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Seeking Significance: Part Two – Is Legacy All It’s Cracked Up To Be?
We have explored the journeys of many senior professionals from success to significance. But what does it mean to be significant, and particularly to whom?
You may discover an alternative pathway to significance as you explore the options surrounding that question.
So, let’s consider to whom you could be significant.
1. Professional Life
Let’s begin with your working life. Are there aspects of your industry or profession that you wish to become more significant?
Enabling Justice
I’ve been spending some time with a highly accomplished litigation lawyer. He holds some radical views on how civil litigation functions in the UK. At this moment, his legacy may be to actively campaign and influence the litigation culture in the UK and, perhaps, even beyond. That would be significant to his profession.
Transforming Education
Or think of another person I’ve spent time with, a former headmaster. He sought to make a significant impact on the education sector. It was less about the staff and much more focused on how he could improve the approach that primary and secondary educational institutions took to maximise the opportunities for their pupils and young people. Through that, he aimed to foster a culture change in academic institutions in the UK and beyond. For him, this was about influencing the educational sector and transforming the lives and opportunities of young people. What could you bring to your profession that will have significant impact?
2. Changing the Way Things Are Done
Sometimes, significance involves a desire to change how a particular thing is done. This might occur through an invention or a business that challenges the status quo.
A Better Deal for Leaseholders
I’m thinking of someone I worked with to build a successful Software as a Service (SaaS) business. Upon returning from the States to the UK and becoming a leaseholder in a large block of flats, he realised how poorly served those leaseholders were by the managing agents appointed to oversee all of the standard services provided by the freeholder to support the leaseholders’ occupation of the property.
This became a passion not tied to his profession—he was a software developer by training—or his sector, as financial services had been his background. This was a passion to change how something was done: to enable leaseholders to be served to the standards that they, as occupiers, should expect from property professionals.
He aimed to foster a connection between the leaseholder—the flat’s resident—and the service provider rather than depend on remote professionals who would expect you to make do with whatever they thought best. This strategy would facilitate resident engagement with the managing agent and lower the managing agent’s costs in serving these leaseholders.
He transformed a successful platform into a business that fundamentally changed how these relationships were managed. It was a PropTech company, and he was one of the earlier players in the PropTech space before it was even identified as a sector. For him, it was about changing residents’ experiences in blocks of flats.
3. Personal Life and Family Legacy
For some people, significance is about being important to their family. It’s about leaving a meaningful legacy for their children and grandchildren. It’s about being an exemplar in everything you do and, at this new season in your life, having more availability to support ageing parents or children with demanding grandchildren.
Sometimes, significance involves care, shared experiences, financial security, and serving as a role model for children and grandchildren. For these individuals, significance revolves around the family legacy—you want to be significant to your family.
4. Community Impact
Others aspire to be significant in their community. They can express this through fundraising or by taking on volunteer board roles such as trustee, magistrate, or school governor.
Becoming a Magistrate
I’m thinking of a very talented leadership development individual with whom I spent quite a bit of time working. He realised he wanted to be significant by training and serving as a magistrate for his local community. In that position, he hoped to bring justice to his community and to those accused of crimes.
He completed the entire training process and committed to serving on the bench. Thus, he was exceptionally well-positioned to serve when the riots broke out in the UK in 2023.
5. Social Impact and Business
There are other people I work with who are passionate about a particular charity or who seek significance by serving social impact businesses or social enterprises. If this is you, you take all the skills you developed in the commercial sector and reapply them in organisations with charities or social impact businesses.
IT to Regenerate Broken Nations
I’m thinking of a person I first met in 2002. Over the last 25 years, he has achieved immense success in developing a business from a complete startup into a software development services company listed on the Nasdaq, employing tens of thousands of people. The initial mandate for that business was to impact and transform the lives and hopes of people in post-communist emerging economies in Eastern Europe.
He has left that organisation, feeling his time there is ending. But what will significance mean for him next? Significant to whom?
IT to Restore Refugees
As he explores this, threads begin to emerge. Could he utilise all those skills to foster hope and transformation for refugees in long-standing camps in sub-Saharan Africa?
People who have been in those camps for five, ten, or even fifteen years see no prospects of returning to the countries they fled. These refugees rely on external aid to survive in a subsistence economy.
With his skills in empowering people to become effective IT and software development professionals, he wonders if he could engage remote workers from those refugee camps to serve Western clients and bring hard currency into these camps.
Could he bring the type of transformation he has been part of in other countries to entire refugee camps?
We reflected on a specific refugee camp I’m familiar with, accommodating a quarter of a million residents. It would rank among the top 10 towns or cities in the country where it’s located if categorised as a town. Although it’s a refugee camp, it’s pretty densely populated, and refugee agencies provide all essential services.
Could that quarter of a million people—a population roughly equivalent to that of Cambridge, England—be transformed into a next-generation tech hub?
How could you take everything you have learned in one context and reapply it to be significant to a completely different group of people? Should you be exploring business rather than charity to create that transformation?
Conclusions
As you consider how you want to move from success to significance, ask the question, ‘Significant to whom?’ can bring you to consider the various contexts in which you can become significant. Whether it is your profession, changing ways things are done, your family or communities or through social impact businesses, you have so much to offer when you can step beyond the primary drivers of career success.
Charles McLachlan is the founder of FuturePerfect and on a mission to transform the future of work and business. The Portfolio Executive programme is a new initiative to help executives build a sustainable and impactful second-half-career. Creating an alternative future takes imagination, design, organisation and many other thinking skills. Charles is happy to lend them to you.