Living a Leadership Legacy

Developing outstanding leaders is fundamental to my company's success. Not only because strong leaders have a positive, profound, and measurable influence on making the company a great place to work, but more importantly strong leaders inspire commitment through demonstration of leadership in action.

When I was little my mom recounted a conversation between a mighty oak tree and an acorn. The acorn was feeling undervalued and insignificant. The mighty oak urged the acorn to be patient, because with the right conditions the acorn would evolve into a mighty oak and be part of the larger ecosystem contributing shade, and housing and even food for forest inhabitants. And, when at last the oak was fully mature it would produce acorns. Acorns that would possess a spark of life to be passed on from one tree generation to the next. Even at a young age, my mom was promoting a life focused on living, not just leaving, an authentic leadership legacy.

How do you live a leadership legacy? Kouzes and Posner, authors of Leadership Challenge surface five practices of exemplary leadershipTM foundational for living a leadership legacy:
1. Modeling the Way— Setting an example through your day to day actions.
2. Inspiring a Shared Vision—Passionately believing you can make a difference.
3. Challenging the Process—Searching for opportunities to change the status quo.
4. Enabling Others to Act—Creating an environment of mutual respect where trust, authenticity and dignity are the most important tenets.
5. Encouraging the Heart—Keeping determination alive by rewarding peers for their efforts and celebrating accomplishments even the small ones.

Taking it further, living a leadership legacy is about daily, genuine servitude. It is about helping those who choose to work with you take root, find their path, discover their own unique gift and then celebrating it. In essence, that is the leadership challenge. Whether or not you leave a legacy depends on if you have succeeded at becoming and living life as an extraordinary leader.

To help leaders develop their full potential and live their leadership legacy, my company is committed to using Extraordinary Leader (Zenger Folkman) as their leadership framework. We can see pieces of this in our core competencies as well as our Managing through Premier Performance model.

I encourage you to read both Extraordinary Leader and Leadership Challenge as the next steps on your leadership journey and ask you to answer to yourself these two questions: If you were measured by your actions today, what leadership legacy are you living? What leadership legacy will you leave?
- Stacy 

REFERENCES

Leadership Challenge, Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, http://www.leadershipchallenge.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-131053.html

Extraordinary Leader, Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman, http://extraordinaryleader.net/extraordinary-leader-book.html