Influence at Work is a 3-part series of articles exploring what it takes for impact executives to gain and use internal influence – that precious currency required to be successful in any organization. Part 1 below begins with the foundation: earning your license to operate.

In Part 1 of this mini-series I wrote about earning your license to operate as a corporate impact leader — developing the business fluency and relationships that establish your credibility inside your organization. For Part 2, I explore what to do with that license once you have it. 

When I talk to folks doing this work at a high level for a long time, they tell me that influential corporate impact executives operate in equal measure as leaders of an impact strategy and agents of the business’s core strategy. Quite simply, they demonstrate the same core operational capabilities and strategic instincts as their peers in other departments. 

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Pursue impact solutions that solve business problems

Durable and effective impact programs often address a business need in addition to advancing a societal objective. In doing so, they rewire others’ perception of impact’s relevancy (less “cost center”; more “strategic resource” and “business driver”). We all know this as shared value.

Maybe your company has workforce pipeline challenges, or limited credibility in growth markets, or consumer trust deficits, or regulatory exposure – each of these can be a legitimate entry point for impact work that drives a blend of social and business outcomes.

Tactics to consider:

  • Revisit your current program portfolio through the lens of your “pressure map” from Part 1. For each program, ask: does this address a business priority? If not, it may warrant scrutiny.
  • When developing new initiatives or refreshing your impact strategy, start with the business. What are the 5-year goals the business cares most about? Then, crosswalk those priorities to the assets and levers available to your impact function. For exercise and tools to guide this kind of thinking, check out NationSwell’s Toolkit on Identifying Your Organizational Impact Superpowers or reach out to your NationSwell Impact Team to explore ways we can support.
  • Partner with a senior business leader or function (e.g. HR, marketing) who has accountability for the business priority you’re targeting. Shared ownership can increase your relevance, resourcing, and the likelihood that you land the plane. 
  • Consider if a pilot would benefit your shared value approach. Testing new solutions in targeted markets or functions could help to validate both social and business outcomes, and the results can be used to refine the model before committing with full force. 

Run your function like a business

Leading your programs, your budget, and your team with the same rigor and standards as other business leaders tells the rest of the organization that you’re one of them.

This requires managing your programs to high performance expectations, being ready to make hard calls, and treating your function’s resources with the same discipline you’d expect from any other part of the enterprise. It also requires proactivity about accountability. One corporate impact executive advised, “Be the first to admit when something is not working.”

Tactics to consider:

  • Establish a regular business review rhythm for your programs that mirrors how other functions report on performance. Specifically, consider:
    • Reporting on outcomes, cost per outcome, and contribution to business priorities;
    • Aligning cadence with existing forums (e.g. quarterly business reviews instead of standalone meetings);
    • Using the same formats as other business functions (e.g. dashboards, decks, etc.).
  • If resources permit, dedicate someone on your team to operate as an independent evaluator to apply a standardized measurement framework across all programs. By moving evaluation responsibilities away from the program team you decrease the risk of bias and increase the uniformity by which you understand what’s working and what’s not.
  • Make the hard calls. Define criteria for continuation, scaling, or exit at the outset – such as minimum impact (social and business) thresholds. Reassess on a fixed timeline that aligns with other business functions. If a program is misaligned, underperforming, or consuming resources without a clear return, have an exit strategy. 

Be judicious about your external partnerships

Partners chosen for legacy reasons, personal relationships, or anything other than strategic fit can subtly undermine leaders’ credibility over time, especially when resources start to get squeezed. Evaluate partners’ impact regularly and maintain a standard of mutual value creation — not unlike how another operator in your business might approach vendor relationships.


To be clear, trust is still the most crucial currency when working with partners. The leaders I’ve talked to value knowing what their partners excel at and letting them do their thing. At the same time, those leaders caution against becoming overcommitted to any given partner, to being a sole source of grant revenue to a program, or otherwise making an eventual exit too disruptive for either organization.

Tactics to consider:

  • Audit your current partner portfolio annually against your strategic priorities. Where is the fit strong? Where is it rooted in legacy? Where are you filling a gap a better-aligned partner could fill?
  • Assess partner reputation and ecosystem positioning. Evaluate how current and prospective partners may be perceived by key stakeholders, and how that perception reflects on the internal influence you are honing. Prioritize partners whose credibility, leadership, and approach reinforce your strategic narrative and brand, and establish clear criteria for reputational risk. Consider third-party validation and a clear track record of impact.
  • Select organizations that have opportunities for employees, leaders, or customers to engage — through volunteerism, pro bono work, etc. — so partnerships don’t operate in isolation from the business. 
  • Develop a point of view on what percentage of an organization or program budget you’re willing to be responsible for and apply that information to grantmaking decisions and partner evaluations.
  • Build a playbook for winding down grantee or partner relationships. Include considerations like what period of notice to give before discontinuing grants, whether to provide reduced funding for a temporary bridge period, and ways to help build your partners’ capacity to seek additional funding sources.

Build your team around business-relevant skills

Working in the impact profession draws in people who are intrinsically motivated by mission or purpose. But hiring for purpose — building a team around passion – isn’t sufficient in a business environment. Here’s another point where the NationSwell members and Strategic Advisors I’ve been talking with are quite clear: the most effective corporate impact teams put a premium on analytical, financial, program management, and communication capabilities. They hire people who understand — often come from — complex corporate environments. That doesn’t mean domain expertise, field work, and lived experience count less; just that they should be considered alongside business acumen.

Tactics to consider:

  • Create deliberate development pathways for your current team. Consider secondments or internal rotations into other functions, and offer training on business-relevant skills. Bring in cross-functional partners to present their work to your team.
  • When you have open roles, write job descriptions that center business competencies alongside the domain expertise you’d typically prioritize.
  • Work with your talent partners to source job candidates from within the business. Former finance, strategy, or operations professionals who’ve moved into impact roles can be quite successful at translating impact to the business and vice versa.

Explore sustainable and diversified funding models

There are a few reasons why it pays to think creatively about the financial architecture of your work. For starters, it’s rarely a bad idea to reduce dependencies on a single source of funding. Then there’s the possibility of being able to do more with more. And perhaps most relevant to this topic, there’s the opportunity to demonstrate a mutually beneficial orientation to the business’s financial interests.

What this looks like in practice can vary, and what’s right for one company might not work for another. Some companies make impact investments that regenerate capital while advancing strategically aligned goals. Some corporate foundations raise money from customers and external partners. And in the context of OBBBA, some impact leaders are collaborating with partners in finance, accounting, and elsewhere to maximize tax advantages for philanthropy while preserving its key role in advancing impact. 

Tactics to consider:

  • Review NationSwell’s recent case study on navigating OBBBA and then connect with your finance partners to explore creative ways to mitigate tax downsides while maintaining philanthropic momentum.
  • Check out NationSwell’s guide to corporate impact investing to see if there’s a potential role for this approach in your organization.
  • Investigate opportunities to co-fund programs with other business units or functions that have a direct stake in the outcome. For inspiration, take a look at NationSwell’s case study of Johnson & Johnson’s Business Match Fund.

If earning your license to operate is about closing the distance between how you think and how the business thinks, then becoming an asset is about closing the distance between what you do and what the business needs done. When that gap is narrow — when your strategy, your programs, your team, and your partnerships are all in service of business priorities as much as impact goals — your influence starts becoming hardwired. And that’s a good place to be.

In Part 3 of Influence at Work, we’ll turn to the matter of ROI: how to measure it and how to talk about it.