Owning Your Impact

There’s a gap that exists in every leader’s life — the gap between intention and impact. You intend to be approachable, but your team hesitates to bring you bad news. You intend to empower people, but somehow every decision still flows through you. You intend to foster innovation, but the culture feels risk-averse. The distance between what we mean to do and what actually lands is where most leadership development needs to happen.

The challenge is that this gap is largely invisible to us. We experience our intentions. Other people experience our impact. And without deliberate effort, those two things can drift further and further apart. This isn’t a character flaw — it’s a human one. We all have blind spots. The question is whether we’re willing to explore them.

In our leadership workshops, we use applied improv exercises that make this gap visible in real time. When you’re in a scene with a colleague and you think you’re being collaborative but your partner feels steamrolled, that feedback is immediate and undeniable. There’s no annual review to wait for. No 360 assessment to interpret. You feel it in the moment, and you get to try again right away. That rapid cycle of action, feedback, and adjustment is incredibly powerful for developing self-awareness.

What we’ve found over thirty years of this work is that most leaders don’t lack good intentions — they lack accurate information about their impact. Once they see it clearly, they almost always want to close the gap. And the skills to do so are surprisingly learnable. Presence, active listening, reading the room, adjusting your energy to what the moment requires — these aren’t personality traits. They’re practices. And like any practice, they get stronger with repetition.

Owning your impact means accepting that leadership is measured not by what you meant, but by what people experienced. It’s a humbling shift, but also a liberating one. Because once you stop defending your intentions and start getting curious about your impact, you unlock a level of growth that no amount of strategic thinking can match.