Legacy Leadership and the Busyness of Business

Jay Newman, PhD; Founding Partner Culture By Choice

One of the biggest impediments to truly becoming a Legacy Leader is how darned busy we can all get. There are always dozens of things that have to be done. It’s what I refer to as the Busyness of Business. But, when we examine everything we are doing and weigh the value of each task against the amount of time we devote to each task, we often find that a lot of this busyness is just that, busyness. Not business but just busyness!

How do we rescue ourselves from all this busyness and get down to what is really our business? The best path I have found is to focus on the true values and principles of the business. In other words, create a Legacy Culture. The activities associated with the core values and principles of any business result in moving the organization towards a Legacy Culture. Some of the activities associated with busyness will be quite helpful to the organization but other actions will be of little or no consequence. The Mission-not-so-Impossible is to differentiate between the busyness that contributes to the mission and those that do not.

Here’s a process for determining if what you are doing is mission critical, mission supportive, or mission frivolous. In order for this exercise to work you must understand your mission. Here are the key questions that need to be answered. What are the controlling ideas that govern what the organization does? What values and principles support these controlling ideas? What actions are critical to making the controlling ideas come to life? What actions support those controlling ideas? What actions seem like a nice idea but do not directly contribute to those controlling ideas? Here’s something you can try. Set a timer and every fifteen minutes just jot down a brief note that tells what you are doing. Do this for 3 days. After the 3 days analyze your activities and put them all into one of the 3 categories.

Here’s an example of a what a controlling idea is all about. I’ll use Culture By Choice as an example. The goal of Culture By Choice is to help its client companies develop a culture that focuses on maximizing the opportunity for attracting, hiring, and retaining the best possible people through their practices associated with 1) recruiting, 2) hiring, 3)on-boarding, 4) training, 5) retention activities, 6) performance and behavioral coaching, 7) incentive packages, and 8) succession planning. All of these actions are associated with understanding the people of the organization. This leads us to realizing that the controlling idea for Culture By Choice is what we call People Acumen. Every action we take should be focused on our team gaining a better understanding of one another, our clients, and those people that touch us and/or our clients. The advice we give and the coaching we do with our clients should be designed to help our clients improve their own People Acumen skills.

As I personally examine my daily activities, I should see that I am working on improving my own People Acumen skills, the People Acumen skills of my colleagues and the People Acumen skills of our clients. If I find myself spending time on activities that are not associated with or supportive of these skills, I need to re-evaluate my actions. We, at Culture By Choice, value the relationships we have with one another and our clients. We value the trust that we’ve built. When things happen that diminish that trust, we know it and we feel it.

As you read this Blog post, you may have questions. Please feel free to ask. I’d love to build an ongoing conversation about the hows and whys of Legacy Leadership.