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What Is Your Personal Impact Factor?

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What if you could actually measure your personal and professional legacy?

I was having breakfast with my friend, Kevin Glover, VP of Clinician Education and Training at B. Braun Medical, talking about his research and he mentioned that his paper had been accepted into a journal with a certain “impact factor”. I stopped him mid-sentence.

Not being an academic, I had never heard that term “impact factor” before. The term itself was so interesting, I uttered those powerful three words: tell me more.

It turns out, the impact factor of a journal is the average number of citations each article in the journal gets over the preceding two years. For example, right now, The New England Journal Medicine has an impact factor of 54.42 which means that, on average, each article in that journal was referenced by another publication 54.42 times in the previous two years. By comparison, the Journal of Postgraduate Medicine has an impact factor of 0.972, which means each of its articles got referenced once in the previous two years

The impact factor is a proxy for the influence the journal has. The New England Journal is referenced by 50 times the number of people that found something worthy to reference in the Journal of Postgrad Medicine.

What if people came with impact factors?

What if there was some kind of score to indicate how influential you’ve been with your kids, your colleagues and your friends?

How many times have you thought about something your Dad taught you? How many times have you quoted something an old boss said to you?

It doesn’t happen often but every now and then an incident will get back to me:

  • “Jen was crawling around the floor plugging the projector in at the client site and said, ‘Kevin used to say, get into the room early so the client doesn’t see you getting dressed for the performance.’”
  • “Andy showed up five minutes late for the client meeting and said, ‘I just kept hearing Kevin’s voice saying being late is like giving the middle finger to your client.’”

While it’s amusing to hear my oddball maxims echoed back to me, it also feels good to think they actually stuck and made an impact.

Today we have partial and imperfect ways to measure impact. As an author I’m eager to check on my book sales, or Amazon rank, or how many people viewed an article on Forbes. Some companies are running reports on internal communication platforms to see who the true influencers are in the organization (i.e., who is answering the most questions in the forums, who is receiving the most direct inquiries through email).

We don’t have a way to measure that actual impact factor of our lives, but pretending there is a way just might help us to increase our legacy.

  • How often are you providing advice, lessons and ideas that your direct reports will be able to use many years into the future?
  • What are saying, and what are you modeling, that your children will pass on to their children?
  • What lessons have you learned as a leader, as a parent, as a spouse that others could benefit from?

We will never have a perfect way to actually score our personal impact factor, partly because by definition, our legacy extends after we are gone. But being mindful of our impact—of how many people are taking lessons from us and citing them back to others—will help us to help others while we’re still here.

Are you engaged at work? Discover your “engagement” score by taking The Personal Engagement Profile.

Check out Kevin Kruse’s new book, Employee Engagement 2.0.