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Meet the MasterMinds: Robert Galford and Regina Maruca on How Legacy Thinking Makes Better Leaders Today

Robert Galford and Regina Fazio Maruca work together at Boston’s Center for Executive Development and co-authored the new book, Your Leadership Legacy: Why Looking Toward the Future Will Make You a Better Leader Today. Galford also co-authored the bestseller The Trusted Advisor and The Trusted Leader.

A veteran journalist, Maruca is a former senior editor at Harvard Business Review and former associate managing editor at the Boston Business Journal and New England Business magazine.

I asked Galford and Maruca about legacy thinking and why it’s important for leaders to proactively plan what they want to leave behind.

McLaughlin: What is legacy thinking and how is it different from a leader’s desire to have a long-term, positive impact on a company?

Galford: One difference is that intending a “long-term, positive impact on a company” often tends to be thought of and discussed in quantitative or qualitative performance terms, while legacy thinking adds the critical dimension of individual leadership.

Of course, it’s important to “do right” by your company, in terms of strategy, performance, growth, and so forth. So let’s assume the best, and start with the premise that your readers have integrity and good ethics.

But what about you—the leader—as an individual? What about you as a person who interacts with others on a one-to-one basis everyday? What about you as a leader as someone with personal hopes, goals, desires, and expectations?

Too many leaders are driven, on a day-to-day basis, by expectations that are really not their own—shareholder expectations, board expectations, market expectations. All of these are important. But at the end of the day, you also have to live with yourself.

You want to do your best for the organization but you also want to be at peace with yourself. Have you found satisfaction in your job? Are you doing the kinds of things that you want to be doing? Are you playing to your innate strengths? Are you in your natural role? Or are you constantly pushing or pressuring yourself far outside of your comfort zone to achieve the organizational goals before you? Legacy thinking calls all of these questions into play.

A leader who retires and leaves behind a successful organization, but has clearly done so at a high personal cost, tends to leave what we call a “negative” legacy. Colleagues and employees may say, “I don’t ever want to be like that!” And as a result, they may structure their own work lives differently and for the better. So the ultimate result might be positive. But wouldn’t it be better to build the kind of legacy that prompts people say, “I want to be like that,” and learn in a positive way?

Maruca: Another way to frame it is that legacy thinking is much “smaller” than thinking about the long-term impact you’ll have on a company. Legacy thinking is about the day-to-day. What decisions am I making today? How am I spending my time? How am I acting? How am I influencing others’ thinking/behaviors/outlook today? Am I satisfied, even happy, with my actions and the effect I might be having on others today?

McLaughlin: It seems that a leader’s legacy is often defined by others. Is it possible to design your own legacy? If so, how?

Galford: You can’t create a blueprint for your own legacy, if that’s what you mean. It’s impossible. But what you can do is try to figure out the kinds of legacies you are probably already seeding, and try to calibrate those legacies-in-the-making as best you can with the person you are and the person you would like to be.

A leader’s legacies form a mosaic, with each individual “impact” on another person or party representing one “tile” in the overall picture. The idea, at the end of a career, is to emerge with a mosaic that is coherent—one that integrates as seamlessly as possible the “personal” leader with the manager that people see every day, over time.

Your legacies are defined by others. But right now, without huge effort, you can gain enough perspective about yourself to see how those legacies are taking shape, and you can try to influence them for the better.

Maruca: Remember, too, that we believe that leaders’ legacies are “defined” by how the people they’ve worked with behave—and approach their work—once the leader is no longer there. The media often discusses a leader’s legacy, writ large. What we’re concerned with is all of the little threads of that legacy. What are the people of the organization doing now, and why?

McLaughlin: At what point in an individual’s career does it make sense to think about a legacy?

Maruca: Day One.

Galford: The earlier you think about the effect you are having, the earlier you can try to identify any “disconnects” between you and your job, the better and happier leader you’ll be as a result.

We’ve said that people often gain a critical kind of clarity of thinking in the face of a personal crisis. What am I really doing? Why? One of the goals of legacy thinking is to force that kind of clarity in the absence of any crisis. Think of the benefits of really understanding your own priorities as early on as possible.

