What Leaders Do, Growing a Personal Leadership Legacy.
In Heroic Leadership, Best Practices from a 450-year-old Company that Changed the World, former Jesuit and J.P. Morgan Managing Director, Chris Lowney, gets straight to the heart of what it means to be a leader. Drawing wisdom from the Jesuit spiritual tradition, he says, “If all leadership is first self-leadership that springs from personal beliefs and attitudes, then each person must first decide what personal leadership legacy he or she wants to leave behind.”
Indeed, personal growth, success, and happiness is incumbent upon first deciding how you want to live your life by assessing the impact you wish to have on others (that is, your legacy). Once you begin to understand who the person is who is thinking and acting by identifying what that person really desires, you can begin to gauge the quality of your responses to whatever is happening around you or to you. You can begin to see whether those responses either measure up to or fall short of the legacy you wish to leave behind. To do this first is to develop your “greatest power” according to Lowney, the power of a leader’s personal vision.
And yet, as Hamlet says, “there’s the rub.” The difficulty is in discerning what your deepest desires are so that you can begin to figure out how to live a life of consciously directed action inspired and energized by them.
To begin on the path of discernment towards being a better leader (since you are in truth leading, that is, influencing those around you, all the time, as Lowney says, whether you realize it or not), you must start an “intensely personal” inward journey. You begin by really asking, “What do I care about? What do I want? How do I fit into the world?”
Answering these questions is no easy task. It also certainly isn’t a task that you either complete before being thrown into the thick of life or finish at a certain age. Personal growth is a process of evolution that continues to unfold as you live and influence those around you. It is a life-long process of revision and maturation that requires tenacity, patience, forgiveness of yourself and others, and humility even into old-age.
Simply put, leadership is about who you are, first. What you do and how you do it flows from who you are on the inside; that is, who you are in your private thoughts concerning yourself, others, the world, and your desires—all that stuff in your heart and in your head. Don’t like the picture of life on the outside, take a good long look at life on the inside first. Discern who you are and what you want your life to be and on the attitudes and behaviors that best express the beautiful picture you see. Then hold fast to it in faith, clinging to that vision and those standards of conduct in everything you do, big and small, both in the chaos and in the boredom of each day.
Read Part 2.
