Resource Type: Commentary

Power, Influence, and That Which We Cannot Control

Posted on by Shannon Schuyler

Power can make people listen. Influence makes people choose to listen. 

Not surprisingly, power can be attractive because people often associate it with autonomy, access, and the ability to get things done. Having power means not only having a seat at the table, but also having some authority over what happens there.

Influence is different. It is the ability to shape thinking, decisions, and action without relying solely on authority. It is about building trust, sharing ownership, and having the ability to move people to action. 

Understanding the limits of authority

My career has spanned the interconnected ecosystem of sustainability, climate, inclusion, and related fields. Within the business community (and even society more broadly), these fields are often still treated as niche areas of expertise. Connecting their inputs and outcomes to business strategy and value creation requires thoughtful knowledge-sharing and awareness-building.  

Even when I held a seat at the proverbial table, power and authority brought more accountability for actions, investments, and outcomes — especially when they fell short. But credibility, evidence, conviction, and relationships were what enabled me to influence which actions and investments were adopted.

At the leadership level, so many conflicting priorities often mean that tough decisions need to be made collectively. A role’s place in the hierarchy or within a particular P&L might confer additional authority, but influence is what allows a leader to move people and shape what happens at the table. 

Perhaps one of leadership’s hardest realities is that we are accountable for outcomes we do not fully control. Not having full dominion of your function can be deeply frustrating and even derailing, creating a sense that you lack agency, recognition, or control. Even more difficult is the need to rely on someone else’s command of the topic, commitment to the work, and willingness to advocate boldly when you are not in the room. 

I completely understand these feelings. I have had them. But they cannot become an excuse for why specific agendas are not advancing. They may be a factor, but they are also a reason to push harder. 

We still have the ability to persuade through clearly-defined outcomes, a well-grounded perspective, and compelling evidence. Doing so requires knowing your audience, understanding the right levers to pull and when, and being intellectually grounded in how the work creates value. 

Power is the capacity to direct outcomes; influence is the capacity to shape them. Both need to be activated. 

The dichotomy of control

For me, the need for control was always the real agitator — not simply the tension between power and influence. I spent too much time and emotional energy on items outside of my control: all aspects of our initiatives, how they were perceived, etc. 

That remained a central challenge until my professional coach and friend enlightened me to Stoicism, and one of its central tenets in particular: the dichotomy of control. 

At its simplest, Stoicism holds that some things are within our control, and some things are not; wisdom is knowing the difference and directing our energy accordingly.

For my own mental stability, I had begun to focus fiercely on what was within my control — particularly my judgments, choices, actions, responses, attitudes, and how I responded to feedback. I could not lead effectively if I was consumed by things outside of my control, such as other people’s behavior, opinions, decisions, or agreements. 

Power says: I need to control the outcome.

Stoicism says: The outcome isn’t entirely mine to control.

Influence says: I can shape the conditions around the outcome.

Both power and influence have an appropriate place in the successful operation of any venture. Perhaps the most crucial mark of an effective, competent leader is the ability to recognize when to rely on each one depending on the circumstances, time constraints, and people involved. 

The strongest leaders don’t default to power or influence; they develop the discernment to know when to command, when to persuade, and how to distinguish between what they can shape and what they must accept.

Influence is Built Before the Meeting Even Begins

Posted on by Rose Kirk

If there’s one lesson every social impact leader needs to internalize, it’s this: the meeting is not where you get buy-in. It’s where buy-in gets confirmed.

I spend quite a bit of time counseling individuals — either one-on-one or in workshops — on how to create sustainable, business-aligned social impact programs. It was the work I built at Verizon and the legacy I left behind after 10 years as the company’s chief corporate social responsibility officer.  

During my many counseling sessions, I’ve observed that some social impact leaders operate under a persistent myth that good ideas sell themselves. Walk into the boardroom with a compelling case for equity, sustainability, or community investment, present it well, and the room will nod along. 

