Creating Your Legacy: Five Specific Actions for You and Others

Last week, I wrote about Peter Drucker’s impressive lasting legacy. But one does not have to be an icon to pay attention to legacy; everyone has one whether intentionally created or shaped by default. Leaders who build and help others craft a legacy approach today’s work with more clarity about their personal purpose, commitment to making an impact, and confidence in their ability to do so.

In my teaching, writing, and coaching, I help others make progress on their legacies. In the recent Global HR Leadership Experience (GHRLE), we helped HR leaders advance their legacies by mastering five actions (figure 1). These same actions apply to anyone on a pathway to establishing a legacy at work (executives, midlevel and other leaders, individual contributors) and outside of work (parenting, community volunteers). Let me use GHRLE as a case study for how HR and business leaders can make progress on their and others’ legacy.

Legacy Action 1: Define with clarity personal purpose.

Most business and HR leaders have a personal purpose that comes from their values (beliefs, assumptions, heritage (DNA, mentors, experiences), strengths (what comes naturally), and aspirations (goals, mission). This personal purpose defines an identity that they are known for by others, which impacts their thoughts, shapes their actions, and leads to their legacy.

Achieving clarity about personal purpose helps define how success looks and feels, sets priorities, and determines where to focus time. Gaining clarity comes from reflection on key thought-triggering questions (figure 2).

To turn purpose into an identity, we ask leaders to identify three words they would like to be known for by those with whom they interact (figure 3).

Legacy Action 2: Personalize your career.

A personalized career begins by reflecting on and being clear about a personal purpose (above). Then we make choices about jobs, roles, assignments, and tasks in alignment with enacting our purpose and identity. Jobs that feed our purpose are generally easy, energizing, and enjoyable! Our personal definition of career success becomes our compass that reflects these core values and becomes our legacy. 

Personalized careers come when we make tradeoffs or navigate the paradoxes inherent in career anchors—or orientations—to reflect purpose and identity. Figure 4 shows some of the common career tradeoffs that personalize a career journey. Each person may create a personalized (and changing) plot for a personal career agenda by highlighting the current and desired scores on the seven career orientation paradoxes in figure 4. For example, someone might lean to the left anchor to a greater or lesser extent (hi CBA lo) or to the right anchor (lo 123 hi).  Circling the letter or number signifies current leaning; then you can pick where you might like to lean in the future.  This diagnostic creates a personalized career roadmap that captures a current and future legacy.

Legacy Action 3: Master required competencies.

As work changes, required competencies (knowledge, skills, and aptitude) have to evolve. Having the right competencies enables business and HR leaders to respond to changing work requirements. Based on three decades of research with over 110,000 respondents, reports from eight leading consulting firms, and with insights from 27 thought leaders in GHRLE, we propose these foundational and emerging competencies for HR professionals to deliver value (figure 5). Note that we have prepared a similar required competence logic of business leaders. The red competencies deserve increased attention in today’s market.

Legacy Action 4: Serve others.

Personal progress to developing a legacy is not a solo and isolated activity. Progress comes from adding value to and serving others. Serving and adding value to others creates a virtuous spiral where one’s identity helps others grow, which then reinforces and enhances personal identity. A simple legacy-enhancing exercise is to identify stakeholders a business or HR leader interacts with and then ask the “so that” question about identity: “How will my personal purpose and identity add value to those I interact with?” (See figure 6.)

Legacy Action 5: Demonstrate executive presence.

To sustain progress requires mastery of emerging competencies, turning personal purpose into an identity, and ensuring that identity adds value to others. To establish legacy, business and HR leaders need to demonstrate executive presence (figure 7).

Conclusion

In GHRLE, the participants went through these five actions and left with more confidence about their future opportunities. These legacy-enhancing steps can be adapted by anyone seeking to have a lasting impact.  I have applied these five actions primarily to a professional, at work, legacy.  They can also be applied to a personal, outside of work, legacy with family or other community groups.  A highlight of the Peter Drucker 2025 Forum was hearing from his daughter who shared her father’s at home actions where his posterity would become his lasting legacy. 

How do you think about and create your lasting legacy?

Dave Ulrich is Rensis Likert Professor Emeritus at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, and a partner at The RBL Group, a consulting firm focused on helping organizations and leaders deliver value.