Joyce Talag is a life, leadership and team coach at Joyful Transformations LLC. She helps leaders thrive and make an impact.
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As a leader, you might find yourself being increasingly concerned about the broader contexts in which you and your team operate. I find clients frequently navigating current events such as the ongoing tech layoffs, Supreme Court decisions, political movements and climate-related calamities. What seems apparent is that today’s workers can no longer isolate themselves in their organization’s bubble. Their ability to think and perform is affected by various factors surrounding them.
Advocates of corporate social responsibility (CSR) have long pushed for businesses to take a shift from profit-centeredness to the triple bottom line that is people, planet and profit. More than a decade ago, Harvard Business School professors Michael Porter and Mark Kramer introduced creating shared value to enable businesses to understand the impact of societal needs on their survival and competitiveness. Since then, the concept has taken different names—the most recent of which is ESG (environmental, social and governance).
In 2022, a McKinsey article identified ESG’s intrinsic difficulty as a critical barrier to adoption because of the complexity of an organization’s stakeholders. This information could be viewed as both a strategic and tactical challenge. Can operational leaders and their teams be equipped with leadership skills that can empower them to widen the value of their work?
Thought leaders such as Marshall Goldsmith, Peter Hawkins and Eve Turner have been advocating for a more impact-oriented approach to coaching. Goldsmith’s stakeholder-centered model brings stakeholder input to measure growth in leadership effectiveness. Meanwhile, Hawkins’ nomenclature has shifted from high-performing to high-value teams in his work on systemic team coaching.
As a CSR practitioner-turned-coach, I find these times a strong business case for connecting leadership and team development with impact orientation. Here are some ways for you to get started:
Set the language.
A shift in thinking can be triggered by spoken words. In many instances, leaders refer to internal and external customers, which presupposes direct effects. When you use the term stakeholders, it can take a broader meaning. Who has a stake in your work? To whom does your team have a stake? Asking these questions challenges your team to think beyond their immediate transactions.
Make learning and reflection a habit.
Speed is often associated with a competitive advantage. However, the pitfall of teams that are in a constant state of urgency is that it can make your team turn into hamsters on a wheel who do not achieve anything important or meaningful. Carving out time in your huddle agenda for strategic concerns as well as post-completion reflection can support your team’s growth and ability to rediscover the value of their work.
Train your team to develop a 'sixth sense.'
How many times lately have you found yourself surprised by unexpected setbacks? Dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity is both a challenge and a competency for today’s leaders. Developing a sixth sense means training your team to notice who is not being included, what is not being said and why. The practice may require getting them to think from different perspectives. One practice that I find useful in coaching teams is when participants symbolically step out of their roles and into other people's shoes. Others make physical activities such as wearing the six different hats to encourage different ways of thinking.
As you work on integrating an impact lens with your team culture, it is important to remember that the work does not rest on your shoulders. Getting your team involved through active conversations, brainstorming and execution can foster a sense of alignment and connectedness with organizational ESG priorities and, more importantly, create purpose and meaning for your individual team members.
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