Anyone who has actually tried this knows better. 

By the time an idea is formally presented, the decision-makers in the room should already understand it, have had a chance to react to it privately, and have had their concerns addressed. If you’re using the meeting itself to persuade people for the first time, you’ve already lost significant ground — and possibly the whole initiative.

The truth is that influence inside an organization is built long before anyone steps into a meeting room. It is built by investing in relationships, learning the language of the business, and equipping your team to operate as true partners across all levels of the organization.

Walk the halls 

One of my signature approaches to building influences is what I refer to as “walking the halls.”

Walking the halls means proactively building one-on-one relationships with key decision-makers — not only when you need something from them, but continuously, as a discipline. It might mean stopping by someone’s office, grabbing fifteen minutes on their calendar, or catching them after another meeting to talk through an emerging idea before it’s fully formed. 

These informal conversations do two things extraordinarily well: they surface objections early, when they’re still cheap to address, and they give decision-makers a sense of ownership and input into the final proposal.

The insights gathered from hall walking are not a side benefit of relationship-building; they are the mechanism through which influence is created. 

A finance leader might tell you, informally, that your proposal will get killed unless it’s tied to a specific cost-saving metric. A sales leader might mention that a similar initiative failed two years ago for reasons no one wrote down. 

Armed with that intelligence, you can revise your pitch, pre-address objections, and walk into the formal meeting with something that already has quiet support. The meeting becomes an opportunity to ratify the work that has already been done — not a high-stakes persuasion event with an uncertain outcome.

And critically, walking the halls doesn’t stop once buy-in is secured. Continuing to invest in relationships after a decision is made is what protects an initiative from quietly losing priority, being weakened by budget cuts, or being deprioritized when the next crisis hits. Ongoing relationship maintenance is what turns a one-time win into sustained organizational support.

Speak the language of the business

Social impact leaders often walk into rooms fluent in mission and impact metrics, but far less fluent in how their company actually generates revenue. This is a critical gap. 

If you can’t explain how your organization makes money — its margins, its growth levers, its competitive pressures — you’ll struggle to position social impact as a driver of business value rather than a cost center or a nice-to-have.

The social impact leaders who wield real power are the ones who show up as business leaders first. They can speak candidly about P&L, customer acquisition, brand risk and reputation, and talent retention — and then connect social impact strategy directly to those outcomes. 

This doesn’t require abandoning the mission or diluting its ambitions, but it means translating it into a language the business already understands. When leaders can see how social impact contributes to the outcomes for which they are accountable, the work no longer survives on goodwill.

Build a team that can influence

None of these approaches can scale, however, if the work rests on one leader’s shoulders. 

Social impact functions should be staffed with the same strategic rigor as any other business unit. That means hiring not only for passion or subject-matter expertise, but for capabilities like strategy, financial acumen, program management, marketing, and cross-functional collaboration. 

It also means helping team members understand how the business operates and training them to build relationships across finance, legal, sales, human resources, communications, and other functions, with the goal of creating advocates and allies embedded throughout the organization, not just at the top.

At Verizon, I was notorious for conducting deep quarterly operational reviews with my team in which we examined every aspect of our strategy: what was working, what wasn’t, what we were learning, and how our programs were serving both external and internal clients. 

This preparation, in turn, equipped team members to walk their own halls. It gave them the confidence and business literacy to sit across from a CFO or a regional VP and speak credibly about both impact outcomes and business fundamentals. When an entire team can operate this way, influence no longer depends on a single leader or relationship and becomes woven into the fabric of how the function works.

Power and influence aren’t won in a single pitch. They are built through sustained investment, sharp business fluency, and a team capable of operating as genuine partners across the organization. 

Walk the halls before the meeting. Walk them after. And build a team that can do the same.

