How will you plan your contribution?

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If you’re like me, you’ve spent some time setting goals. Maybe you worked with your manager to write annual goals. Maybe you set some personal goals. Maybe you even extended your time horizon and wrote out your 5-year plan (I’m proud of you).

The thing with goals is that sometimes we get so busy focusing on following a framework (looking at you “SMART goals”), or establishing targets (and now I’m looking at you “Key Performance Indicators”), that we miss the bigger picture. I encountered this little book on leadership called Do Lead (reference below) and I liked the author’s framing of goals as contributions.

Instead of naming personal goals we can define organizational contributions. Contributions are still goals, but they’re bolder. Contributions need to be broken down into a series of discrete actions. By stacking and sequencing these actions we can make progress on overall contributions.

The Impact Stack worksheet invites you to name a contribution and then work backwards. While you’re thinking about the actions required to meet that contribution why not try to anticipate obstacles, imagine what success looks like, and choose how you will celebrate? After all, you are making a contribution - not just meeting some random goal.


Impact Stack Worksheet (1.3 MB)

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Copyright, Use and Distribution

This worksheet is part of our Worksheet Wednesdays experiment. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You are free to copy and redistribute this worksheet. You can remix it or adapt it to your purposes, providing you share your revised version too. If you use this worksheet, please attribute Thirdway Think and link to thirdwaythink.com


Source of Inspiration

McKeown, L. (2014). Do Lead. London, UK: The Do Book Co.  

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