Unleashing Your Inner Leader: An Executive Coach Tells All

CHAPTER 4

Impact: What Do You Do?

Successful leaders are adept at communicating their impact and the impact of their team to anyone, anytime, anywhere. Communicating your accomplishments in the CAR (Challenge, Action, Result) format is the technique that successful leaders use to demonstrate their impact. Your CAR stories are your career currency, or the foundation upon which you build your career. CAR stories can be successfully used in performance reviews and introductions to communicate your impact to the organization concisely. You can also match your CAR stories to company leadership competencies when writing performance reviews.

CASE STUDY

Meet Edward. He had worked for one of the top global technology companies for the past 12 years. Although he had had many successes, he felt as if his career had simply been “floating along.” He had changed jobs four times with simply the average salary bump and only one promotion. When he came to work with me, his goal was very clear; it was time to become more serious about his career and to work actively on getting his accomplishments noticed so that he could get some real promotions. He had no idea how to do this.

GET YOUR RESULTS NOTICED

In this chapter you will learn the techniques to get your accomplishments noticed, and you will see how Edward implemented these practices. Let's get started with a story.

I recently did a presentation at a local high-tech company. I began by asking the audience the following question: Of those people ...