To Move People, Meet Them Where They Are

Posted on by Celeste Warren, founder, Celeste Warren Consulting LLC

Throughout my career as a human resources executive and, most recently, as chief diversity officer for a Fortune 100 company, I learned one truth that shaped every initiative I ever led: If you cannot influence, you cannot create change.

It sounds simple, but it’s a lesson that took years to fully understand. Influence isn’t about authority, title, or having the final say in a meeting — it’s the ability to shift perspectives, help people see what they hadn’t seen before, and move organizations toward outcomes that matter. 

In the diversity, equity, and inclusion space, that work is especially imperative. For too long, DEI was treated as a “nice-to-have” — a feel-good moral imperative rather than a bona fide competitive advantage for the business. My job was to help companies understand that the embrace of diverse perspectives can help them outperform their peers in innovation, problem-solving, and market responsiveness. 

But, as I learned, you don’t get people to that conclusion by lecturing them. Effective influence means meeting people where they are and helping them arrive at the insight themselves.

Looking back, I see three levers I’ve returned to again and again:

  1. Emotion: Understanding what moves people in order to better connect abstract ideas to their own lives and values.
  2. Data: Grounding conversations in evidence, then humanizing the numbers with stories.
  3. Relationships: Doing the work to build relationships before a critical decision is on the table and then using that rapport to help leaders respond thoughtfully rather than reactively.

Understanding what moves people

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that effective influence starts with understanding what keeps people up at night. Everyone has priorities, fears, and pressures that drive their decisions. If you want to move someone, you have to first understand what moves them.

Early in my tenure as a CDO, I met with a leader who worked in mergers and acquisitions. He was polite but skeptical. He didn’t see what diversity, equity, and inclusion had to do with his work, which was deals, numbers, and integration plans.

While he finished a phone call, I looked around his office. On his desk sat a photo of his wife, his daughter, and a young man I assumed was his daughter’s fiancé. When he hung up, I asked about the picture. His face lit up as he told me about his daughter’s engagement, about how excited the family was.

I asked him a simple question: “What do you know about your future in-laws? Their faith? Their political views? Their beliefs about the things that matter most to you and your wife?”

He paused.

“Your grandchildren are going to grow up in a household that might be very different from how you raised your daughter,” I continued. “Before you bring someone into your family, you want to understand who they are.”

Then I brought it back to M&A: “It’s the same when we bring a company into our family. Before we close a deal, we need to know who we’re really acquiring. Are there lawsuits or class actions? Cultural issues that could become our problems? Diversity, equity and inclusion due diligence isn’t separate from the deal, it is the deal.”

He got it. In that moment, the abstract became personal, and suddenly it mattered in the decisions he was responsible for. 

That’s the power of emotion as a lever of influence — of understanding another person’s perspective well enough to connect what matters to you to what already matters to them.

Let the data speak

Emotion can open doors, but the evidence is what allows an idea to withstand scrutiny. When I sit down with senior leaders, I begin with the data, allowing the numbers to tell the story first. Data is objective; it doesn’t have an agenda, it simply reveals what is.

But data alone isn’t enough — numbers on a slide can feel distant, even cold. They can help describe what is happening, but can’t help senior leaders understand how it feels to the people experiencing it. 

That’s why, after presenting the data, I bring the human element in: stories from employees, perspectives from the front lines, voices that put a face to the statistics. Only then do I move on to solutions.

This sequence matters: data, human storytelling, then recommendations. It’s a structure that respects leaders’ analytical instincts while also engaging their empathy. It leads them to conclusions they feel ownership over, rather than conclusions that feel imposed.

Build trust over time

Although empathy and evidence are powerful tools, true influence depends upon trust. The most consequential conversations I have with leaders rarely begin in the moment when a major decision has to be made. Far more often, they are enabled by an existing relationship that has been fostered over time: listening without judgement, offering honest counsel, and repeatedly demonstrating care for the success of the organization.

