How to scale up your impact
Business leaders often ask how to scale up their impact. They’re already ‘doing good’ but they feel they could do more. Some have taken the actions that seemed obvious to them and are unsure what to do next to step up the impact they’re having. Others have an allocated pot of money to spend on ‘doing good’ and want to make sure they’re having the maximum impact. How do you scale up and amplify your impact?
What is impact?
Firstly, let’s touch on what we mean by ‘impact’. Personally I prefer talking about impact to sustainability and you can find out why here.
Every action, every decision that you take as an individual or a business has an impact. It affects people’s livelihoods and wellbeing. It affects nature, ecosystems and animals. These impacts can be both positive and negative – and they can be observed and measured.
Knowing your current impact can help you prioritise and know where to focus.
Understanding the impact of different options can help you make decisions.
Measuring the impact of what you’ve done can help you know and talk about the difference you’ve made.
Seven things you can do to scale up your impact
1. Focus on impact rather than activity
Lots of businesses I speak to are doing lots of well-intentioned and often inspirational activity – but they’re not joining up the dots to see if that activity is actually making a difference. Let alone whether it’s having more impact than anything else they could have done.
These activities might include:
Planting trees or donating to charity
Paid volunteering days
Signing a petition or joining a sector-wide collaboration
Switching the packaging they use
There’s a reason lots of businesses focus on activities – they’re easier to measure, especially when the knock on impact might be several years away. But (to be brutal) these are vanity metrics. What difference are they actually making? How can you be confident of that? How do you know that what you did was better than other options?
It’s important to understand the knock on effects of what you’re doing so you can confidently say that you’re making a difference to people and/or the planet … and have data to back this up.
2. Focus
One of the best ways to have an impact is to pick a specific problem to focus on rather than spreading yourself across lots of different problems. When you focus in on a problem and take time to understand its complexities then you stand a much better chance of understanding the role you can play, coming up with creative solutions, fostering collaborative partnerships and ultimately moving the needle – i.e. making a meaningful difference.
How do you pick a problem to focus on? Try asking:
What cause are you passionate about?
Where is there a big problem that’s not being addressed?
What problems are relevant to your product / service / sector?
What are your assets and capabilities? Where can they make a difference?
Some businesses are so focused on impact that tackling this problem is their north star. Good examples of this are Elvis & Kresse, Tony’s Chocolonely and Belu. You might not feel ready for doing this in your business – that’s ok.
3. Be bold
Close your eyes and imagine yourself in 20 years time. Your business is being presented with a prestigious award for outstanding impact; for making the sort of difference that others can only dream of. What have you achieved?
What do you achieve in your wildest dreams? Set yourselves this bold, audacious goal.
Set a goal that transcends your business and that you have no idea how to solve.
Small incremental changes do make a difference and they are important. But it’s the businesses that dare to think crazy big that achieve big things. Their strong vision gathers followers and brings people together. And together they make the impossible possible … and they have a big impact on the world. The three businesses I referred to in the last section are great examples of this – they all punch well above their weight!
4. Be data led
Look at the data:
What’s your current impact on people and the planet? Where are the biggest opportunities for improvement? Focus your efforts on those.
Where are the greatest areas of unmet need? Where are the biggest problems? Focus on those.
And when you start doing things, look at the data again:
What’s working? Carry on doing it.
What’s not working? Stop doing it or improve it.
Do you have ideas to improve what you’re doing? Try them out, measure the impact, compare that with your current activities, adjust your plans accordingly.
Data can be gold-dust when it comes to influencing people. It removes subjectivity, opinion and assumption. And it can help you do the things that make the biggest difference.
5. Make it part of everyone’s role
When a single person or a small team are responsible for sustainability, CSR or responsible business then it’s hard to achieve significant change.
The magic happens when it’s part of everyone’s role. If every single person in the organisation is thinking about small changes they can make to embed impact and responsible business practices into everything they do then the culture changes.
These changes could be as simple as asking a different question when buying something, adjusting the questions used in job interviews , choosing what achievements you celebrate or changing the stories you share in internal communications.
6. Collaborate
Most substantial, gnarly problems are complex. They can’t be solved by one organisation alone. They often require systems change.
When you understand the problem you’ve decided to focus on, you’ll identify others who are tackling the same problem. You’ll identify your own capability gaps. You’ll spot opportunities to collaborate.
The businesses that have the biggest impact are great at collaborating. Within their sector, with charities, with government and the public sector, with their supply chain, with their clients and customers.
You can join an existing collaboration or you can establish a new collaboration, bringing people together, creating connections, facilitating conversations and enabling progress.
7. Think about how you can make your money work harder
Where is your money being invested? What about your employees’ pensions?
There’s still far too much money being invested in businesses that are damaging the planet and harming people. Changing your investment policy and making sure your money is invested in businesses that are ethical and sustainable can make a massive difference to the impact you’re having.
Shifting your pension to an ethical fund can have more impact at an individual level than anything else. Making sure your company pension gives employees the ability to make ethical choices about their pension is something very powerful you can do.
Conclusion
Not all of these seven will be right for your business at the moment. Read through them and think about which can be a catalyst for scaling up your impact, given your starting point.
Scaling up your impact doesn’t have to mean doing more or spending more. It can just mean doing things differently. These ideas give you an idea of how you might do that.
For more practical advice on how to get clarity on what steps to take to scale up your impact, check out my FREE Scale Up Your Impact Guide: