Your Professional Legacy

Legacy: something transmitted by or received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past

“Legacy.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/legacy. Accessed 13 Oct. 2024.

Legacy usually means the things we leave to others when we die. What’s in the will? Who gets the car?  I believe that it’s much more and plays a part in how we approach our work. Our legacy doesn’t have to be about things. It can also be about impact. Have you ever wondered what your workplace legacy will be like once you’ve left? We often think of what we’ll leave family and friends but rarely think about what we’ll leave the people at work. Start thinking about it today, especially if you’re a new manager. Why? Because everything you do and say impacts someone in some way and often in ways that aren’t obvious to you. You build your reputation daily with your team, organization, or industry, but when you leave, you leave your legacy. How do you want to be remembered?

Types of Legacies

Think back to your favorite boss. What did they do or say that you still carry with you in your current workplace? Now think back to the last person who cut you off in traffic. Can you still feel the anger or fear that they might have caused an accident? Did it change the way you drive when you approach that spot in the road? Both of these memories, feelings, and actions represent legacies left to you by those who came before you. They are not material but they do or did impact you. The thing is, they can be direct (your boss) or indirect (the bad driver). They can also be long-lasting or instantaneous. As managers and leaders, we must keep this in mind. What we do, what we say, and how we act impact others whether we interact with them for years or seconds.

Direct Legacy

Unless we live alone in a cave, we interact with other people. Either by choice or by necessity. Regardless of how they come into our lives, how we treat them leaves them with some sense of who we are and how it affects them. Think about it. How you show up affects the actions and attitudes of your team. Are you the type of manager that encourages them to be creative or do you micromanage the hell out of them because you don’t trust them to be able to do the job better than you?

How does working with you day in and day out impact their job performance? Does it affect how they react to situations outside of the workplace? It does. I once had a boss who negatively impacted the team to the point that they had filed more than thirty grievances against her. One of the complaints? She never said, “Good morning.” While that may seem like a trivial complaint, it not only affected her relationship with the team, it affected their attitudes and dealings with customers and the overall reputation of the team suffered.

Indirect Legacy

These are the people who exist on the fringes of our world. We often forget about them because they are the ancillary people who keep the wheels turning in the background. It is important to remember that we impact them too. When was the last time you said “thank you” to the person who cleans your building or delivers your packages? What about the customer service person you called to repair something? Your interactions with these people leave an impact. If you come in and are in a foul mood, do you ignore them and act like they don’t exist? Are they just “the help” and not part of the team? Take a moment and think about how their job affects your job. What is the legacy they leave to you?

Why it Matters

“When people show you who they are, believe them,” said the great poet and author Maya Angelou. The advice can help us plan the legacy we want to leave. We create wills to leave our material possessions, so why not develop a plan for impacting others before we leave? What do we want them to remember? Our emotional intelligence?  Our ability to think calmly and lead with confidence? What about the managerial courage to do the right thing for our people? If not, our legacy might be one of laziness, cowardice, and incompetence. But If we take the time to increase our self-awareness, use the tools, and apply the skills we’ve not only learned but taught,  we will leave a legacy of that person who encouraged others to be the best at what they do. This is the art and skill of management and leadership.

Image by Thomas from Pixabay

Shifting  Your Focus Affects Your Leadership

Individual contributors get promoted for different reasons. It’s often a reward for strong individual performance. For others, it’s because they have the potential to help the company meet its goals.  Being promoted is good for the individual but the company has to benefit also. The benefit improves things for the bottom line and myriad stakeholders. When the company succeeds, employees have jobs, customers have products and services and stockholders have income. To be successful, you have to direct your focus in two directions, first inward and then outward – in that order.

Looking Inward

In the beginning, you concentrate not so much on getting things right but on not getting them wrong. It’s normal to want to have all the answers right from the start because you want to be liked and respected, especially by the new team. You don’t want to screw up because the boss has placed their trust in you and you want to look like you know what you’re doing. After all, first impressions mean a lot so you have to work on yourself before you can take care of your team.

Inward focus means learning the hard skills that drive the company  How do you schedule the team, assign the work, and review their progress? It means writing reviews and knowing what meetings to attend. It’s understanding what you have to do day in and day out to get the work done and it takes all your effort and concentration to get it right. The problem is it takes time to develop the knowledge and the skills. At first, you don’t even know what you’re supposed to do beyond assigning work and approving time off. You have to focus on yourself because your success depends on it. Once you get comfortable in the role, it’s time to shift outward and when you do, the job starts to morph into the craft.