It is trust that enables leaders to come to me with questions that they might otherwise be reluctant to ask publicly. During the height of the MeToo movement, a male leader came to me privately and told me he was considering stepping back from mentoring women because he was afraid of being falsely accused of misconduct.

I understood his fear, which was real and being echoed in conversations across corporate America. But I also knew that stepping back would be a mistake for him, for the women he mentored, and for the organization.

I told him that the risk he feared was statistically unlikely, but the risk of abandoning mentorship was certain: Talented women would lose access to guidance, sponsorship, and opportunity. I encouraged him to take sensible precautions, meet in open spaces, keep communication professional, but not to let fear stop him from doing something critically important.

He listened. He kept mentoring. And years later, several of the women he championed have moved into leadership roles.

That conversation happened because we had built trust over time. That trust gave us room to discuss fears, assumptions, and disagreements candidly, and it allowed me to challenge someone’s thinking without making that person feel dismissed or condemned.

Influence isn’t a soft skill — it’s a strategic capability. Building and wielding it requires patience, preparation, and genuine curiosity about the people you’re trying to reach. It’s the difference between ideas that stay on whiteboards and ideas that change organizations.

So invest in it. Study the people around you with genuine curiosity. Listen closely enough to understand their priorities. Build relationships before you need to draw on them. And never underestimate the power of meeting someone exactly where they are and walking with them toward where they need to be.

That’s influence. And it’s the most important currency you’ll ever earn.

Influence at Work, Part 3: Showcasing impact’s ROI

Posted on by Nick Cericola

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 3 concludes with how demonstrating ROI can compound influence over time.

In parts 1 and 2 of Influence at Work, I focused on the value unlocked by impact leaders when they reflect business characteristics in how they think and operate. That will get folks quite far in building up a supply of professional capital — i.e., influence — but there’s a third and final leg of the stool that needs as much attention: proving what you’re doing is working.

To wit, your influence is compounded over time if you can show — and sell — ROI to the business.

Here’s what that requires in practice:

Beef up your analytics capabilities

I touched on the importance of building a team around business-relevant skills in part 2, but it’s worth a double click on analytics. Here I’m talking about the ability to design studies, interrogate data, and make airtight claims about the value your work is creating for the business.

Many impact teams weren’t built with this skill in the foreground – program evaluation and impact reporting, yes, but not internal ROI analytics. If your team doesn’t have this capability today, your two paths are to hire for it or borrow it. Both are viable.

Tactics to consider:

  • Audit your current team’s analytical skills. Where are the gaps? Can existing team members develop them through training?
  • When you have open roles, write job descriptions that explicitly require quantitative or analytical competencies. Former finance, strategy, or data professionals who’ve moved into impact roles can be effective at translating between the two worlds.
  • When hiring isn’t feasible, borrow. Identify a data or analytics partner inside the business – someone in people analytics, finance, market research, or a business intelligence function – who can serve as a collaborator on your internal ROI work. Position the ask as a mutual benefit: good measurement of impact programs yields proof points that the business itself can use.
  • Consider the role of external validators. Third-party evaluation can introduce credibility that internal analysis alone can’t fully provide. Build a relationship with an academic partner, a research organization, or an evaluation firm that can bring an independent perspective to your data.

Commit to the structured study of primary ROI data 

Honestly, measuring the true business ROI of impact work is really tough. That’s why so many for so long have looked to the big secondary studies from research firms or consultancies to back up their claims that employee volunteerism generally improves retention, or that consumers are generally willing to pay a price premium for sustainable products, and so on. To be clear, these studies are great, and they’re worth citing. But they’re not really a replacement for knowing your own specific ROI.

As shared value approaches to impact take deeper root – and as impact teams look for ways to ensure their continued relevancy – they need to focus on primary data collection, good question design, and structured analyses that survive scrutiny.

