How to think about building your legacy

As a leader, leaving a great legacy is arguably the most powerful thing you can do in your career and life because it enables you to have influence well into the future — even after you are out of the picture. Legacy-building in business contexts can mean working to ensure the long-term viability of the organization and leaving it stronger, more productive and more valuable than it was before. Thinking about your long-term legacy is also a great way to ensure that you are resisting the temptation to make myopic decisions that are overly focused on short-term gain.

So, how can you keep your legacy in mind as you go about your everyday decisions? These strategies, based on more than a decade of research, can help you keep legacy-building in mind — and leverage those thoughts to maximize your impact on the world.

— THINK ABOUT WHAT THE PREVIOUS GENERATION DID FOR YOU: Recall your predecessors and how their actions affected you. What resources did they leave behind for you and your contemporaries? How did they change the organization to provide you with opportunities? How did they shape your organization’s culture? While you can’t always reciprocate the deeds of prior generations because they are no longer part of the organization, you can pay it forward by behaving similarly to the next generation of organizational actors.

— FOCUS ON THE BURDENS RATHER THAN THE BENEFITS: People are more concerned with avoiding leaving a negative legacy than with creating a positive one. Highlighting the burdensome aspects of long-range decisions can help leaders to recognize the negative legacies that these sorts of decisions can create. Further, it is strategic for organizations to intentionally connect decisions about benefits and burdens so that managers must make them simultaneously.

— CONSIDER THE RESPONSIBILITY THAT COMES WITH YOUR POWER: Recent research on intergenerational decisions involving longer timeframes reveals that power can lead decision makers to be more concerned with the interests of others in the future. The result is that they are more generous to future generations, which naturally helps them to build a positive legacy.

— REMEMBER THAT YOU WILL DIE SOME DAY: One of the most effective things we can do to buffer our anxiety about death is to attempt to transcend death by finding meaning in our lives. Central to this meaning is that we have impact that persists beyond our physical existence. Research shows that reminding people of death motivates them to consider their legacies and causes them to act in ways that benefit future generations, thus improving the overall quality of their long-term decisions.

Ultimately, your legacy is all you’ve got. Think about how you want to be remembered by other people and act on those thoughts. You can get a little bit of (symbolic) immortality by creating something meaningful that will outlive yourself.