Legacy Together is an innovative new management initiative, but what exactly is ‘legacy’, and what could be the business benefits of understanding it better? Companies including Accenture, Barclays, BP, Diageo, Ernst & Young, Lloyds TSB, Pepsico and Swiss Re went along to find out.
Legacy as a business perspective
You have to start with what’s in it for the business, and three no-brainer commercial reasons would be: maximising staff retention and motivation; enhancing your brand; and growing leaders who know how to think strategically. People often expect me to talk about sustainability, social responsibility and the ‘triple bottom line’ – commercial, environmental and social achievement. That’s fine, but if a legacy-driven approach doesn’t deliver tangible business benefits, none of these things will happen anyway. First let’s clarify what we mean by ‘legacy’.
It’s impossible to not influence other people – for good or for ill. Everything we do, every day of our lives, impacts on others. So the question is “what impact are you having?” We each leave a legacy every day of our life, and any leader’s legacy is a combination of their influence and their actions. Just because your name isn’t Warren Buffet doesn’t mean you won’t leave a legacy. In this sense, you can’t not leave a legacy. But as a leader, is your legacy what you would want it to be? How did you contribute to it today?
Legacy as a practical business benefit
Let’s take the three I referred to at the start one at a time.
Maximising staff retention and motivation: To engage – and hold onto – the best and the brightest of your people you need to address what matters to them. Simply throwing money at them is not enough. There’s a lot of talk about winning hearts and minds, but I don’t see too many organisations who really know how to do this. But focussing on legacy is about factoring in what matters in a way that automatically engages hearts and minds. We know particularly that those in their twenties – your next generation of leaders – expect an organisation to live up to their own social values. They shop around for organisations that can deliver on this too. If you can’t, believe me, they will leave when they find somewhere else that can.
Enhancing the brand: Brands are increasingly about values. At Legacy Together we’re currently working with the Jamie Oliver-inspired social enterprise Fifteen Cornwall. This incredibly successful social enterprise – and brand – is a powerful demonstration of the legacy–driven business ethic in action, having turned a healthy profit since its inception while performing a valuable social function. It is now looking to expand. Imagine how your organisation and your brand could leverage being associated with a social enterprise like Fifteen Cornwall in the mind of your most valued clients and customers. Suppose also you could give your key people special access to Fifteen Cornwall’s CEO and learn how he’s done it? Our experience is that young business leaders in particular see this as a real opportunity. So, you can learn while enhancing your brand (and your brand values) both in your own people’s eyes, and externally with your most valued clients and customers.
Thinking strategically: The best leaders know how to address the crisis of the day without losing the bigger picture of where they’re going, why and in what time frame. This after all will be their legacy. Getting clear about just what this is then, is invaluable if leaders are going to think strategically. Getting clear about what you want to leave behind – your legacy – should focus attention on what you need to do now to achieve this. Any CEO or Board member who has been involved in succession planning will know what I’m talking about. But this applies equally to every team leader.
What we call a ‘rapid legacy intervention’ can teach people how to do this, while frequently producing an additional benefit of accelerated goal achievement. Thinking of legacy as something ‘now’ increases clarity, strengthens motivation and fosters an attitude of imminent target-achievement.
Why Legacy Together?
Legacy Together is based on the strong collaborative element involved in achieving outstanding results – be it between individuals, teams or organisations. That means people need to know how to work together. This is hard enough when they’re just engaged in day-to-day managing, but to be really successful you need your people to be able to innovate, and increasingly innovation – which by definition means doing something new – requires collaboration.
If you want your people to learn how to collaborate and innovate, they’ll need to know how to engage with what really matters to them, and also those they‘re going to partner with. Focusing on legacy – and using the legacy questions that are part of our ‘legacy toolbox’ – provides a template which is easy to use and generates immediate answers.
Final thoughts?
For today’s business leaders, and those of tomorrow, legacy is not just a cosy optional extra for the good times. Sometimes it can make all the difference at the sharp end of closing a sale. Our London launch provided a striking example of this, when Ben Hunt-Davis (Olympic gold medallist and a project manager for the 2012 Olympics who was invited to address the audience) told the inside story of London’s winning bid to host the 2012 Olympics.
Ultimately, this stunning, multi-billion pound sale, came down not to the management of an event, but to the deep and lasting legacy that London was committed to delivering for the next generation. It is clear to anyone who has met and worked with the members of the 2012 project that they are driven by this legacy every single day. So legacy might just be a new business imperative for the 21st century, presenting both an opportunity and a challenge for business leaders to create positive sustainable change. It could be that the greatest social legacy of London 2012 will be to consolidate the idea of ‘legacy’ itself as the norm – and not the exception.
Ian McDermott, Co-Founder Legacy Together. Contact at Ian@legacytogether.com or visit www.legacytogether.com