Tactics to consider:

  • Develop a testable hypothesis. Start by identifying the specific business priority you’re trying to demonstrate impact against: employee retention, consumer trust, market access, etc. Then build a logic model that works backward to the core underlying impact work (e.g., by doing X, we accomplish Y, which is worth Z to the business).
  • Seek out your sources of primary data. Deputize someone on your team to figure out what data exists, how it is captured, who owns it, and what opportunities are available to study it for impact purposes. Chances are decently good that employee engagement scores, talent retention data, and customer research are within reach for your team already.
  • Analyze the data to test your hypothesis. Generally you’re going to be exploring the correlation or causal relationship between business outcomes (e.g., annual talent retention rates) and impact inputs (e.g., employee volunteer participation).
  • Know the limits of your claims. There are four degrees by which you can measure and articulate business value, in ascending order of their strength: program outputs, correlated outcomes, causal outcomes, and financial value. All four degrees have merit, but only when framed appropriately. Your audience will know when correlation is not causation, so be transparent about what your analysis can and can’t prove.
  • Document your methodology. You may not always need to “show your work” with every audience, report, or presentation, but you’ll never regret documenting your approach and your math when it’s called for.

Care deeply about your deck and how you deliver it

As much as we all hope for our numbers to speak for themselves, that’s a gamble most shouldn’t take. At the end of the day, selling ROI – making your case for attention, investment, and prioritization – is just as essential as measuring it. I recently spoke with a couple of long-serving corporate impact executives who told me that the presentation deck as a craft deserves outsized attention: the narrative arc, the visual clarity, the economy and precision of language. 

Tactics to consider:

  • Lead with business implications and avoid the temptation to describe everything you do programmatically.
  • Design a deck to be voiced over rather than read in depth. We often ask slides to do too much – to be the backdrop of our presentations and the detailed readout all at once. In some cases, you need two different documents to perform those two different tasks. Keep slides lean if you can – one main idea conveyed per slide, minimal text, strong visual hierarchy of information. And if needed, use an appendix for detail.
  • Tailor your framing to the specific executive or audience. A CFO cares about financial exposure and return. A CHRO cares about talent outcomes. A CMO cares about brand and consumer trust. The underlying story can be consistent but the framing should accommodate their unique perspective. 
  • Practice delivering it out loud. Your goal is not to memorize, but to build fluency – to be able to move fluidly between the deck and the room, respond to questions while staying on message, and project confidence.
  • Develop a ‘30-second version’ of every presentation you give. You may not always need it, but when you do you’ll be glad to have put in the extra work. If nothing else, it forces you to clarify your thinking to its purest form.

Don’t shy away from clarifying the stakes

Impact leaders might hesitate to connect their work explicitly to business risk or competitive exposure out of concern they’d seem alarmist, or that they’d imply their function exists primarily to manage downside. That caution may be misplaced, particularly in a moment where any number of dynamics – from a swinging political pendulum to growing AI backlash – could put impact in a difference-making position for the company.

Leaders are often well-served to call it how they see it and, in the right conditions, will benefit from sharper articulation of what the company stands to gain or lose based on its level of commitment to social goals. One impact leader recently relayed an anecdote that underscores this point: she went into a meeting with c-level execs and asked, “how would you feel if we were no longer seen as an industry leader on [our priority]?” The question, pointed and provocative, piqued attention in the right ways and accelerated a conversation about putting more resources into the work.

Tactics to consider:

  • Frame impact gaps as potential business risks. Urgency rooted in competitive exposure and reputational risk often lands most squarely with business leaders. In particular, if your company is materially behind peers on a workforce, community, or consumer trust dimension, say so using competitive data. 
  • Connect ROI to investment decisions explicitly. When making the case for new resources or program continuation, be clear about what the business stands to gain and what it risks by not investing. Sometimes a well-framed cost of inaction argument is more persuasive than a benefit projection.
  • Scenario plan with your team. Look down the road at potential short and mid-range shifts in your company’s context that could change the relative value of impact to the business, and discuss how you can put your work in an optimal position ahead of those eventualities. Relevant shifts could relate to your industry, the political environment, consumer or public sentiment, and other dynamics. 

