Legacy is Long Sowing

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 quit sowing, but we’ve also made decisions on where it just doesn’t make sense to continue. 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?

The 2024 Capstone

When a Situation Tests the Whole Chain

In late 2015 or early 2016, just weeks after accepting a new role as a Safety and Human Resources manager for a mid-sized construction company, I was invited to lunch by one of the vendors who provided a specific service to that organization. He picked me and the CFO up at our office and drove us a few miles across town to the restaurant we agreed on. Before the waiter made it to our table to take our drink order, that fellow had made three statements about one of his competitors that were plainly untrue. As the waiter walked up to the table, I told the guy that I had only known him for about fifteen minutes and he had already lied to me three times. I followed that statement by asking how I was ever supposed to trust anything else he said from that point forward. Then I stopped talking. The silence that followed was uncomfortable; for him, for the CFO, and even the waiter. It was not uncomfortable for me.

Each of his comments that spurred me to challenge him were about one specific organization that I had done business with in previous roles and had been familiar with for much longer. Still, I didn’t have any strong personal relationships with anyone in that organization. The CFO did and hadn’t said a word, which is a lesson in itself. I didn’t call our vendor out on behalf of any one individual, I did it because he had served us a bull shit appetizer and I wasn’t willing to eat it. The company I was with continued doing business with this vendor the entire time I was there, and that required me to interact with him routinely. Those first fifteen minutes provided an accurate snapshot of what I would experience from him in the years that followed.

Through that same time, though, I maintained a working relationship with the organization he had spoken ill of. In fact, various folks inside that organization provided me with information I needed when I couldn’t get straight answers from the vendor being paid to provide them. As Cindy and I built our business, our interaction with that organization grew and we were very intentional about referring business to them; remember those values I just pointed to, Community and Together? We didn’t make those referrals based on something that company was doing for us, we did it because we had received solid service from them.

Like all organizations do at some point or another, that one went through several changes at executive level in a relatively short period of time. In spite of that, we continued doing business with them ourselves and referring our clients to them when we saw a win/win opportunity — for that organization and our clients. Through all that, very little was reciprocated. So be it, they had existing relationships before we started our business and all we hoped for was to be considered when they made a change. Think back to what our values said you’d never see from us: an introduction that serves us more than it serves you or us positioned as the only source of the answer. We made those referrals because we believed both parties could benefit. The law of sowing and reaping takes care of the rest.

In late 2024, Cindy and I were invited to breakfast with a key member of that organization’s executive team, someone we had interacted closely with for nearly a decade at that point, to discuss what we thought would be a strategy for building on the limited work we had done with them. He was visibly uncomfortable for much of the conversation and finally made the comments that showed us why. He explained that the organization would soon be announcing a partnership with one of their competitors based several hours away to start a division that directly competed with the services we provided and that division would be reaching out to clients we had referred to them. (We learned soon after that they already had been…) He explained that if they didn’t form that relationship with their competitor, they stood a chance of losing market share in their own lane. He closed by emphasizing that “it wasn’t a personal decision, it was just business.”

One of our Strategic Leadership Coaching clients has frequently told me that he has yet to see someone do business with the sign on the side of a building; they do business with people. Truer words have never been spoken, and that’s the whole reason I said earlier that without a relationship in place, most adversities wouldn’t even be memorable. The “it wasn’t a personal decision, it was just business” comment stung on a personal level for sure. But make no mistake, the real frustration was from standing up for the organization when others wouldn’t and actively supporting them for years without being given a consideration for what they would be allowing a firm from states away to offer to many of the same people we had connected to them to begin with.

Sometimes it becomes painfully obvious that you’ve been sowing into rocky soil all along. All said, had something like that happened even a few years prior, it may have been devastating. I won’t pretend it didn’t piss me off; it certainly did. But it also resulted in us considering new relationships with companies in that space that we would have never considered otherwise, several of which have grown exponentially in the few short years since.

A late adversity is useful precisely because it is not new in kind — it reveals whether the earlier seeds actually grew. This, as hard as it was to digest at the time, showed us that our earlier seeds had indeed grown, but it was still up to us to find the harvest in those seeds so we’ll pick there next. Until then, think about one recent situation that stung but would have been much harder to handle without the previous adversities you’ve learned from. What did that expose about the leadership attributes you’ve developed? And which ones still need some attention?

Reflection as Discipline

Choosing Harvest Over Bitterness

Any time you get kicked in the pants, especially in a case like we experienced in late ‘24 where it comes from behind but connects up front, there’s a temptation to decide “we’ve paid enough,” rather than make the harder choice to continue reflecting, keep serving, and keep your door open for everyone else you can impact who had nothing to do with that scenario. In complete transparency, doing each of those is the only way I’ve seen for intentionally choosing harvest over bitterness — even if that harvest isn’t immediate.

Cindy and I had so many similar experiences prior to that, all of which were significantly smaller in scope and with far less investment. Without each of those, most of which I haven’t bothered to reference in this process, I’m not sure we would have been able to process this one the way we did. Make no mistake, it still hurts. “It’s not personal, it’s just business” may have been enough for the person saying it to write it off on their end but we had never pointed our clients to a sign; it was always personal. We had been through it before and we’ve been through it since. From the beginning of this look at making the best of your bad situations and a few times since, I’ve referenced a saying that’s often hard to digest: “You can only control two things, your attitude and your actions.” I may not always like it, but that doesn’t make it untrue. And each of those kicks in the pants forced me to take complete responsibility for controlling those two things.

Once more for the people in the back: “Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.” Had we failed to control our attitude and actions, allowing the bitterness from any of these situations to take root, we would have been choosing to sacrifice the seeds within them and we would have stood no chance whatsoever for eventually reaping a harvest. But by controlling our attitude and actions, and purposefully living out our Community and Together values, some of that harvest came almost immediately and that’s compounded ever since.

The other thing that compounds is our experience in developing and refining each of the leadership attributes we’ve worked through here. We’ll look at that more next. First though, here’s the formula you need to commit to memory: Bitterness spends the seed. Reflection plants it. Definiteness of decision after a tough season is often the decision not to close the heart. In short, keep sowing — even if that means sowing somewhere else. With that in mind, pinpoint one area where a recent slight is still collecting interest. Track one step you can take right away toward harvest instead of bitter rehearsal.