Maruca: But that’s not to say that priorities don’t change. Legacy thinking isn’t supposed to be static. People are always changing and growing. What was important to you as a leader in your twenties might not be the same as when you’re in your fifties. At any stage, though, it’s useful to try to gain that clarity.

McLaughlin: What is a “legacy statement” and how does it differ from a personal mission statement?

Galford: A legacy statement summarizes the hopes and aspirations you have for your impact on others.

The statement also holds your feet to the fire, though, in that it forces you to identify some specific actions you can take as a result of naming those hopes and aspirations. The exercise of writing a legacy statement also calls for people to “pressure test” their statement for achievability, realism, and stretch.

Can you do what you say you want to do? Should you? Are you being realistic? Too easy on yourself? Too hard?

Mission statements can be pretty vague. A lot of them can boil down to something like, “Do Good, Avoid Evil.”

A legacy statement forces the connection with the decisions that are on your desk right now, and the behaviors you engage in today, tomorrow, and next week.

McLaughlin: What’s the first step to take to begin creating your own legacy statement?

Galford: To begin the process, you should look back, and then forward, and then inward, in broad strokes. Ask yourself: What have I carried forward from my first job? What impressions are still with me? What did I learn there?

What about the future? After you retire, what would you hope people would be doing, or thinking, as a result of having worked with or for you? What if someone’s first job was working for you, and now it is years later? What do you think that person took away?

What about yourself as a person? Are you the same at work as you are outside? Do you wear a “game face” a great deal? If so, why is that? What are the threads and themes that permeate both worlds? Are there things you want to do, but you keep saying “soon,” or “next year?” What are those things, and how will you feel if you never do them?

Start with these kinds of questions as a good way to “locate” yourself and generate the insights that legacy thinking demands.

McLaughlin: How do you measure your progress along the way? How can you learn whether or not the legacy you want to leave is the one you’re on track for?

Galford: You measure progress by revisiting your statement regularly, by continuing to ‘pressure test.’ You ask trusted confidants to consider the statement, and you, and offer their candid opinions (this is extremely difficult, but worth it). You also try to continue to “marry” the aspirations you articulated with the realty of the day to day. Is there friction? If so, why?

Maruca: Over time, legacy thinking will “bubble up” and you’ll begin to see where it can influence your work and your life, in both the minutiae and in the bigger picture. Should you go make that presentation, or should you let a deputy do it? Should you write an immediate reply to a troubling email, or can you force yourself to count to ten? Should you stay on as top executive of a company, or is it time to move on?

Galford: You’ll never learn definitively what your legacy will be. But if you get a sense of it, and it sits well with you, that’s great progress.

McLaughlin: Can you give an example of a leader who would have benefited from legacy thinking?

Galford: On the less positive side, ex-Enron CEO Jeff Skilling comes first to mind, of course. But then, keep in mind that Skilling is a “headliner.” Headliners are almost too over the top to include in a useful discussion of legacy thinking.

There are many, many people out there who are not in the news, who are genuinely trying to do their best for their companies, but who could benefit greatly from legacy thinking.

Remember, the thrust is self-improvement, and having a positive influence on the thoughts and behaviors of others while at the same time finding some personal peace and day-to-day satisfaction.

McLaughlin: What’s the biggest hurdle people have to get over to embark on a legacy thinking process?

Galford: Fear of seeming like an egotist. People are often reluctant to confront the reality that they are going to leave a legacy, no matter what. Legacy seems like such a grandiose word.

Maruca: Fear that they’ll discover that they are, at bottom, not happy with the way they’re living their lives. And that the path to change will be difficult or full of risk.

McLaughlin: What’s on your reading lists these days?

Galford: I’m part way through Stumbling on Happiness by Harvard Professor Daniel Gilbert. If you liked Tipping Point, Blink or Freakonomics, then this is along those lines. Next will probably be Howard Gardner’s Changing Minds.

Maruca: I just finished Plainsong by Kent Haruf. I also just read Sam Hill’s new short story on Amazon.

Oh, a business book? The New American Workplace, by James O’Toole, Edward Lawler, and Susan Meisinger is next on my list.

McLaughlin: Thank you for your time.

Galford and Maruca: Thank you!

Find out more about their new book and download an excerpt at the Web site for Your Leadership Legacy. See the Web site for The Center for Executive Development for more information on their services.