That’s a wrap on Influence at Work (revisit part 1 and part 2), but not on NationSwell’s investment in supporting leaders in our community with this most essential aspect of their success. Many thanks for the brilliant NationSwell members and Strategic Advisors who lent me their experience and insights for this mini-series. For anyone with questions, comments, or need, please shoot me an email at [email protected]. 

Influence at Work, Part 2: Becoming an Asset to the Business

Posted on by Nick Cericola

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.

NationSwell op-ed: Predicting the Future of Work

Posted on Jacob Lepiarz and Allie Mahler

We are currently living through one of the most profound shifts in the history of work. As AI, automation, and other emerging technologies redefine jobs, skills, and career pathways wholesale, leaders across sectors are being called to meet these industry-wide undulations head-on and help shape what comes next.

That imperative is at the heart of NationSwell’s new Workforce Innovation Collaborative — a cross-sector effort designed to help leaders explore emerging workforce trends and co-design scalable solutions for a more future-ready and inclusive economy. Through shared learning, strategic dialogue, and collective action, the Collaborative aims to create the kind of trusted space leaders need to navigate uncertainty and create a future-ready workforce where every person has the skills, opportunities, and support to succeed.

To mark the launch of that work, NationSwell invited leaders from the Collaborative to respond to a shared prompt:

Which emerging signals are giving you the most optimism about the future of work right now? And where do you currently see the greatest opportunity to build a system that is more responsive to where work is headed next?

Although their responses reflect different vantage points, they converge around the common belief that the future of work will be shaped by how well leaders connect learning to real opportunity, pair innovation with inclusion, and design workforce systems that can adapt as quickly as the world around them changes.

Prompt: Which emerging signals are giving you the most optimism about the future of work right now? Where do you currently see the greatest opportunity to build a workforce system that is more responsive to where work is headed next?

“We are at an inflection point in the future of work, and I believe the greatest source of optimism and opportunity is in mastering the art and science of building truly responsive workforce systems.

The science is the strategic leveraging of predictive labor market intelligence. By shifting away from reactive measures, we can now leverage data and insights to anticipate skill demands driven by global trends. Our data provides the scientific rigor needed to pinpoint future talent shortages, standardize risk indicators, and replace guesswork with reliable, real-time insights, allowing us to accelerate our workforce investments across the globe.

However, the true opportunity — the art — lies in translating those insights and data into hyper-local execution that allows us to co-create with the communities we work in. This essential human-centered approach ensures our work doesn’t just fill a business gap, but actively builds equitable, transparent systems that deliver a net-positive impact in local communities. We achieve this by cultivating bespoke, long-term partnerships with community leaders, educational institutions, and nonprofits. 

Linking our global data-driven approach to local trust and co-creation is the systemic approach necessary to ensure our interventions foster equity and accessibility, building the sustainable, resilient workforce the future demands.”

— Courtney Williams, Global Workforce Development & Labor Market Intelligence, Google

“Across the Design and Make industries, I’m seeing promising workforce solutions that connect access, applied skills, and real hiring pathways. It’s no longer enough to train people on tools in isolation — what’s emerging now are integrated models that build capability in real workflows, validate those skills through industry recognized credentials, and link learners directly to opportunity. That’s how we ensure both students and experienced professionals can adapt and thrive as technology reshapes the future of work.”

— Kate Buchanan, Workforce Innovation & Investment Lead, Autodesk Foundation

“Right now, what gives me the most optimism about the future of work is the growing consensus that, as AI reshapes roles, human-centric skills — critical thinking, communication, and creativity — matter more, not less. It’s really important that optimism is matched with action in this moment, and through Barclays LifeSkills, our programs are helping people to develop these skills in order to differentiate themselves for current and future roles.

