The key to effective leadership is the ability to develop personal impact. Growing your impact and influence requires an understanding of how to build your own personal brand while developing influencing skills that will be effective across a range of stakeholders. This means taking responsibility for your behaviour and actions. 

If we wanted to create a checklist for improving personal impact and influence, we might start with:

• Increasing your own self-awareness and the awareness of others
• Understanding how you impact and can flex your interpersonal style
• Managing your personal emotions and states
• Developing action plans for effective outcomes
• Using strategic influencing tools
• Managing the organisation within which you influence.

There are many management books about how to do this. You will find a couple of them in the list of references at the end of this module. In this section, however, we’re going to focus on a couple of tools you might think about using in situations when you need to make an impact, to get someone else to agree with your course of action, say, or to take responsibility for delivering something that can help you work more effectively.