Using the Work – Impact – Results Framework
Josh Alwitt
February 2023
Leaders have been very interested lately in the Work – Impact – Results framework. They find the framework helpful for alignment, role definition, prioritization, accountability, and other leadership needs – and while it’s simple and powerful, it can also be tricky to use effectively. So this article expands on the original one from 2019 by offering details, examples and tips.
Here are some of the most common questions coming up for leaders as they try to apply the Work-Impact-Results framework:
- How to distinguish between Work and Impact, or between Impact and Results
- Pitfalls of over-indexing on Results
- How specific to be when defining Work or Impact
- The framework is so simple and powerful – why am I finding it hard to use?
Why Work-Impact-Results?
The framework comes from research[i] that focusing on the positive impact we want to have on other people leads to greater satisfaction, wellbeing, and leadership performance. And focusing on the specific work that creates our desired impact is more likely to lead to the quantitative results on which people are measured.
Distinguishing between Work, Impact and Results helps us as leaders to:
- Create alignment and motivation by helping people feel excitement and pride about attaining meaningful shared goals
- Agree on who our most important stakeholders are, and what they need from us
- Focus the team’s effort on the work most likely to lead to shared goals
- Develop breakthrough innovations for creating impact rather than incremental efficiency and margin improvements
- Prioritize organizational capabilities needed to create the impact
- See measurable results more clearly: as an output of having impact on people
These are powerful benefits, and yet many people find the framework challenging to apply.
Here are some more detailed definitions. I’m offering the definitions here in order of how they affect each other, i.e., Work-Impact-Results, but remember to always start with Impact, then move to either Work or Results.
Work
Work describes what we do to create the impact. Work should have a verb to reflect its active nature. Elevate Work above the level of simple activities by being specific about what will be done and to what end.
Defining Work is particularly helpful for planning meetings. For example, you can elevate the meeting purpose from “share updates” to “share updates about issues that require real-time input and discussion with other team members”.
Sometimes Work is defined in an abstract way that makes it hard to know where to focus effort, e.g. “create a customer-centric culture”. In these cases, it’s helpful to ask “what would we see you doing?”, in order to get back down to the specifics of the Work.
Here are some examples of elevating activity to Work:
| Activity | Work |
|---|---|
| Have a meeting about customer experience | Agree on how we can build a data analytics capability to guide decisions about customer experience |
| Present to our client | Illustrate through a presentation how we will solve the client’s problem |
| Discuss quality issues | Understand the root causes underlying our manufacturing quality issues |
| Make a list of each team’s projects | Prioritize our most critical projects and clarify the work we need to focus on for this year |
Impact
Impact describes how we intend to influence other people, e.g., how we want people to think, feel, act, or how we want to enable them. The main difference between Work and Impact is describing what you will do vs. how others will be affected positively:
| Work | Impact |
|---|---|
| Build a data analytics capability to guide decisions about customer experience | Enable the product team to make features decisions that will delight customers and lead them to feel greater brand loyalty |
| Develop a presentation to explain how we will solve our client’s problem | Our client feels confident that we understand their situation and have the capability to address it |
| Design a process improvement to address our manufacturing quality issues | Headquarters is excited about the possibilities for our plant and expands our product line |
| Prioritize our most critical projects for this year | Leaders are willing to share resources across functions in the service of the organization |
Exploring desired Impact requires you to consider who your stakeholders are, and their relative importance to your organizational purpose and strategy. For many leaders, this can be an eye opener when new stakeholder categories emerge or change in importance.
Results
Results describe how we will measure the Impact. Results are critical – without financial success, the organization will be unable to have the impact over the long term. Results are also how most leaders are assessed, so they get a lot of attention and often become the main topic of discussion in management meetings. However, Results are an output – they represent the evidence that we had the desired Impact. If the results are off-track, the first place to look should be Impact. To distinguish between Impact and Results, remember that Impact is about people and Results is about measures.
| Work | Impact | Results |
|---|---|---|
| Build a data analytics capability to guide decisions about customer experience | Enable the product team to make features decisions that will delight customers and lead them to feel greater brand loyalty | Customer retention rate
NPS Online sales |
| Develop a presentation to explain how we will solve our client’s problem with customer conversion | Our client feels confident that we understand their conversion situation and have the capability to address it | Expanded client relationship (revenue)
Customer conversion rates |
| Design a process improvement to address our manufacturing quality issues | Headquarters is excited about the possibilities for our plant and expands our product line | Quality metrics
Number of products produced Employee engagement |
| Prioritize our most critical projects for this year | Leaders are willing to share resources across functions in the service of the organization | Throughput for critical projects |
Over-Indexing on Results
Because of the attention paid to results, it’s common to focus on results at the expense of Impact. Let’s say we were very focused on increasing the revenue on a client account. If we focus on selling anything we can, rather than helping them with their most pressing problems, we might increase revenue in the short term but probably at the expense of the long-term relationship. By focusing on the Impact of helping the client, we are more likely to create the result of increasing account revenue over the long term.
Cost Reduction
You’ll notice that cost doesn’t show up in the Work-Impact-Results table above. People often wonder where cost fits into this framework, since reducing costs is a common goal assigned to leaders. It might be tempting to define the Work as “reduce development costs by moving work to a low-cost labor market”. The question is where the positive impact can be found which is the underlying reason for reducing costs. Let’s say we’re reducing development costs in order to fund a series of innovation initiatives. The Work could be “move development work to low-cost labor markets to free up capital for investing in innovation initiatives.” The Impact might be the effect on customers of having access to these innovative products and services. Or perhaps the impact is that the company remains viable and able to continue to service its customers. Cost reduction for the sake of innovation, opportunity, upside or even viability is more energizing than cost reduction for the sake of the bottom line. For the most part, our brains are not wired to get all that excited about numbers.
Bringing it Together
If you’re having difficulty, take it one step at a time. Start by defining key stakeholders. Pick your most important stakeholder and define the Impact that will lead to your desired Results. Then define the Work that will lead to that Impact. Remember, all three elements are important – the question is where to focus and how they relate to one another.
[i] Adam Grant, David McClelland, Burnham Rosen Group, and others have conducted research leading to this finding