Paid Subscribers Only: How executives can help achieve positive change and greater impact

Opportunities to improve effectiveness are endless, but it’s easy to deprioritise them—especially when growth through hiring seems simpler or change feels too complex.

Photo by Fatemeh Eghbalpour on Unsplash

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Originally posted on the HYPR website by Daniel Walters, March 5 2025

There are always more opportunities to improve the effectiveness of an organisation. You are never done with this work. It's easy to get too busy or feel the change involved with some of these opportunities is too complicated, and when there’s an opportunity to grow through hiring, some of these may stay on the back burner.

If that option is limited or cannot be used sparingly, you must look elsewhere for a more productive capacity. This will lead you to examine where you can improve within your existing workforce.

From our survey of opportunities in my previous post on amplifying software engineering impact, we can summarise the following strategies we identified, which can be applied to help us reduce wasted effort and increase our impact:

• See inflight work through to completion

• Identify what to subtract

• Tackle the riskiest assumptions first

• Identify organisational constraints differently

• Establish new ways to determine progress

• Better time and meeting management

• Improve decision-making throughout the organisation

• Identify and invest in learning opportunities

• Systematise bringing in new organisational changes

• Prioritise problems the organisation is experiencing

Let’s explore how each can help us and what might be involved in bringing this change to reality.