Leaders who want a lasting impact must include their career and personal experiences in the development path. Leadership requires a strong, evolving development practice of engagement as we aim for more impactful attitudes and results. Yet, it also demands refining a leader’s core human qualities, their indispensable leadership elements.
The Impact Field Playbook for Leaders: Become Indispensable is a guidepost and playbook for leaders who desire sustained impact. It aims to create a dynamic approach to leadership by combining deep reflection with practical engagement. It focuses on leadership practices that improve business results by leading and scaling with others.
At the heart of this model are the indispensable leadership elements: identity, beliefs, actions, and knowledge. Each element helps create a lasting impact by examining the most fundamental blocks to a powerful effect. It links personal growth with professional progress to deepen a leader’s influence. Leaders align their development with a lasting, positive impact on their organizations.
This Leader’s Guide, The Impact Field Playbook for Leaders: Become Indispensable, covers the basics of the four allied leadership practices, the six Impact Fields, and the four indispensable elements for sustained leadership impact.
Indispensable Leadership Elements
Leaders must explore the roots of their presence and effectiveness to have a lasting impact. These elements form the basis of a leader’s development:
- Identity—how you see yourself and want others to see you; it’s about understanding who you are at your core.
- Beliefs—the values and principles you uphold that guide your decisions and interactions.
- Actions—your visible behaviors, engagements, and mindsets. They reflect your inner values and intentions.
- Knowledge—the skills, insights, and understanding that you have gained. They inform your decisions and help you solve problems.
A growth mindset and a willingness to adapt enable leaders to evolve. They must challenge and reflect on their assumptions. By examining, experimenting, and expanding these core areas, leaders build a strong, resilient, and influential base, fueling lasting growth.
Applied Leadership Practices and Indispensable Elements
Each leadership practice emerges from the unity of two indispensable elements. They provide a pathway for holistic growth.
- Wisdom: Knowledge and Identity. Wisdom reflects a deep understanding of oneself and one’s knowledge. Wisdom-oriented leaders become trusted guides, connecting their core identity with a solid foundation of knowledge.
- Inspiration: Identity and Beliefs. Inspiration emanates from authentic self-expression grounded in core beliefs. Leaders inspire others by aligning their identity with deep values, which causes others to act toward a shared purpose.
- Innovation: Beliefs and Actions. Innovation requires a commitment to bringing ideas to life. By linking beliefs with actions, leaders foster a culture of new ideas. They encourage experimentation.
- Achievement: Actions and Knowledge. Achievement is where knowledge meets action. Achievement-oriented leaders set goals and guide their teams with purpose. They push boundaries to achieve more remarkable results.
While each practice is distinct, they work together to form a balanced approach to leadership. Leaders may start with any applied practice. But wisdom often guides them. It grounds their actions, beliefs, and insights in reflection and self-awareness.
Mastering the Impact Fields
The Indispensable leadership elements intersect with four applied leadership practices: wisdom, inspiration, innovation, and achievement. They also progress across the impact fields: ignore, block, build, maintain, multiply, and source. Together, these elements, practices, and fields form a holistic model of leadership progression. As a leader’s capacity grows, they rise from the Ignore field, with little influence, to the Source field, with a profound, transformational influence.
Leadership growth follows a journey through the impact fields. Each field transcends the prior one and demands greater integration of the four leadership practices.
- Ignore—Minimal influence due to a lack of clarity and direction, resulting in stagnation.
- Block—Restriction and control limit creativity, autonomy, and engagement, hindering the team’s potential.
- Build—Structure and guidance lead to results but may restrict collaboration and freedom.
- Maintain—Stability and support allow for steady growth, with experimentation within safe boundaries.
- Multiply—Empowered teams and autonomy foster shared growth. As leaders’ influence grows, so do their contributions.
- Source—Leadership that is visionary and transformational. It enables change and builds a legacy, allowing revolutionary ideas to flourish.
Advancing through each field, a leader amplifies their influence. They move from limited engagement to creating an inspiring, transformational culture.
Self-Reflection on Your Impact
Assessing your impact and growth in each leadership practice and the indispensable leadership elements is vital. This is key for your ongoing development. Deep reflection on your identity, beliefs, actions, and knowledge shows your place in the impact fields. It reveals your strengths and areas for improvement.
Below are reflection prompts for each element, with a mix of straightforward and more challenging questions. The easy reflection prompts a quick self-assessment. The deeper reflection urges a more rigorous look at your leadership. It creates a transformative self-assessment experience.
- Identity
- Easy Reflection: How do I view myself, and does that align with how I want others to perceive me as a leader?
- Deeper Reflection: Where do I hold back from showing up fully as myself in my leadership role? How might embracing my authentic self impact my leadership presence and my team’s perception of me?
- Beliefs
- Easy Reflection: Are my values clear? If so, cite one that is your guiding principle. How do they guide my decisions and influence my team’s values?
- Deeper Reflection: Do I hold beliefs or assumptions that might limit my ability to adapt, connect, or progress as a leader? What are they, and what is their impact on me? Others? The organization? How open am I to challenging and evolving these beliefs to better serve my team and organization?
- Actions
- Easy Reflection: Are my actions consistent with my beliefs, and are they creating the intended impact? If so, give an example.
- Deeper Reflection: How do my actions consistently inspire trust and confidence in my team, even in difficult situations? Where might I misalign my actions with my values, and how does that affect my credibility and team dynamics?
- Knowledge
- Easy Reflection: Do I regularly seek to expand my understanding to serve my team and organization better? If so, what is one example?
- Deeper Reflection: How am I aware of the gaps in my knowledge that could hinder my team’s progress? How proactive am I in seeking out new, challenging experiences? They should broaden my understanding.
How did you do? Was the deeper reflection easy or ridiculous? Was the easy reflection a bit of a challenge or somewhat basic? This self-assessment may offer insights into your current position within the impact fields.
Why We Fail to Level Up or Progress
Leaders may struggle to progress due to resistance to change, fear of relinquishing control, or discomfort with uncertainty. Strictly focusing on one way of doing things limits growth and makes leaders more vulnerable to stagnation. To progress, leaders must be open to feedback and adaptable. They must also be willing to challenge long-held beliefs. This will create a leadership identity that evolves with the organization’s needs.
How to Shift Influence
Increasing influence begins with building trust and transparency. Leaders can boost their impact by sharing insights. They should invite collaboration and welcome questions and feedback. A leapfrog experiment is an initiative to change culture, like fostering improvement or real-time feedback. Good luck with this brave one. Yet, clarifying and aligning on shared goals could help a leader right now. It could increase their influence over time. It could transform their and their team’s engagement with the organization’s vision.
The Master Wisdom Key
The Impact Field Playbook for Leaders: Become Indispensable begins with a leadership practice through wisdom. Wisdom is introspective, courageous work.
To lead with wisdom, one must first embark on the journey of self-discovery, as “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” — Aristotle.
The applied practice of leadership through wisdom starts with the courage to examine one’s essential leadership elements: identity, beliefs, actions, and knowledge. It is the willingness to go within, engage in deep reflection, and confront the assumptions that shape our leadership.
Wisdom is knowing when to question beliefs, let go of outdated know-how, and take bold steps toward something new. It is the key to authentic growth and meaningful impact. It guides leaders to align their internal clarity with external influence, creating a foundation for true transformation.
What’s next? Explore the following post to dive deeper into the wisdom practice: A Leader’s Guide: Practicing Leadership through Wisdom.
Questions? Let’s Connect Now.