What do I mean by results, not effort? Results and impact depend on direction.
Early in our career, our direction is given to us by our teacher or our manager. So we are responsible only for our effort. If we work hard on the tasks we are given or on developing the skills we are told we need, we will generally get promoted to the next level.
But the impact we have depends on where we put our effort. A lot of effort in the wrong direction can have zero or even negative impact, but a little effort in the right direction can have exponential impact.
To draw on my study of physics, effort is a single-dimensional scalar – we can quantify how hard somebody worked, how many hours, how much effort, but it’s independent of direction or impact.
Impact is a vector where direction matters. Impact is a product of effort and direction.
Early in our career, where our direction is given to us, our impact is dependent primarily on our effort (and the skillfulness of our manager in choosing a direction).
Once we become more senior, we become responsible for setting the direction ourselves; in other words, we are evaluated based on impact, not just effort.
The masters can exert minimal effort to create great impact, like the apocryphal story of the master engineer that tapped the machine in one place and got it working, resulting in the invoice itemizing tapping the machine as $1, and knowing where to tap $9,999. The equivalent in our present-day world is the executive that can have a strategic conversation that redirects an entire team in a new direction; the same effort by the team creates tremendously more impact.
Credit to Owain Lewis for inspiring this thought with his post.
P.S. If you want to learn more, check out the webinar in my profile link, and sign up for my upcoming class on becoming a more effective executive.