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Your Leadership Legacy: Why Looking Toward the Future Will Make You a Better Leader Today

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Regardless of what you do as a leader, you *will* leave a legacy behind. Rather than wait until there's not much left you can do about it, Robert M. Galford and Regina Fazio Maruca make the case for managing your legacy now in the book Your Leadership Legacy: Why Looking Toward the Future Will Make You a Better Leader Today.

Contents:
Part 1 - Making Leadership Last: Building a Legacy
Part 2 - Impact and Duration: What Kind of Impact Are You Having?; What Role Are You Playing?; Your Intentional Legacy; Is Your Legacy Designed To Last?; Are You Doing the Right Thing?
Part 3 - Judgment: The Need for Judgment; Legacies and the Responsibilities of Leadership
Notes; Index; About the Authors

In many ways, this is reminiscent of Stephen Covey's "Begin With The End In Mind". You start out thinking about how you would like to be perceived and remembered, and then start taking actions to make that happen. The authors define "legacy" as how others approach work and life as a result of having worked for you. They also advocate for looking at "legacy thinking" early on in your career, so that your goals can shape your day-to-day interactions with those you lead. Through a series of exercises, they walk you through assessing your current influence on those around you, identifying the type of role you play in the organization (as well as how that will affect your legacy), and then what steps you need to put in place to ensure that you are creating the legacy you intended. It's not necessarily a comfortable process, as the odds are that you'll have to acknowledge that there are aspects of your leadership style that may be effective to the organization but devastating to those around you. But ultimately, you'll leave some sort of personal signature on your charges. You might as well make sure it's one you'd *want* to be remembered for.

While written specifically for leaders, it's not hard to extrapolate the principles to your personal life. Think of your role as a leader of your family or of some organization where you volunteer your time and efforts. These areas also affect your legacy, and in many ways it's a legacy that's more personal and important than a corporate one. Even if you choose not to follow through all the exercises put forth here (and I recommend you do), just the thought of actively managing how others will remember you will start to move you down a road that not many travel in time to have much of an impact...

The authors of "Your Leadership Legacy", Robert Galford and Regina Fazio Maruca asked for my thoughts on the type of leadership legacy I want to leave.

I read their book and was thoroughly impressed. Although I had not given a lot of thought to the approach, I am completely sold on it. The thesis of the book is to think about what legacy you want to leave and work backwards. This is the best way to have the greatest impact.

I think I will find this approach particularly worthwhile to keep me working on the big picture as opposed to getting too much into the little things.

The book talks about legacy thinking. In their words, legacy thinking helps you recognize when you are wasting time at a given spot. Legacy thinking helps you put planning in prospective.

This book is very fast and easy to read with a tremendously powerful message. I would strongly recommend this for any leader.

I plan to use this legacy thinking in my decision making.

"Your Leadership Legacy" serves as an excellent springboard for an issue that too many leaders leave unaddressed. While they could have simply reminded us that looking toward the future is a good idea for leaders, the authors provide a fantastic framework and practical discussions for crafting -- and actually achieving -- professional results.

I found this short and easy to read book to be extremely useful. Not having specifically considered my own leadership legacy to date, having read this book helped me to recognize that integration of my personal values into my business life will affect not only how people think of me, but whether and how my work will be considered in the future. I really enjoyed this book and particularly liked not only the personal narrative by the "leaders", but also the follow-up from his or her associates commenting on, and clearly illustrating, that person's leadership legacy. Will I be thought of as a fair and reasonable person? Or as a perpetual grump who never helped anyone else? And who wants to follow in the footstops of the latter? After reading "Your Leadership Legacy", now I'm reflecting on these things!

I thought this was a great little book. Easy to read, practical advice. There were a number of things I can use over and over. Their discussion of legacy roles was really interesting and thought provoking. I knew people in just about every category. Reading this carefully could be very useful and make a big difference in a manager or leader's life. This book is beautifully packaged and would be a thoughtful gift for anyone in business.

