We evaluate leaders on short-term metrics and wonder why they make short-term decisions. Short-termism rewards what’s easy to measure over what matters. It trades the next generation for the next result, and it leaves people, culture and trust to fend for themselves.
Legacy requires a different question. It matters because it outlasts every quarterly result and every title, and it’s the one thing your people will remember about you. When trust is harder to earn and easier to lose, what your team and your customers remember about you may be the only advantage that holds.
So let me share where my own thinking about legacy started, with two leaders and a thousand scientists who shaped how I lead.
Who taught you to lead, and what did they leave out?
It’s important to understand where leadership is learned. For me, it was firstly my father.
He was tall, beautifully spoken and intelligent. I loved him dearly. I learnt easily from him, to read, to think, to speak, to feel good about myself. I am not sure that was true for my brothers. He was harder on the boys in a way he never was with me. As an adult, I came to understand why. It was easy for him to love and recognise someone who did life the same way he did. His insight with his sons was more limited. I saw the cost of that to them, in different ways.
The second was from the managing director of a large global publishing business. I started as his EA. Under his fearsome intellect and his patience, I learnt to edit, to manage finances, to prepare board papers and, curiously, to spell, something sixteen years of schooling had failed to teach me. He was relentlessly kind and appallingly untidy, and he would pause any conversation to chase an idea that had nothing to do with what we were meant to be doing.
I became, in my own leadership, many of the things I loved about these two people. I’m a good storyteller. I’m curious about most things. I try, always, to be kind and inclusive.
What I didn’t learn from them, I learnt, over ten years, from close to a thousand women with a STEMM background. I learnt the difference between generalisations and facts, between conceptual and linear thinking, between theatre and pragmatism, between listening and talking.
The leaders who shape us give us gifts. They also leave gaps, shaped exactly like the things they couldn’t see in themselves.
Insight: The leaders who shaped you also shaped what you never learnt.
What are you doing with the power you have?
There’s an old story that has stayed with me on this question.
Once upon a time there was a prince. He heard the sky was going to fall, that the end was upon him and his people. He felt powerless to stop it. At dusk he went to the square and told his people there was nothing he could do, then turned back to the palace.
At dawn he saddled his horse and rode into the desert to die.
Far out among the dunes, he came across a small lark lying on its back, feet pointed at the sky. “Little bird,” he said, “haven’t you heard? The sky is falling. What on earth are you doing?” The lark glanced at him, then went back to staring at the sky. “One does what one can,” it said.
The prince had every advantage, and he did nothing. The lark had none, and it did everything it could.
When I think about legacy, I first think of the visible things, what I built, what I achieved. Those things are easy to point to, and they pass just as easily.
The legacy that actually matters is quieter: the beliefs and behaviours I’ve carried into every room, and what they’ve meant for the people who shared the journey with me.
That kind of legacy is hard to see and easy to overlook. It is also the only kind that lasts.
If you never stop to reflect on your leadership, tomorrow’s version of you will look a lot like yesterday’s. You might know more. You might have more scars and more stories. But the person applying that knowledge, with the same beliefs and the same instincts, is unchanged.
Insight: Without reflection, tomorrow’s you is just yesterday’s you with more experience.
Is the past your teacher, or your dictator?
So, ask yourself these harder questions.
- What am I afraid of, defensive about, avoidant of? What won’t I say to my manager, my partner, my daughter, and what won’t they say to me?
- Do I think of myself as a leader, and have I got the balance right between managing and leading?
- Is my team, or my organisation, heading somewhere I helped shape, or am I just executing someone else’s direction?
- Is the past a teacher, or is it running my future?
Don’t just sit with the answers. Pick one and say it out loud to someone who matters, your co-founder, your partner, your team. Legacy isn’t built in the reflecting. It’s built in what you do the next day, differently, because of what you found.
Insight: Legacy is made in how you show up daily, not in what you build.
I anticipate learning until I can no longer breathe.
