Legacy is Long Sowing

For years in our Emerging Leader Development course, Cindy has emphasized that one of the toughest things about defining moments isn’t just the adversity involved but the fact that we don’t get to choose when we have to deal with them. With more road now behind me than I have left in front of me, I can say without question that our next adversity is never going to wait until we’re perfectly ready for it. While relationships are often what exaggerate the impact of each adversity, leveraging growth through those relationships - professionally and personally - has proven to be a secret sauce for staying the course.

Early on in the process of writing The Values Advantage, I realized that we weren’t walking the talk as well as we should - especially given the tremendous example the book was based on. I stopped then and there to identify the core values that should be posted on our website (so we’d at least fit in with the 70+ percent of companies that have their values posted on a website). As I moved forward with writing the book, we refined the definitions and we developed detailed behavioral descriptions to back them. We’ve since taken that even further by listing what anyone we interact, a client or the general public, should see and should not see from us for each value. In the original edition of the book, I (somewhat jokingly) said that our final value, Together, was added since we couldn’t spell IMPACT without a T. And I felt an immediate sense of conviction about just how important Together actually was, spurring me to write Leveraging Leadership Growth; Strength Through Great Professional Relationships.

Truth be told, Cindy and I have worked as hard on modeling Community and Together since starting our business in 2015 - even without having named them - as we have each of the others. Relationships are indeed what drive every aspect of our lives, and yours too. Even the ones at the root of some of our most challenging adversities. Somewhere previously in this process of challenging you to make the best of your bad situations, I made a comment about how there will be times where we’re tempted to rest on what we’ve done rather than continuing to sow into others - especially after an extremely difficult season. I followed that by stressing the importance of pushing forward regardless, to keep searching for our seeds in each adversity and doing everything in our power to nurture those seeds so we can take full advantage of the greater opportunities within them. And I meant it with every fiber of my being.

That said, getting taken advantage of hurts and there’s often a temptation to quit taking the high road or to quit sowing into others. We’ve decided that we’ll never take that road, but we’ve also made decisions on where it just doesn’t make sense to continue sowing. This may sound contradictory at face value, especially with those Community and Together values I just mentioned.

If you were to read that page of our website, here’s what you’d see following each:

Community: 

You should see: us connecting you to a person, an organization, or a room with no relationship to what you are paying us for — and the same thing happening for people in this region who are not clients at all.

You should never see: your relationships kept routed through us, or an introduction that serves us more than it serves you.

Together:

You should see: us building associations in which your strength and someone else’s compound — the Executive Leadership Elite Think Tank being the clearest form of it since 2019: leaders from unrelated industries brought together on purpose, each one stronger for the association than they would be alone.

You should never see: us positioned as the only source of the answer, or a room assembled for its own sake with nothing coming back out of it.

The final chapter in Leveraging Leadership Growth was about the legacy we should each be working to leave. Legacy is not what we intend to be remembered for. It is what we keep doing when the invoice will never come. I believe all of our values back that idea, but the two I shared here are the foundation. But even when building a legacy requires long sowing, whether we feel like it or not, we need to be keenly aware of whether the soil we’re attempting to nurture our seeds in. We’ll dig into one of the decisions we had to make not so long ago where it no longer made sense to sow next. Before that, think about your own scenarios where you were doing more than paid for. Which times were you sowing into your legacy and which were cases where those seeds were planted in rocky soil?