What kind of legacy are you leaving behind? We all think about that from time to time. Your Leadership Legacy is a book that can help you not only think it through but plan for success. This book is primarily focused on your business legacy but the framework can be applied to your family and community legacy as well.

The first step is to acknowledge that you probably haven't given much thought to your legacy but that you want to do so starting now. The authors lead you through the process of drafting your desired legacy statement and how to seek feedback on it. This latter piece is critical and probably one of the hardest things to do; it's like baring your soul, so be sure you pick the right person/people to give you an honest assessment.

The authors list six different types of leadership roles. Thinking of myself and others that I've worked with over the years, I'd say it's pretty hard to shoehorn someone into just one of these roles. That said, most people probably lean more towards one even if they have tendencies towards two or more.

This isn't one of those books you can just read, put on a shelf and forget about. If you're truly serious about creating a lasting legacy you'll need to refer to this book every so often in the years ahead; it's a good way to check in on your progress and make any necessary adjustments.

Since this book is a potential long-term resource, I'd like to see the authors enhance the companion website. They have the opportunity to put tools, checklists and other items up there to serve as a living online resource center for all their readers. More importantly, it would be great if they'd set up space to host legacy framework documents and worksheets for their readers. That way the information would all be in one (online) location, so you wouldn't have to worry about creating a folder or storing it locally; this approach would be very attractive since the whole process is so long-term and things could easily be misplaced or forgotten about.

This book definitely has a lot to offer, but you need to be committed to the long-term process to get the most out of it.

--"I really liked this book. The authors are exactly right in putting together the short-term and the long-term. It was very readable, without the usual "how-to" preaching that pervades leadership books. It made me think hard about my own career and career goals, and I can easily think of about a hundred colleagues who could benefit from this."

This short book offers a core recommendation: think about your legacy long before your retirement. Plan it and begin to create it now. Many executives do not begin to consider their legacies until their working lives are nearly done. This wastes a great opportunity. By thinking ahead and planning for the sort of legacy you would like to leave, you can make it much more probable that the legacy you actually do leave will match your aspirations. Legacies do not happen accidentally. They are the products of years of effort. We recommend this framework for considering your legacy. Authors Robert M. Galford and Regina Fazio Maruca include a structured series of action steps to help you get started on the path of legacy creation, and they provide numerous entertaining and illustrative anecdotes to help point the way. They don't dwell on asking if a manager who is preoccupied with legacy creation is hampered in making risky decisions, and they don't examine the mini-fad in legacy thinking. However, they do clearly tell you how to look forward, act with deliberation, and pick yourself up and start again if one legacy gets destroyed and you must build another.

Thinking about the legacy you're going to leave behind is a lot like the other things we tend to put off such as leaving a will or expressing our ideas about our own funeral.

These latter things are a great help to those left behind. The idea of a working legacy is another matter. Developing and keeping in mind a legacy that you'd like to leave behind at work can well help you in making the day to day decisions. By knowing where you want to go, you can keep your decisions consistent, you can evaluate decisions based on some clear understanding of how that decision will effect the big picture rather than just the decision of the moment.

You would expect a book with this kind of title to be aimed at the CEO level, or perhaps just below. And to an extent it is, but it is also applicable to 'first leaders' who can begin to use these techniques immediately. After all, the real job of the first leader is to develop his/her leadership skills so they can move on to eventually reach the CEO position.

Your Leadership Legacy should be a wake-up call for every leader - new and experienced. Most leaders pay little - if any - attention to the legacy they are building and leaving in the organizations in which they work. This book should cause them to think twice about their legacy.

Presented in an easy-to-read, example-filled, practical format, Your Leadership Legacy will guide you though the critical components of understanding your unintended leadership impact, writing your legacy statement, putting the statement through the acid test, and putting it into action.

This book provides every leader with the knowledge he or she needs to create a positive, enduring legacy - starting immediately. The sooner you read it, the better!