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Whether it is in the job search process or your day-to-day work in higher education, knowing how to communicate your impact is critical to your professional growth and the mission of your office. Here, we will discuss what impactful language looks like, the common pitfalls for us educators, and ways readers can incorporate these practices into their workplace interactions.
Before we talk about impact, let’s start with communication and its purpose. In higher education, we often process a large amount of information and communicate in an insightful way. This applies to researchers who conduct literature reviews and identify gaps in existing findings, teachers who organize learning materials and share with students, or administrators who compile sources and write reports or proposals. Additionally, those of us in staff or administrator positions find ourselves relying on our written and oral communication to build up our own reputation and elevate the mission of our respective offices.
In order to communicate effectively, experts often highlight the importance of knowing your audience. Peer-reviewed articles share knowledge with researchers with similar academic backgrounds; teaching and learning welcomes students into dialogues and provides them with more nuances; and administrative reports or proposals are to document and sometimes persuade others to take actions. Similarly, elevating certain projects or connecting specific roles to the strategic planning or mission of an organization requires a deep understanding of segmented audiences, which we will discuss later in this article.
What do we mean by impact, then? Researchers define impact as “the effect or change over time that we can see, demonstrate, measure, or capture on different stakeholders, and which happens as a result of an activity or an organisation.” In the context of higher education, not only do we see this shift to demonstrating the value of certain contributions to specific groups or the institution at large, but also increasingly robust methods to measure or capture the impact for internal and external constituents.
Strategies for Communicating Impact
When it comes to the necessity of incorporating impactful language, examples often come up in career development, such as job search or interviews.
Embrace power verbs: Building on the tried and true advice on action verbs, power verbs project strengths that effectively convey an accomplishment, making it easier for your audience to imagine you doing the actual tasks or being at work. For example, using words such as “streamlined” or “revived” give additional attention to processes or outcomes.
Present results and integrate reflections: Building on principles of storytelling, leverage both data and insights to strengthen your claims. When you can, quantify your work and drill down to specific areas of impact. The metrics or numbers can help readers grasp the scope of past projects or programs, people involved, and any details relevant to operations, marketing, finances, or performances. During interviews, also share your reflections and lessons learned to provide depth to your examples. Demonstrating self-awareness of what went well and what could be improved is often a plus for hiring teams and your future colleagues.
Know Your Audience
Now that we have explored some strategies, let us look at how to adapt them to three audiences you may encounter in your professional sphere: colleagues, supervisors, and administrators.
Colleagues: Your colleagues — whether they be team members, campus collaborators, or professional contemporaries — can be your greatest champions, particularly when it comes to celebrating the day-to-day wins that may otherwise get overlooked in more strategy-focused conversations. Your meetings or conversations with them provide opportunities for debriefing and reflection. Create opportunities to talk about outcomes for your events, projects, and initiatives, and allow your colleagues to do the same.
Another key way to communicate your impact is through social media posts, particularly on platforms where you are connected to fellow practitioners in the field. Photos increase engagement on posts, so try to remember to take pictures and include them alongside key metrics in your posts. While it may feel awkward at first, doing so helps you increase awareness for your unit and build your professional brand.
Supervisors: While your colleagues provide vital daily support, your supervisor is another key person with whom you need to communicate your impact. With the category of supervisors, we mean the individual(s) to whom you directly report. Being able to communicate your impact to them is particularly important during the performance evaluation process.
When talking about work, especially when you collaborate with others, it can be easy to default to using entirely “we” statements. This framework works well when you are recounting projects to groups or amongst colleagues. It helps to simplify the narrative and keeps your explanation from being too long-winded.
However, in performance evaluations, it is important that you shift from the “we” to the “me” mentality, at least when it pertains to honestly conveying your actions and responsibilities within different projects. Focusing on what you took ownership of, and the outcomes of your actions, makes your impact more clear. With this, we do not mean ignoring the work of others. Rather, we want to encourage you to fight the urge to be overly gracious at the expense of downplaying your achievements.
Administrators: For the sake of this article, we are categorizing key leadership positions under the administrators category. Think of deans, provosts, vice presidents, and so on. They are individuals that you may not encounter on a regular basis but whom you may find yourself reporting to on a semi-annual or annual basis. People in leadership roles often operate at “30,000 feet,” meaning that given the breadth and depth of their work, they often only have the capacity to hear about high-level outcomes. The reports you create for them, therefore, need to reflect this reality.
To effectively communicate your impact, make sure to include the metrics that showcase how your work is supporting institutional strategic plans. While the day-to-day wins are important, it is important that administrators know how your program’s impact aligns with the broader success story of the unit and college or university. What metrics might you highlight? Consider promoting positive programmatic improvements, such as increases in quality and attendance, or a boost in the unit’s visibility and image. Both data points mean that you need to collect quantitative and qualitative data.
Conclusion
The language we use to describe ourselves or our work is often a reflection of how we see ourselves. In fact, there is power in self-advocacy, documentation, and concrete steps we can all take to boost our professional and personal well-being. Our confidence derives from both internal and external validations, and we can take control of how we perceive our own value by articulating our own impact.
