Impact leadership

Impact leadership involves putting ‘purpose’ at the heart of your organisation. Leaders who champion a focus on impact can create a strong, vibrant organisational culture that drives work forward.

An impact-led culture

Focusing on the difference your organisation makes can create an inspiring vision which brings people together and motivates them to work towards a shared goal. Like an effective strategy, this collective understanding of impact needs to permeate across the organisation. Trustees, the chief executive and senior managers need to invest in ways to help everyone live and breathe impact. It needs to infuse everything the organisation does.

Balancing impact activities

Leaders can foster an impact-led culture by managing the balance of the six impact activities across the organisation:

• thinking impact
• planning impact
• delivering impact
• assessing impact
• improving impact
• communicating impact.

Ensuring that some attention is paid to all six of these, at some point, enables the organisation to create a strong, impact-focused culture.  Of course, the priority tasks can and should change over time. When an organisation is developing strategy, for example, it is likely to be concentrating on thinking about impact and assessing past results. When reporting to funders or bidding, it will focus more on communicating impact.

Impact roles

People within the organisation will also tend to focus on different activities, depending on their role. The trustee board ought to spend more time on planning impact; managers should expect to score highly on planning and improving it; frontline staff should be focused on delivering and assessing, and certain roles such as marketing and fundraising should score higher on communicating.

Everyone needs to be thinking impact as they work, so that they become used to asking “Will this create the right impact?”