Few terms evoke more vigorous debate, visceral reaction and idolatry than Leadership.
Look no further than Amazon’s 60,000 titles on the topic to get some sense of just how much debate.
Not surprisingly the last year has increased our collective interest in the Leadership topic. From political, business, community or social, we are genetically wired to seek out “leaders” to, errrhmm, lead us. Particularly during turbulent times.
People who can make sense of the environment. People who can articulate a clear perspective. People who seem to have some plan, even a half-baked one, about what to do next. People who tell us what we could/should/must do and remove that burden of responsibility from our own shoulders.
Not wanting to evoke the ire of 60,000 authors, and the 60,000 soon-to-publish authors waiting in the wings, I’ve some very binary perspectives on this topic.
Leaders are never a designation or title. Leaders can, and often do, appear from some of the most unlikely places and backgrounds.
Leaders express a grand objective that’s so powerfully compelling that others willingly step up to contribute their own experience, passion and creativity to bring that objective to life. That’s the critical “followers” part.
Leaders have a tangible impact on us. They change something, improve something, create something, overthrow something, end something.
But recently I’ve been thinking a lot about Leadership and the idea of Legacy - and whether Legacy might not be the most critical Leadership attribute of all. A growing sense that the truest Leaders have a legacy. It doesn’t need to be an earth-shattering “erect a statue in the park” one, but there’s definitely memories and signs of their passage long after they’ve left the building.
And what those memories and signs they leave behind are the truest definition of whether they’re actually great leaders.
You can thank Twitter, or the Twitter algorithms, for this latest round of introspection or navel-gazing because it served up two stories this week that brought Leadership Legacy into sharp focus for me.
In one case, a serial entrepreneur who has been derided as a socialist for deciding that no-one at his organization should earn less than US$70,000 a year. That meant taking a significant personal pay-cut (up to 90% by some calculations) to ensure this could happen. Interestingly when he made this decision in 2015, media pundits were quick to say his company was destined to become a business school case study of how to destroy a thriving company. Since then, company revenues have tripled, staff headcount has increased by 20%, employee household debt has plummeted, home ownership by employees has grown 10X and, by all accounts, job applications are through the roof.
The other case is also a serial entrepreneur that has created numerous innovative businesses. When he started, he was also derided for his idea that selling books on the internet was an astute business direction. Since then, his business has grown to include a global logistics leviathan, the server infrastructure running many of the most critical businesses in the world including the US Department of Defense (and the CIA by some unconfirmed accounts), a growing streaming media enterprise and, oh, 48.5 million books on that website that started it all. Along the way he’s become the richest man in history and, over the last 12 months, added US$70 billion to his net worth.
Before you drown me out in cries of false equivalencies, I’ll readily admit this is not an apples-to-apples comparison.
One runs a proudly private company. The other runs a very public one. A public company whose shares jumped 30% from the start of 2020 thus putting significant wealth into the pockets of pension plans, retirement dreams and personal portfolios globally.
One employs 200 people in the US only. The other has over 1 million worldwide including 400,000 added in 2020 to meet the increased demand for their business.
One made a deliberate decision to focus their leadership on what they considered a fair, equitable, living wage. The other made similar deliberate leadership decisions including a brief increase in hourly wages at the start of the pandemic before suspending that program, entered into an open Twitter spat with elected officials about wage inequity and has, by several accounts, vigorously championed against employee union formation inside the very warehouses that have filled much of his coffers (and, I’ll readily admit, my recycling bin)
I wouldn’t even raise the Legacy term if it weren’t for the fact that, in their most recent communications, the one leader committed the organization to becoming “Earth’s Best Employer” and “Earth’s Safest Place to Work”
Ironic to me was that this commitment was articulated for the first time in the 26 years since the company was founded. And was their last piece of communication as CEO before handing over the reins of day-to-day leadership.
So, does Leadership Legacy really matter?
Before you answer, let me share a leadership legacy moment from an organization I once worked with.
So, does legacy matter?
If the organization you lead continues to grow, continues to beat analyst expectations, continues to attract, amaze and entice customers, continues to add employee headcount, continues to innovate and your share price looks like a classic hockey stick, does it really matter how you treat those who’ve directly contributed to those achievements?
If the organization you lead continues to deliver record earnings and stellar customer NPS does it really matter if your employee attrition is high and your employee’s cultural commitment is in free fall?
If the organization you lead continues to be breathlessly covered by the media using terms like “innovative”, “disruptive” and “world class” does it really matter that there are an equal number of articles using terms like “hazardous” “inequality” and “deplorable”?
Josef Stalin, a Russian leader many consider great, once quipped “If you want to make an omelette, sometimes you have to break a few eggs.”**
I guess, when all is said and done, it simply comes down to what we, as leaders, want to be remembered for.
What will be the signs and memories we leave of our passage through the organizations we work inside. And among the people we work beside.
Have you considered what your Leadership Legacy will be?
** - this saying is officially attributed to Frenchman François de Charette in 1700 who said “ne saurait faire d’omelette sans casser des œufs”. Source: theidioms.com