As we look at the workforce development sector, the greatest opportunity is to build a system that keeps pace with change by connecting learning to work earlier and more often, and by updating training as employer needs evolve faster. That means scaling employer-aligned earn-and-learn pathways — apprenticeships, fellowships, internships and project-based work — so learners graduate with an increased level of experience. It also means widening access to growth sectors, including AI-enabled roles and the skilled trades, where we continue to see strong demand. Through Barclays LifeSkills, we’re working across our partnerships to turn demand into clear routes to good jobs.”

— Deborah Goldfarb, Global Head of Citizenship, Barclays

“What gives me optimism is how clearly manufacturing and industrial skills are being redefined as both high-tech and people-driven. Advances in automation, digital tools and connected systems are changing work on the factory floor and at job sites. Realizing the full value of those advances depends on sustained investment in our people through skills-building, learning and clear career pathways. I’m also encouraged by how employers are engaging more intentionally with collaborators beyond their organizations. We’re witnessing stronger coordination among educators, workforce systems and local communities to ensure training keeps pace with technological advancement. This alignment — of innovation, skills and purpose — is a compelling signal that manufacturing can provide meaningful, fulfilling careers in a dynamic industry.

One of the greatest opportunities lies in modernizing workforce systems to evolve alongside the technologies shaping manufacturing. High schools, community colleges and regional training providers are critical anchors in this system, and we need to align more closely and dynamically with them, given that roles and skill requirements are changing faster than traditional training cycles can keep pace.

That means co‑designing training pathways that blend hands‑on experience with digital and technology‑enabled learning. It also means creating opportunities for continuous upskilling throughout a career. When workforce systems are built to adapt — rather than react — they not only prepare people for today’s manufacturing roles, but also for the future. They also help ensure the industry can remain innovative, competitive, and resilient over the long term.”

— Asha Varghese, Head of Corporate Social Responsibility, Caterpillar Inc. and President of the Caterpillar Foundation

“We are seeing a historic surge in systems readiness work at the local, state, and national levels. Stakeholders in the workforce ecosystem sometimes work in silos, but I’m seeing sustained interest in collaboration, especially across sectors. We are collectively examining what worked in the past to determine what must evolve for the future. 

There’s also growing consensus that career journeys of the future will be less linear. We know upskilling isn’t one-dimensional. It might mean deepening expertise to grow within an existing career trajectory, diversifying skills to transition into an adjacent role, or pivoting into an entirely new profession. A big opportunity right now is to reimagine our support systems to recognize this full spectrum of movement, ensuring that our infrastructure is as flexible as the workers it serves.”

— Diana Fischer, Senior Director, Workday Foundation

“One of the greatest opportunities is in building accelerated, more flexible pathways into the skilled trades that are tightly connected with employer needs. A more responsive workforce system should focus on expanding apprenticeships, investing in short-term training, and exposing students earlier to these fulfilling and well-paying careers.”

— Betsy Conway, Executive Director, Lowe’s Foundation

Influence at Work, Part 1: Earning the License to Operate

Posted on by Nick Cericola

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.

The impact leader’s work of building influence begins with establishing one’s own credibility as a business leader. More accurately, it begins with conceiving of oneself as a business leader. I have been struck in my recent conversations with seasoned impact executives by how emphatic they are in this regard. They told me there is no escaping that sense of sisyphean effort required to make the case – to get to “yes” – if your own mental model is one that differs widely from that of the CFO, COO, or any other executive who sees themself as primarily an agent of the enterprise. 

Put simply, they told me you advance impact by working through the business, not alongside it. 

For some leaders, this invites a shift: impact leaders should be able to think like and channel the perspective, language, and outlook of the very people they seek to influence.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Study how the business makes money

If you can’t clearly explain how your company does what it does, you’re operating at a disadvantage. By really learning how the cash flows, how share price behaves, how the widgets get made, you not only understand what makes your own impact work possible, you understand how to decode the business’s strategy and the psychology behind its decision-making. You begin to frame impact and talk about it in language that will resonate most strongly and signal that your efforts are aligned to the business.

