and why more employees have been staying out of the market.

We've seen a huge numbers of people that are starting their own companies and business, which is very different than the 2008 recession. And what I seem to hear people saying is like what you're talking about, where they're looking for more value in their work or to be valued and probably feeling more valued is by having more value. They don't want to just be the dish boy or the dish girl or the waitress anymore. They're like looking for more value, more experience in their life. And I've never heard anybody say, well, less work or they're looking like they're looking for a value that enriches their lives. Do you agree with that? Well, I do. And I love the way you put this, which is people want to contribute value.

That's the process of impact. And they also, it's not just about doing things that are valuable and having impact. It's about being valued. And so like bottom line for managers, like if you want to quell this kind of burnout epidemic is, yeah, you may need to give some people some time off. Like right now, a little bit of R&R would probably help a lot of people, but that's not the answer. Lead your teams in a way that people can do valuable work that has meaning, that really matters. And make sure people feel valued on top of that. Yeah. And like, when we feel appreciated for doing impactful work, like boom, like work is exhilarating, not exhausting. Yeah. And I think that's what employees are looking for. They did that internal sort of value research and they went, what is life and what the

hell am I doing from this coronavirus thing? And I think that's why a lot of employees are struggling with it because what you don't want to come back to your dead end, but just do your robot routine job. We want value. What's that? And you want to be paid more. So there you go. Liz, it's been wonderful having the show. Like I said, we could talk for hours and it's been really insightful. We need to have you back. Of course, maybe we should have you on to plug your other books, but give us your plugs so people can find you on the interweb. Impactplayersbook.com. Other books you can find at multipliersbooks.com, rookiesmarts.com. Interesting, last night my son-in-law changed it to cookiesmarts.com because he said, Liz, you actually know a lot more about cookies.

And then you can find information about me at thewisemangroup.com. There you go. There you go. Thank you very much, Liz, for being on the show. We certainly appreciate you coming on and sharing your expertise. Oh, it's so fun to talk with you, Chris. Thank you very much. And thanks to my audience for tuning in.

Go pre-order the book. You definitely want to get a hold of this. October 19th, 2021. It's going to be coming fresh, hot off the presses with that fine new print smell. Get it at anywhere you find bookstores. Fine bookstores are sold. Fine books at fine bookstores are sold. Don't go to the alleyways to buy your books.

Impact Players. How to take the lead, play bigger, and multiply your impact. Thanks so much for tuning in. Be sure to go to youtube.com, 4Chess Chris Voss, to see the video version of this. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss. Go to all our groups on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all those places the cool kids are playing these days. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other, and we'll see you guys next time.

So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold, but the

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