Shifting Focus

Your job starts with a learning curve but changes as you get the hang of the routine stuff. Now you can start to think more about what the team needs. This means finding out which team member needs close supervision, which members can be left alone, and to what degree. More importantly, it means finding out why. Do you know if Jake can’t or won’t do his job? It makes a difference in how you handle his training and his assignments. Once you know what he needs and how you can help him, everyone benefits. Jake, the team, you, the company, and the stakeholders reap the rewards. The road to successful leadership requires seeing the big picture and this is where it begins.

So How Do You Do It?

Changing your focus is a matter of developing skills, hard and soft. I’ll be honest, many managers often think soft skills mean handholding and pop psychology sessions with the team. That’s not what I mean at all. Developing your teams’ hard skills will get them through the workday. Developing their soft skills will help them, and you, sleep at night. Here are a few examples:

Hard Skills:

• Project Management
• Presentations
• Marketing
• Accounting

Soft Skills

• Emotional Intelligence
• Communication skills
  • Verbal
  • Nonverbal
• Critical Thinking
• Conflict Resolution
• Problem-Solving

Hopefully, you see how the skills in one group can affect performance in the other. A lack of critical thinking skills can torpedo a marketing campaign and botching the accounting could affect a team member’s problem-solving abilities. As the manager, your job is to develop each team member’s ability in both groups and you can’t do that if your focus is on yourself. The team is your direct responsibility and by focusing more on their success, you will ensure yours.

Conclusion

Working your way up the ladder means constantly shifting your focus to see the big picture. Always start with yourself. Discover where you are, where you want to go, and how you plan to get there. This involves being a lifelong learner, whether it’s what the job entails or developing soft skills that grow your outlook.  In time you’ll start to see the role others play in your worldview and how your actions impact them. It’s all about being aware and willing to lead the way.

Commitment: Your SuperPower

Workplace Dedication

Commitment is one of the most underutilized superpowers managers have at their disposal. It means we dedicate ourselves to something.  When was the last time you were wholly committed to something? Was it your favorite sports team? How about supporting someone you care about in pursuing their passion?  Parents make huge sacrifices when their kids play on a sports team. They spend countless hours driving to practices, tournaments, and games. They do it because they are committed to their kid’s success and happiness.

As a manager, ask yourself; “How committed am I to my job?” I’m not talking about drinking the Kool-Aid kind of dedication. I am talking about the amount of thought you put into the question.  We are very committed in the beginning. We get the job and think that the company is the greatest thing since sliced bread “Wow! I get health benefits and a 401K, not to mention Paid Time Off (PTO). I will do everything I can to support this company!” A month later, we’re knee-deep in the details and often forget about supporting the company, we just want to get the work done. We still want to do a good job but the reality is that dedication is no longer the top priority. That’s when it’s time to consciously examine the different levels of commitment and how we can use them to energize ourselves and our teams.

Levels of Commitment

Different relationships require different levels of commitment and those levels require different amounts of energy. Your team requires a deeper level of obligation and support than your peers. Your job is to figure out who needs what, including your responsibility to yourself.

The Organization

Organizations have mission statements and visions. The minute we’re hired, we are asked to support them. The mission asks us to dedicate time and effort to helping the company fulfill its mission. If we don’t understand or can’t explain it, we’re probably not as committed as we’d like to think. That means it’s time to go back and review to understand. Does the company mission align with your values and needs? If it does, great but if it doesn’t you need to find out why and what you can do about it.

Your Peers and Colleagues

Are the people you work with and report to all on the same page? Do their actions support the organization’s mission as you understand it? If not, think about how you can influence their commitment. One way is to simply make it a natural part of the conversation. It’s normal to ask how projects, resources, and other aspects of the business tie into the mission or vision. Not only will you get people thinking about it, but you’ll also display the critical thinking skills that demonstrate strong leadership

Your Team

If you manage a team, you must demonstrate your dedication to them. Become the servant leader and let them know you care about them as a group and also as individuals. Managers get work done through people. Without their effort, you won’t succeed and that means that makes them your number 2  priority. The more dedicated you are to them, the more dedicated they are to you and by extension to the organization. Take the time to mentor them and find out what goes on in their world. Work on improving your communication and coaching skills so that they know what you expect of them and how important they are to fulfilling the mission.

Yourself

Make your commitment to yourself the number one priority.  Unleash your superpower by increasing your self-awareness. Take a hard look at why you think the way you do. How do your thoughts about yourself and others affect your actions, decisions, and how others see you? Looking inward is usually the beginning of change.

Think back to that first day when you vowed to support the company because of what it would do for you. Turn the question around and ask what you can do for it. Does it still hold true or have things changed? How does the company’s support for you affect your life outside of work? When we talk about work-life balance, we’re asking what we can do to keep our commitments to everyone and everything we do. The person we are when we begin our career is not who we are mid-career. As we mature, things change. We promote up, we start families, and we begin to think more about giving than taking. These changes require us to take a hard look at what motivates and inspires us because as our lives change so do our commitments.