The Five Elements of Impact Leadership

I’ve been arguing for a year or two now that ‘impact’ has become much too closely associated with measurement, monitoring and evaluation.  It’s almost as though some people are unable to think ‘impact’ without automatically thinking about whether and how to measure and evaluate it. For the last ten years, the discipline of monitoring and evaluation has taken impact hostage. But impact has broken free.  It is now increasingly accepted that the impact topic overlaps with monitoring but is quite distinct from it.

 
You can monitor other things than impact: expenditure, staff morale, pay levels, performance, income, the external environment. And, critically, you can do other things with impact as well as monitor and evaluate it.  In fact, in addition to assessing impact, there are at least four other things you can do with impact, and all of these are critically important.

 
These five elements together make up impact leadership.

Live Impact

This is about creating an organisational culture in which impact is unequivocally the primary purpose; is not subservient to ‘bringing in income’, ‘keeping busy’, ‘keeping going’, ‘having a high profile’, or ‘beating that charity down the road’.  This means actively putting in place and maintaining lived values and daily organisational rituals: the way we talk in every meeting, the way we induct new staff and volunteers, the agendas of our trustee board meeting, our websites, our HR processes, and our decision-making.

Plan Impact

This is about creating and communicating meaningful, realistic but inspiring plans about what your organisation will achieve, and using these to shape what you do – not the other way around.  It’s about the difference you will make, will commit to making. And it includes helping all your people see a direct and unbroken connection between their work and these planned impacts. You are not planning impacts in order to measure them. You are planning them because impact plans are essential to good leadership in social organisations.

Assess (Evaluate) Impact

None of this is to say assessing (measuring, monitoring, evaluating) impact is no longer impact.  Rather it is to place impact assessment into a broader context in which assessment is always purposeful and always supports leadership.  Create data once you’ve worked out why you need it.

Improve Impact

The primary purpose of assessing impact is that you can work out what you’re achieving – and why – and to change things so that you achieve more. Much improvement should be happening at the frontline, sometimes without managers even knowing about – a leadership and improvement culture in which staff and volunteers are given the freedom to innovate and improve. Large scale changes are also made through comparative assessments of the impacts of different services and products.

Sell Impact

If your starting place is the monitoring and evaluation mindset, you can struggle to get beyond ‘impact reporting’, which too often just leads to reports, often lengthy tomes stuffed with impenetrable data. Selling and communicating impact has to be so much more creative and diverse than that – your web and social media presence, your sixty second ‘pitch’, your business cards, your branding, your strapline, your funding bids, your fundraising materials – all your communications should be impact-centric.

Impact leadership, I believe, is where a social organisation’s leaders use impact as the primary narrative through which they understand and lead the organisation.  Leadership of and mastery over all five elements lies at the heart of a successful charity, non-profit or social enterprise. Impact leadership is the leadership model for our sector.

Richard Piper