The Small Leadership Moments That Build Your Leadership Legacy Every Single Day
Are you being intentional about your leadership? And intentional when it comes to creating your legacy every day as a leader? I sat down with Codi Shewan, author of Everyday Legacy, to talk about what he’s learned from the funeral business when it comes to creating a living legacy.
Codi Shewan: Correct!
Michael Kerr: What does a funeral director, a former funeral director, what can you teach us about organizational effectiveness?
Codi Shewan: Maybe more than one might think. It seems like a very disconnected, disjointed world. And yet the beautiful thing about funeral service and my experience in funeral service was that it taught me that the small moments matter more than what’s expected. And when we think about that from a leadership perspective, it means that in order to create really strong cultures, it means doing sometimes the things that we might not expect to be doing, but those are often the things that matter the most to our teams, to our employees. And so finding those unique opportunities, they’re really not out of arm’s length. A lot of people think that what’s the relationship between funeral service and leadership? And there’s more commonality than you would think. In funeral service, you get one shot, it’s got to be great, good client experience. And by great, I mean obviously sensitive to the moment, but you have one opportunity to do it properly.
And in many ways, leadership today is very, very similar. You have one shot. I mean, people don’t stay long if it’s not a good culture, if it’s not good leadership, if there’s not good morale on the team. People will look for places where they can make a meaningful contribution. And as leaders, it’s our job to figure out how to pull that out of people to make them feel really galvanized more than just to the work, but to the people in the work and the organization, the community they’re serving.
Michael Kerr: Right, right. And what about this idea? You wrote this book Everyday Legacy, and obviously that comes out of your experience being involved in, well, let’s just call it what it is, death, right? You’re around a lot of death. So what has being around death taught you about the importance of legacy and leadership in a workplace?
Codi Shewan: Someone once asked me, “What did a career being surrounded by death teach you the most about death and dying?” And I said, “Ironically, it taught me very little about that. In fact, everything I would say that I’ve learned that’s important in life and in business, in relationships actually came from dying. It came from that experience, and it creates this really powerful lens that we can look through. Oftentimes when we think about legacy, we think about it as something that’s left once we’re gone or we start to think about it when the proverbial end, if we know it’s happening, becomes important to us.
There was this one particular experience that really shifted. We only have two minutes, so we don’t have time to go into the whole story, but there was a moment in my career that shifted the experience for me to think this is kind of crazy that we think about legacy as something that’s just there when we’re gone.
Why don’t we shift that to the idea of it being something that we’re creating every single day, that our legacy is something people are experiencing right now while we’re still here?
And when we dial into that, we realize the ripple effect of these often small seemingly inconsequential moments. We can do more of those things in our organization and create not only goodwill and impact internally, but the spill would be externally to the people that we serve in whatever business we’re in. It doesn’t have to be even related to funeral service. In fact, a lot of my clients while they’re still in the bereavement space are also outside in construction and home improvement and healthcare and service industries, hospitality. Anytime there’s that people-centric connection, there are always opportunities to create moments that matter internally and externally. And so the idea of legacy really resonates strongly when you look at it through that slightly different lens as right now versus something that’s left when I’ve gone.
Codi Shewan: Precisely. Now take it from a self-professed control freak. Listen, I like the idea of being in control of that narrative as much as I can. I say that jokingly, it’s less about control and more about the opportunity that you realize it’s not really that hard to find these opportunities, whether it’s internally or externally. So internally with our employee experience or externally with our customer experience to find these little things that make such a difference. They’re the moments that people end up remembering because let’s face it, the table stakes stuff that’s expected, that’s expected of us in whatever industry we’re in. It’s the things that go above and beyond that differentiate us not only as leaders, but as organizations to whatever community is we serve.
Known as “The Workplace Energizer!” Michael Kerr is a Canadian Hall of Fame keynote speaker on workplace culture, workplace culture leadership, and humor in the workplace. Michael Kerr is the author of nine books, including Small Moments, Big Outcomes: How Leaders Create Cultures That Fuel Extraordinary Results. Michael is known as one of the most entertaining, humorous, and insightful keynote speakers on workplace culture and leadership in Canada.
“By far, Michael Kerr was the best speaker we ever had.” Rod Smith, VP Business Development, Century Vallen
