Hi, Scott Munden here from Huntleigh Technology Group.
Welcome to this segment of our leadership series.
The topic for today is legacy leadership. And I chose that topic for a couple of reasons.
One is around the end of the year, I typically like to reflect on what we’ve accomplished this year and look forward into next year, what we might want to achieve. But I also like to use it as a time to make sure I’m keeping perspective on things. And for me, that’s what legacy leadership is all about. I’m sure we can all draw from our past and point out specific individuals as leaders that have had an impact on us, that have helped shaped our style, shaped our lives, impacted us in a lot of different ways.
But legacy leadership is about whether we pass that on or not, not just to the next generation directly reporting to us, but subsequent generations and what the impact is. And that’s not always visible. There’s no KPI that you’re going to point to. There’s no metric that you’re going to see that measures that impact directly anyway.
I had a really good example of that recently, and I thought I would share because it really embodies what legacy leadership is all about.
In our community, within a specific industry, they give out an annual award for persons that embody or illustrate what it means to be in that industry. And they do that by depicting their journey within the industry. And this particular leader had actually won that award.
And whether inherently or by choice, they made it their mission to pass that along to the people that reported to them and to continue process as part of their overall management style. And sure enough, one of their bright stars a few years later also was able to win that award.
And then just this year, that next generation, a third individual under the tutelage of this leader also won the award. The leader wasn’t able to attend the actual award ceremony. But the second recipient was actually there. And after the award ceremony, they were having a discussion. And the entire discussion was about the original leader and the impact that that leader had had on them, both personally and professionally, and the things that they had instilled in them. And both of them mentioning that they felt compelled also to pass that along. For me, that was exactly, precisely what legacy leadership is all about.
We don’t always have the opportunity to see the impact that we have, and we certainly don’t have the opportunity to see what that looks like years or decades later, but it is out there.
Today, we’re celebrating our legacy leaders. We need you. You’re important and to keep a perspective on it because in the day-to-day battle, the day-to-day grind of things, sometimes you wonder if you’re really having an impact. And I’m here to assure you that you do. So please keep up the good work. We’re going to run a couple of webinars during the first and second quarter of 2024 around our leadership series.
And this will certainly be a topic within there. So we encourage you to stay tuned for that. Our blog, and our articles are all posted LinkedIn and on our blog. So we encourage you to take advantage of that as well. We hope you have a safe and happy holidays. Thank you very much.