How to scale your impact

Last week I asked people what topic they would most like to cover in the next Squiggly Career Curiosity newsletter and ‘how to scale your impact’ won.

It’s something that is top of my mind as we go into a new year and it’s given me a great reason to dig into the topic.

So, here’s where I’ve got to with my thinking….

1.    Know the dent you want to make

I’ve always liked this quote from Steve Jobs:

I think the starting point for increasing your impact has to be clarity about what it is you're trying to do, build or change. Without that clarity your efforts will be diluted and your impact reduced.

Personally, I find a purpose that is longer term and a mission that is aligned but more short-term in focus works for me. So, for me that looks like:

• Purpose: Making careers better for everyone
• 2021 Mission: Actively supporting 1m people to succeed in their squiggly career.

2.    Speak what you seek until you see what you said

This statement (speak what you seek until you see what you said) has been so helpful to me in my career over the last few years. I’ve found that as soon as I have started to share the ideas and aspirations in my head with others, the more they have turned into reality.

Talking about the impact you want to create takes confidence. If you don’t feel brave enough to articulate to others, you’re going to struggle so much more to achieve it. When you say it out loud first to yourself and then to others, you step that bit closer towards taking action. You find encouragement and support for others and your ideas and intent get momentum. Yes, you also open yourself to challenge and critique, but the more you see this an inevitable part of your growth, the less sensitive you become to it.

3.    Leverage platforms, products & people

You can increase your impact by thinking about how you use technology, create scalable products and collaborate with others. I think this is where we are on our impact journey right now (I’ve found 24 Assets to be a great book to help me think through some of these things).

Some points of note:

Platforms – technology is a big help is scaling impact! How you use different platforms will help you share your work and engage your audience. However, managing different platforms takes time. In our business we focus on a podcast (this has the biggest reach for us with nearly 1m downloads), Instagram (this platform is brilliant for engagement and research) and here on LinkedIn (again, great for engagement and research with a difference audience to Instagram). We have started and stopped with Facebook and have very limited use of Twitter and YouTube.

Working out what works for you and focusing on consistently sharing on those platforms is key. I also think you have to work out what you enjoy. In theory, Facebook has much better reach for us as a platform but I feel more connected to our community on Instagram.

Products – this is really just thinking about how you package your message in a shareable way. Think about how you can create assets that relate to your purpose and are useful to others. These assets need to be designed and created in a way that allows them to be used and shared without your effort increasing exponentially. It might be obvious, but here are some ideas that have worked for my business:

• Create a newsletter using Mailchimp
• Create short ‘how to’ guides designed in Canva
• Create PDFs (again using Canva) to share on LinkedIn
• Create visual/audio assets using Headliner
• Record and share educational resources via Thinkific
• Create a weekly newsletter/article on LinkedIn

We do all of these and you can get quite far without spending any money! You will need to invest the time though!

People – don’t compete with others who may share the same impact intent as you. Find a way to connect and collaborate. You’ll learn and achieve far more through this approach. I’d start by thinking about the areas of influence around your impact and then the people/organisations who operate in those areas (I’ve illustrated this based on my example below):

I think of this as in 'impact ecosystem'. Make a conscious effort to get in touch and build a relationship with the people in your ecosystem. Maybe you could share their work? Maybe you could produce something together? Maybe they could recommend you to others? There is so much potential to increase impact through collaboration!

4.    Scaling up, deep, out & down

I came across this idea in this article and I thought it was a helpful provocation as you think about your impact.

• Scaling-up = doing more. Increasing your capacity and output in someway
• Scaling-deep = shifting hearts and minds. Becoming a respected and trusted though-leader.
• Scaling-out = making your impact transferable. Create advocates and enabling others to act.
• Scaling-down = being selective. Knowing what you're testing, learning, keeping and killing.

I think all these points are relevant and it’s useful to ask yourself what they look like for you in the context of the impact you are focused on. For example, to increase my dent next year, this looks like:

• Scaling-up = new free digital, shareable resources
• Scaling-deep = TED talk and podcast growth
• Scaling-out = career development capability programmes with clients
• Scaling down = R&R and time well spent review within business

5.    Know if your dent is making a difference

I went down a bit of a rabbit hole with this one. There is a lot of information on how you know if your dent is making a difference. Some useful things I found included this website, which links your work to the Global Goals and helps to identify related metrics and further resources:

I also adapted this model from this paper and thought it would be helpful for an initial conversation about what impact you were aiming for, where you were today and how it could be measured.

I hope this has given you some things to reflect on as you go into 2021. If it prompts any thoughts, ideas or questions do let me know in the comments.

Kind thanks, Helen

For more on our work, please go to www.amazingif.com