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How to Think About Building Your Legacy
By Kimberly Wade-Benzoni
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 yourself. It’s key to optimizing your impact on your organization and its people. Legacy building in business contexts can take the form of working to ensure the long-term viability of the organization and leaving it stronger, more productive, and more valuable than it was before. Or, in more dramatic scenarios led by entrepreneurs, creating an entirely new organization. Thinking about your legacy is also a great way to ensure that you are taking into account the long-term perspective of your organization and resisting the temptation to make myopic decisions that are overly focused on short-term gain.
So then, how can you keep your legacy in mind as you go about your everyday decisions? Fortunately, more than a decade of research on how people make decisions that involve future generations provides some specific strategies for helping you to keep legacy building in mind and leverage those thoughts to maximize your impact on the world.1
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. When you take the long-term perspective and think about your organization in terms of multiple generations, reciprocity is not direct, but rather it takes on a more generalized form. Research shows that when we know we have benefited from the legacy of the prior generation, that gets us thinking about the positive legacy we want to leave for future generations and we tend to make better long-term-oriented decisions.2
Focus on the burdens rather than the benefits
When making decisions about the future, leaders may be allocating desirable benefits such as profit or natural resources or they may be distributing burdens that they and others wish to avoid, such as debt or hazardous waste. Research shows that whether a resource is a benefit or a burden matters when it comes to allocation decisions and legacies.3 People are more concerned with avoiding leaving a negative legacy than with creating a positive one. Compared to leaving benefits to future others, leaving burdens leads individuals to feel a greater sense of responsibility toward and affinity with those in the future as well as more moral emotions, such as shame and guilt.
Highlighting the burdensome aspects of long-range decisions can help leaders to recognize the negative legacies that such choices can create. Further, it is strategic for organizations to intentionally connect decisions about benefits and burdens so that managers must make them simultaneously. The increased focus on ethical considerations that accompanies the allocation of burdens can help attenuate the shortsighted and self-interested behavior that often guides the allocation of benefits.
Consider the responsibility that comes with your power
Most research on power suggests that the experience of power tends to make people more self-focused and self-interested. This research primarily considers the effect of power in limited time frames. However, recent research on intergenerational decisions involving longer time frames reveals that power can lead decision makers to be more concerned with the interests of others in the future.4 When intergenerational decisions are combined with an enhanced experience of power, people feel more social responsibility and are more focused on their legacy, compared to when their power is not prominent. The result is that they are more generous to future generations, which naturally helps them to build a positive legacy. When it is clear that we are in a position to determine outcomes for powerless and voiceless others, our decisions are ethically charged and we consider the moral implications of our actions more seriously.
Remember that you will die someday
One day in 1888, a wealthy and successful man was reading what was supposed to be his brother’s obituary in a French newspaper. As he read, he realized that the editor had confused the two brothers and had written an obituary for him instead. The headline proclaimed, “The merchant of death is dead,” and then described a man who had gained his wealth by helping people to kill one another. Not surprisingly, he was deeply troubled by this glimpse of what his legacy might have been had he actually died on that day. It is believed that this incident was pivotal in motivating him to leave nearly his entire fortune following his actual death eight years later to fund awards each year to give to those whose work most benefited humanity. This is, of course, the true story of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and the founder of the Nobel Prize.
Yes, we all die. When we are reminded of our deaths, we remember that we don’t want to die—we want to live! But we understand death’s inevitability, and that fact creates an existential dilemma in light of our deeply rooted survival instinct. 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 legacy and causes them to act in ways that benefit future generations, thus improving the overall quality of their long-term decisions.5 People feel better in the face of death if they are a part of something that will live on after them. Having a positive impact on future generations can help fulfill that need. Nobel lives on through his legacy, and receiving a shocking reminder of the inevitability of his death helped him to get there. His story also illustrates how avoiding a negative legacy can be more motivating than simply wanting to build a positive one.
In sum, the epitome of power is to leave a great legacy that lives on after you are gone. This is how you can maximize your influence and ensure you are keeping the long-term success of the organization in mind. And as a bonus you get a little bit of (symbolic) immortality.
Ultimately, your legacy is all you’ve got. Think about how you want to be remembered by other people and act on those thoughts. Give the grim reaper a run for his money by creating something meaningful that will outlive you.
KIMBERLY WADE-BENZONI is an associate professor of business administration and Center of Leadership and Ethics Scholar at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. She is an internationally recognized, leading scholar in the area of intergenerational decisions and has received numerous competitive awards for her research from the International Association for Conflict Management, State Farm Companies Foundation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Science Foundation.
Notes
1.K. A. Wade-Benzoni and L. P. Tost, “The Egoism and Altruism of Intergenerational Behavior,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 13, no. 3 (2009): 165–193.
2.K. A. Wade-Benzoni, “A Golden Rule Over Time: Reciprocity in Intergenerational Allocation Decisions,” Academy of Management Journal 45, no. 5 (2017): 1011–1028.
3.K. A. Wade-Benzoni, H. Sondak, and A. D. Galinsky, “Leaving a Legacy: Intergenerational Allocations of Benefits and Burdens,” Business Ethics Quarterly 20, no. 1 (2010): 7–34.
4.L. P. Tost, K. A. Wade-Benzoni, and H. H. Johnson, “Noblesse Oblige Emerges (with Time): Power Enhances Intergenerational Beneficence,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 128 (2015): 61–73.
5.K. A. Wade-Benzoni et al., “It’s Only a Matter of Time: Death, Legacies, and Intergenerational Decisions,” Psychological Science 23, no. 7 (2012): 704–709.
Adapted from content posted on hbr.org, December 15, 2016 (product #H03CE6).