What Will Outlast You
Image credit: Digby Scott / Midjourney.com
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A couple of weeks ago, I was on a briefing call with a school principal. She'd invited me to give the opening keynote at an education leaders’ conference she convened last week. The theme of the talk was Leading Beyond Yourself. A few minutes into the call, she told me about what had happened in her own leadership team meeting that morning:
"I was sitting there as people were talking about different things that needed doing, and I thought: I actually don't need to be here. This is great."
Would it feel like that for you?
I’ll bet that one of your big challenges is that you’re usually dealing with the immediate and the urgent. The pull to get them off your list…it’s strong! If you frame a good day’s work as simply solving the problems of that day, you’re missing a trick.
Because your days become your weeks become your years.
When you look back over those years, what could you say about how you’ve contributed? What do you want to be able to say?
I’ve written before about choosing your focus. In that piece, I gave the options of having a problem-focus, where you’re making bad things go away, or a possibility-focus, where you’re focused on creating more of the good things you want to see.
I know when I have a possibility-focus, my energy is higher, and my days feel way more satisfying.
When you choose a possibility focus, you see problems through a more creative lens. You’re asking, ‘What’s the systemic issue here? How can we improve the system, not just fix the symptom?’ You also create opportunities for capability-building. You’re always looking for ways to develop others. And you take a longer-term, strategic view. You’re more able to discern what matters, and what doesn’t, in the immediate day-to-day melee.
At the conference last week, we workshopped three questions:
If you could create one change that would outlast your career, what would that be?
What systems need to exist for change to happen without you?
Where are you both energised and uniquely positioned to make that change?
Together, your answers to these questions give you a lens to focus your efforts. Leading for lasting impact does require focus. You can't transform everything at once. You need to choose one specific area that matters to you, where you’re energised and uniquely positioned to serve. And then build systems and cultures around it that are strong enough to continue long after you’ve gone.
Maybe then, on a Tuesday morning a few years from now, you'll find yourself in a room thinking: "I actually don't need to be here. This is great."
If relentless busyness is the pattern you keep running into, drop me a line.