True leadership: Living a ‘legacy life’ should be understood to be a thoughtful journey of touching other lives. – 123rf.com
LEADERS are often asked about their legacies.
How one views it depends on how one has learnt to address it.
The idea of legacy stems from the human desire to be remembered for one’s accomplishments and to ensure one’s descendants or the organisations one founded can survive and sustain themselves.
But legacy is more than just about being remembered for one’s accomplishments, especially material aggrandisements.
Every one of us is given the unique opportunity to manage the most important project in our lives, that is, learning how to live and use our lives.
In this regard, to find out who we are, we have to address these enduring questions: Who am I? Who should I become? How do I become?
These are meta issues in that we frame our search for probable answers around narratives on such questions.
In a way, a “legacy leader” is a keeper of the future. This means the future is what we do now and regretting the past is thus pointless.
Legacy building is about behaviourial influences and values sharing.
The leadership legacy for business and personal development is about how to demonstrate and build a culture of exceptional and symbolic behaviour.
In whatever we do, we must ensure that it is worthy of our talents and worthwhile in terms of our time investment.
The proper measure of a successful business and life is the return on time used. This is because time is the scarcest resource and is essentially our lives.
Using our lives to build a business or for any worthwhile activity must thus be enduring in impact and meaningful. This is the relevant way to look at leadership legacy.
The leadership legacy at the corporate level is to create a sustainable culture that powers strategic differentiation by: successfully challenging the status quo; exploiting discontinuities smartly; leveraging core competencies and strategic resources; understanding unarticulated needs; and liberating the mind by building the cognitive freedom to lead.
We can frame the personal leadership legacy in the context of VOW, which stands for values, opportunities and wealth.
A business must be defined by noble ends which are achieved by noble means. Education is such an example.
The mission of HELP University that I founded 36 years ago is to help people succeed in life and to live a life of significance through education.
The five values we uphold are:1. Pride of achievement: this is about self-motivation for personal development. It is not about hubris, but clear intentional accomplishments.
2. Sharing success: this is the essence of leadership legacy. Sharing the most precious resource – time – to enable others to succeed is also legacy building.
3. The courage to be: courage is a prerequisite for stepping into the unknown. It is required for transformation and confronting the challenges to prepare for the future. We need courage to choose our self-identity and reinvent ourselves in the search for meaning.
4. To be compassionate: this is a great virtue in how we share our legacy. It is an exemplary act and is more than being empathetic to others; it means active acting to help and serve when the occasion demands it. To be compassionate is to be humane.
5. To be significant: as time is limited and life is short, all decisions and acts must be consequential. This means whatever we do must have enduring meaning, long-lasting and impactful to society.
The above are all other-centred values. They reflect our fundamental beliefs and conviction of using education to enable others to be successful.
O in VOW stands for opportunity. An other-centred approach to doing business creates opportunities for others to flourish and achieve their personal fulfilments.
A true entrepreneurial leader is one who looks for problems to be solved as opportunities.
W in VOW is the creation of wealth. In Chinese, the word for wealth is “chai”. It means prosperity, talents and knowledge. So, wealth is more meaningful if knowledge-wisdom is part of it, and not just mundane material wealth.
No business should be initiated without defining its VOW which, in essence, is about living – and not just leaving – a legacy.
From the above, we can conclude that leadership legacy is about how we create meaningful moments and how we live our lives to impact others beneficially.
Thus, it makes sense to mentor young children and students to learn this as early as possible.
Most of us usually discuss our legacies when we are at a later stage in our lives and it is invariably about what material possessions we leave behind.
Living a “legacy life” should thus be understood to be a thoughtful journey of touching other lives. This is more meaningful than just leaving a legacy of material things at the end of one’s life.
It is in the above context that we must mentor our young children and students to start thinking and practising leadership legacy.Prof Datuk Dr Paul Chan is the co-founder, vice-chancellor and president of HELP University (Malaysia). The views expressed here are the writer’s own.
