Heya big thinker!
It’s kinda funny how the big inspiring strategic goals you set for yourself for 2026 have so quickly turned into an activity hamster wheel, huh?
We’re optimizing process Y.
We’re standardizing intake.
We’re documenting a new onboarding workflow.
And just like that . . . you’re in the trenches, measuring progress in inches, chatting up your ‘to do’ list and ‘got done’ list. In other words, activity talk.
But leadership rewards impact talk.
Last week I ran a workshop with a senior leadership team at Amgen where we practiced one skill: making individual and team contribution legible to the executive team.
Here’s why this matters: When contribution is invisible, the contribution—and sometimes the people responsible for it—stops mattering.
And at the leadership level, that’s dangerous.
Because when teams don’t show how their contributions lead to impact, they lose agency.
It can be a downward spiral.
Invisible contribution → no recognition → diminished initiative → lower ownership → weaker outcomes → even less visibility.
Agency can slip away almost without being noticed.
And when you lose agency, you’re cooked.
Mattering matters.
I’m listening to The Next Big Idea right now, and their latest episode on mattering hit a nerve.
The argument is simple: when people don’t feel like they matter at work, it doesn’t stay neatly contained. It leaks into everything—relationships, resilience, engagement in the community, and beyond.
So here’s the leadership job:
Help your team make their contribution legible.
Because leadership can’t prioritize what they can’t see. And in organizations, the fastest way to destroy mattering is to make contribution unreadable.
Here’s how to do it.
The Contribution Chain
Here’s a simple tool we used in the workshop to connect what you do → to why it matters, and then to back it up with evidence. This tool forces you to build a clean contribution chain you can use in any leadership update.
In short, it will help avoid simply reporting about what’s happening in the trenches, and instead share how your work is actively contributing to the larger business objective.
Here’s how it works.
Contribution Chain:
- Contribution (verb + noun) - what are you and your team working on? what’s the activity?
- Business outcome/result (specific change) - what is the expected outcome?
- Broader impact (why it matters) - why does that outcome matter?
- Proof / evidence (signals) - how do you prove it’s working? what are the signals?
If you want an example chain, here’s a clean one:
- Contribution: Standardizing intake will lead to . . .
- Business outcome: Fewer handoffs + less rework, which means . . .
- Broader impact: Faster time to value for customers
- Proof / evidence: We’ll know it’s working when we see shorter cycle times and less churn.
The point is to translate the ‘activity’ into leadership language they’ll recognize.
The benefit is your leaders will see that your work matters.
I really can’t tell you how much I was affected and inspired by the podcast on mattering I mentioned above. If you are a leader or an influencer of people (and hint, you are), I really hope you will invest some time and listen to it. You matter more than you know, and you can help others matter too.
Give it a listen and let me know what you think.
