#25—Liz Wiseman: Unleashing the Talents of Your Company's 'Impact Players'

Liz Wiseman is a researcher and executive advisor who teaches leadership to executives around the world. I first met her in 2010 when she had just published her New York Times bestseller Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. I’ve been following her work since, as she published The Multiplier Effect and Wall Street Journal bestseller Rookie Smarts. In this podcast we are going to dig into her latest book, Impact Players: How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger, and Multiply Your Impact.

Liz is the CEO of the Wiseman Group, a leadership research and development firm headquartered in Silicon Valley, California. Some of her recent clients include: Apple, AT&T, Disney, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nike, Salesforce, Tesla, and Twitter. Liz has been listed on the Thinkers50 ranking and in 2019 was recognized as the top leadership thinker in the world.

She has conducted significant research in the field of leadership and collective intelligence and writes for Harvard Business Review, Fortune, and a variety of other business and leadership journals. She is a frequent guest lecturer at BYU and Stanford University and is a former executive at Oracle Corporation, where she worked as the Vice President of Oracle University and as the global leader for Human Resource Development.

Have you every found yourself in a situation in which you are working hard, feeling overwhelmed, but you realize you are spinning your wheels and not actually having impact? Yet, somehow, there is that person on your team who is able to avoid the distractions, focus on the right things, and make a breakthrough impact?

These are called impact players, and Liz has dedicated her last years of research into discovering what makes them unique.

In this podcast she shares:

• What impact players are, and how they differ from others
• Secrets of these stellar professionals drawn from a two-year study
• The five mindsets of impact players

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"In the process of studying leadership and trying to teach this, I came to this realization, and if I've learned anything in my research, it is this: It's not about leadership; it's about contributor-ship. And that is, that people come to work every day desperately wanting to contribute everything they have. When people talk about the experience working for a diminishing leader, they're like, "It was painful, and it was exhausting." Being only able to give 50% of your know-how and capability was exhausting, and demoralizing."

-Liz Wiseman

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Episode Timeline:

00:00—Introducing Liz Wiseman+ The topic of today’s episode

2:50—If you really know me, you know that...

3:30—What is your definition of strategy?

4:22—What are you most well-known for?

6:09—Could you give us an example of a habit a diminisher might exhibit unconsciously?

8:33—Why did you choose "impact players" as your next area of research?

11:01—Clarifying the five practices of impact players

12:20—Figuring out the "job to be done"

13:03—Impact players step up and lead

14:52—Moving things across the finish

16:18—Learning and adap

Thank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.

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