There's A Powerful Link Between Finding Meaning and Building a Legacy
Earlier this year ABC released a documentary called Laura’s Choice about a 90-year-old Australian woman Laura Henkel who was on a mission to create a conversation around voluntary assisted dying (VAD). It’s a wonderful documentary about a topic that I’m incredibly passionate about after watching my father-in-law struggle with motor neurone disease (MND) for over 4 years before it eventually took him.
VAD laws are slowly being introduced in Australia, with NSW and QLD being the only two states to not have passed legislation or currently debating a bill: a significant shift from 2018 when 104-year-old David Goodall, a West Australian scientist, decided to travel to Switzerland to access the country's assisted dying services, which is what influenced Laura to give it more thought.
Laura and David were not terminally ill like my father-in-law, but they wanted to end her life on their terms and be allowed to die with dignity. Laura was the mother and grandmother of two filmmakers and she encouraged them to make a movie on VAD because she knew this was an important conversation for Australians to have. Paradoxically, knowing that you can die on your own terms provides a level of comfort because we have a perceived level of control over our death and it decreases the unnecessary stress that comes with the anticipation of thinking about how we will die. Laura and David’s contributions to VAD will contribute to providing future generations with the right to die with dignity and that will be part of their legacy.
Building a Legacy
Intergenerational decisions are the decisions we make today that affect other people in the future: it’s what legacies are built on. As a board member, leaving a positive legacy is arguably the most powerful thing you can do in your board 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 also key to optimizing your impact on the organization, its people and society.
The challenge however in terms of intergenerational decision-making is that the interests of present and future generations are not always aligned. In 2019 hundreds of thousands of young people around the world took to the streets to protest government inaction on the climate crisis. Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist whose one-person strikes in Stockholm helped ignite a global movement, told demonstrators in New York City, “We demand a safe future. Is that really too much to ask?”.
Unfortunately, individuals tend to be selfish and shortsighted in their use of resources and favour using resources themselves rather than allocating them to others, and they favour immediate to future consumption. This is a problem because we cannot avoid the reality that a feature of complex systems, in which we all work and live, is that they evolve irreversibly over time with their environment; therefore, decisions made today not only affect the experiences of those in the present, but they also determine resources available to future generations.
Benefit vs Burden
Whether a resource is a benefit or a burden matters when it comes to allocation decisions and legacy building. People are more concerned with avoiding leaving a negative legacy than with creating a positive one. Compared to leaving benefits to future others, avoiding leaving burdens can minimise the intertemporal and interpersonal distance between decision makers in the present and other people in the future which has been a big part of the discussion around the self-other tradeoff.
This informed how I structured Lead with Heart in the Boardroom, my online governance and leadership training program for company directors. The program informs directors of decisions and behaviour in their boardroom that inform organizational structures and systems that influence culture, wellbeing, health and safety outcomes. With this awareness and understanding directors can not only avoid adverse outcomes, but use their influence to improve outcomes (benefit the lives of those in the present and future).
Because when we feel valued and cared for by our employer we are 36% more likely to be thriving in our overall lives and half as likely to be burned out often or always and we bring any discretionary energy and positive emotions home with us so that we can contribute in a more meaningful way to our family, friends and community.
This is the “why” behind creating Lead with Heart in the Boardroom: help improve the health, happiness and resilience of society by assisting directors in using their influence to make a positive impact, and build a legacy they can be proud of.
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Meaning vs Happiness
Perhaps one of the reasons that individuals tend to be selfish and shortsighted in their use of resources and favour using resources themselves is our misguided quest for meaningfulness through happiness.
Many of us will go through life without realising how important finding meaning and purpose is for our overall wellbeing, and then wonder why we feel unfilled when we’re meeting all the goals we set for ourselves. We have all the tangible assets we could ever want, the house, the family, the job or the corner office, the vacations, the car or boat – we could buy almost anything we desire, but we still feel empty inside or at least unfilled.
This paradox is because a meaningful life and happy life overlap in certain ways, but are ultimately very different. What makes us happy is not what brings us meaning, and vice versa. Meaning comes in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes it looms big in our life; sometimes it’s almost unobservable, but research suggests that living a happy life is associated with being a “taker” whereas leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a "giver."
This is not to say that ‘taking’ is a bad thing because taking joy from an encounter with someone or taking the love that someone gives us, is something we should all do because those things bring us happiness and happiness is an important element to our wellbeing, but in the words of Martin E. P. Seligman, one of the leading psychological scientists alive today:
"in the meaningful life you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self."
Finding meaning and happiness are both important elements to our personal wellbeing, but happiness is not generally found in contemplating the past or future, it’s largely present oriented. Meaning however is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future and minimises intergenerational discounting tendencies and promotes intergenerational beneficence.
Building A Meaningful Legacy
People who have high meaning in their lives have been found to be more likely to help others in need, making the link between finding meaning in your board role particularly important for future others.
Legacy building is therefore an important topic for discussion when it comes to your governance role and the impact you have on the health, happiness and resilience of society because the structures and systems you create now, will inform the way things are done in the future.
Many of the critical health and well-being issues that we’re facing as a society today, such as high rates of mental illness and feelings of languishing, work family conflict, work related stress and burnout, the absence of meaning and purpose, workplace violence, sexual harassment and discrimination are dynamically connected to the social and industrial systems around us. This social pollution is the damage that companies have had on our social environment from the structures and systems they’ve created to manage work.
Leaders would be right to consider how they can contribute to making people more than what they were at the time of their employment, because this will bring more meaning and purpose in their work as they're focused on what they can do for others, both now and in the future, such as improving the health, happinss and resilience of those in their organziation and the communities to which they belong.
Laura said “There is no way I can avoid [death] … I want to do it when I am compos mentis and prepared for it”. There is no way you can avoid the influence you have on the health, happiness and resilience of those in your organization. Simply by being a member of the board, you are in one of the most powerful positions in the company, the question is, how will you use your influence? What sort of impact do you want to make? What do you want others to say about you when you’re no longer here?
Samantha McGolrick is the creator of Lead with Heart in the Boardroom where she teaches board members how to use their influence to make a positive impact. Her free monthly newsletter - Lead with Heart is available samanthamcgolrick.com/newsletter.