Tactics to consider:

  • Join company earnings calls and/or pull the transcript and pay particular attention to the CEO and CFO remarks in full. Note the exact language they use to describe priorities, risks, and performance. Start using that language in your own communications.
  • Ask your finance business partner for a 30-minute sync for you and your team to go deeper on what’s new and evolving with your business model, priorities, and financial underpinnings.

Build relationships with five essential collaborators and orient yourself to the problems they are trying to solve

Whether you’re remote or fully onsite, step outside of your vertical and “walk the halls” in your finance, product, strategy, marcomm, and talent orgs. Time spent building relationships – accruing social capital – with leaders in these departments is time spent as well as anywhere. 

Prioritize curiosity about their sources of pressure and business anxiety. What are they trying to build or solve? What keeps them up at night? What defines their own success or failure? If they understand you as invested in their success – sharing in their challenges – they’ll likely be much stronger partners to you. You’ll learn how they talk, how they think, and how they see the business, allowing you to adopt or mirror those characteristics in the future when you need their partnership.

Tactics to consider:

  • Schedule informal 1:1s with a peer-level leader in each of the five functions and come with questions like “What’s the problem you’re most focused on solving right now?” and “How do you think about success in your role over the next 12-18 months?”
  • Identify one recurring meeting in each of those functions you could observe or contribute to. Even occasional visibility builds familiarity.
  • Find a low-stakes way to add value to one of their priorities before you ever ask for something. A relevant article, an introduction, a data point they’d find useful.
  • Create a simple “pressure map” to track what each key internal partner is being measured on, what’s keeping them up at night, and where they’re under scrutiny. Update it after every substantive conversation.
  • When a new initiative or challenge surfaces in the business, ask yourself: is there an impact angle here that serves their need? before you ask whether it serves yours.

Adopt the same information diet as your execs 

To connect your work to that of your CEO and those around them, you’ve got to make sense of the world as they do. While you may not know exactly what your chief executive spends their time reading, it’s a decent assumption that they’re scanning general business coverage (WSJ, Bloomberg, Fortune, NYT) and industry / trade press on a daily basis. Personally, I find WSJ’s CEO Brief, Fortune’s CEO Daily, and NYT’s Dealbook to be excellent choices for daily news and commentary relevant to markets and business.

Tactics to consider:

  • Add two or three of the recommended newsletters to your morning routine and spend 10 minutes with them before you open Slack or email.
  • When you read something particularly relevant to your company or industry, get in the habit of forwarding it to a peer or senior leader with a one-line observation. It’s a light-touch way to demonstrate business awareness and stay top of mind.
  • Once a quarter, review your own content consumption and consider adding another business-focused content source into your content diet. 

Track your company relative to peers and competitors

Business leaders are keenly aware of their market position relative to competitors. With social impact, they tend not to want to be laggards. The more you can stay attuned to the pressures – direct or indirect – being placed on the business by its peers the more likely you are to be able to win attention when you identify a competitor gap or opportunity space for impact purposes.

Tactics to consider:

  • Set up Google Alerts for your top three to five competitors with keywords tied to relevant topics like social impact, community investment, and workforce. This takes ten minutes and surfaces competitive intelligence passively.
  • Before any major internal pitch or planning conversation, do a quick scan of what peer companies have announced or been recognized for recently. Knowing where your company sits — ahead, behind, or alongside — gives you a sharper edge in those conversations.
  • Ask your NationSwell Impact Team about doing a competitor or peer scan for you.

Increasingly, part of earning your license to operate as an impact leader is about closing the distance between how you think and how the business thinks. When that gap is wide, your influence is built on the basis of successful advocacy. When that gap is narrow, your influence is built on the basis of a strong business orientation and business discipline. More on that latter piece when I share Part 2 of Influence at Work: “Becoming an Asset to the Business.”