How To Leave A Legacy
Executives get their adrenalin flowing with the challenge of the job. But, sometimes in the heat of juggling the hiring, re-organizations, results monitoring and sales they lose sight of what success will mean over time.
No executive, particularly in a public company, can forget that missing one quarter puts a blemish on his or her head and that missing multiple quarters may spell a career change. However, looking back several years at your tenure with an organization people don’t focus on the quarterly results but rather they see the major marks you have made on the business or on the people in the business.
I recall talking to an about-to-retire executive. He said that he believed that when he had worked his last day, after 25 years, that no one would really remember the deals he closed, the projects he brought in on time and on budget, the strategic plans he crafted and executed. He believed that his mark wasn’t on the business so much as the people he worked with. The advice, coaching and guidance he had been able to proffer to peers, subordinates, bosses and customers. For this executive his mark was helping others realize their potential.
Think through the next few years with your organization. If you really leave your mark, what is it that you are going to accomplish?
What are you going to leave as your legacy?
On a personal note, most people die with their song unsung. Then again, many people don’t even know their own song.
When all is said and done, what would you like your life to have meant, your legacy to be? Although it may seem morbid, I know people who have written their own obituary. In it they include all the attributes and accomplishments they would like to have detailed in their lives … and then, they go out and make it real.
Sometimes when I open the local paper to the obituaries and read about the lives of others, I’m taken with the thought that each person leaves a legacy of some sort; but I wonder if they really thought about it; if they consciously tried to create a meaningful legacy. Certainly many did, those are the ones whose obits run many inches of column space in the paper.
What this legacy is can be different for all of us. It may relate to our children, our family or the organizations we have had a part in building. Perhaps it’s books we have written, or people we have influenced or environments we have saved. We would all like to leave this world knowing we gave back more than we took over our lifetime.
Today, executives often find that encouraging their staff to sponsor a community cause has a positive impact on team morale. Think of serving food in a homeless center at Thanksgiving, working at a food bank or leading a team to clean up a portion of a highway. Shared activities like these seem to create a higher morale impact than company paid dinners and events.
What could you dream of doing with the rest of your life to ensure that you have made your mark, you have left a meaningful legacy?
People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.
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image courtesy of jimg944
