Political leaders are often concerned about their legacy. For them the judgment of history is a real factor. Is it the same for business leaders? Certainly their time frames are considerably shorter and you could argue that their greater concern is to build up successes for their resumes. Indeed, many claim that business success is not necessarily a good measure of a business leader. They use the analogy of turning a ship around and say that all too often a leader is blessed or cursed by the actions of his predecessor, depending on whether he presides over a business decline or a business boom.

This is undoubtedly a valid perception. For you as a business leader, your true measure should be a platform for sustained success or, to put it another way, your leaving behind an organisation that continues operating successfully after you have moved on." This begs the question of the title.

From what I have just said that means it is not a question that you can answer yourself, nor can anyone else answer it while you are still "behind the wheel." It can only be objectively answered some time after you have moved on. Nevertheless, if you are honest with yourself and have any kind of self awareness, you could probably predict what the answer is likely to be.

Without presuming to judge you, I would lay odds that your answer is unlikely to please you. Of course that is a no-brainer because no business leader worth their salt is ever really truly satisfied. Yet there are a number of other reasons that make it so. Let's look at just a couple of these.

Pressures of Global Competition

Of course it is a truism to talk about the pressure of 21st century, global competition. Yet the fact is that it has done a tremendous amount to change the nature of business and, not least, the way it is run. Without shadow of a doubt it has made business executives better managers. The nature and scale of operations and the pace of change has ensured this. Yet it has also, paradoxically, increased the need for more of a long-term assessment of their effectiveness. Certainly we are increasingly exposed to calls for greater leadership. This suggests a widening dichotomy between management and leadership. So perhaps there has been an erosion of leadership that is a hitherto unrecognised consequence of all this pressure.

This naturally begs the question as to what is the difference between a manager and a leader. This is a subject that has spawned an industry all of its own with hundreds of books and articles written so I am not going to go into great depth on it here. Suffice to say that for me it comes down to their legacy: a manager leaves a portrait on the wall somewhere while a leader leaves an imprint on people's memories.

That may seem provocative and unduly harsh but it is meant to be. It is not, however, saying that it is about popularity - far from it - but it is about people and winning "hearts and minds." Think for a moment how most newly appointed CEO's immediately set about introducing change. This is evidence of a fixation on results, and supports my belief that an obsession with performance has caused this great divide between management and leadership.

Employee Engagement

The great irony here is that it is impossible to sustain success without the commitment and support of the people you lead. Thus executives who focus exclusively on the management of the business are effectively sabotaging their own legacy. In fact they deserve nothing more than to have a dusty portrait on the wall (and even that is questionable.)

If you need any further evidence of this preoccupation with management, you need look no further than the issue of employee engagement. Surveys continue to show deteriorating employee engagement, despite all efforts to redress the problem. The costs to individual businesses are high, but the macro-economic effect is equally astounding, amounting to more than £64.5 billion in the UK and more than $300 billion in the USA. (Just imagine what those funds could do to alleviate the effects of climate change!)

The fact is that the continual focus on productivity and performance demeans the very people on whom it depends. Consequently, by trying to manage your people rather than showing the leadership that is required, you sabotage your own efforts.

This is actually a lose-lose situation because, as a leader, you actually win the effort of your people by inspiring them. Through articulating, practising and reinforcing identified values, you encourage others to share those values and they end up doing what is necessary, not because you demand it, but because they want to. Consequently, by demanding rather than inspiring, you reverse this force. This makes them feel unappreciated, nullifies any feeling they might have of "making a difference" and exacerbates their lack of engagement.

How to Reverse the Trend and Create Your Own Legacy

Of course the good news is that if you reverse this imbalance and develop your leadership skills you automatically create a win-win situation. You not only become a better leader, but you become a better manager too, with the results to show for it and a legacy you can be proud of.

This is not as hard as you may think and the solution has been around for at least the past 60 years. It is called employee-ownership and entails giving your employees a stake in the business. Companies wholly or partly owned by their employees constitute a £25 billion sector of the UK economy and - according to statistics from the Employee Ownership Association - outperform the FTSE All-Share Index by 10%. Of course that won't surprise you because it is quite obvious that ownership creates the highest level of employee engagement.

What is surprising is that less than 10% of all companies offer employee-ownership. Given the need to do more to reverse the declining trend of employee engagement and the focus on improving performance, it would seem that this is the obvious solution to your most pressing dilemmas. So why haven't you embraced it?

You may have considered it and decided against it, and for perfectly valid reasons. The fact is that there are really only 2 basic models of employee-ownership and they both have their limitations. Direct ownership has limited appeal except for companies whose shares are publicly traded. Even then it is usually only the highest paid employees who can afford to consider it. Indirect ownership may be more widely practical but the ownership link can be more tenuous.

Whatever your rationale for not embracing employee-ownership before now, you will want to reconsider when you learn that there is now a third model.

The new model builds on the popular statement that people are your most important asset. It takes this statement literally and values your people as assets for balance sheet purposes. Of course a balance sheet has to balance, so the corresponding account for Human Assets is Human Capital. And by including this as part of owners' equity you:

1. Make every employee a co-owner in your business with a stake equal to their asset value
2. Achieve this with no significant cost to either your business or the individual
3. Create a direct link between their work and the business' performance, thereby creating the platform for greater engagement
4. Leave current employment practice unchanged and avoid the shortcomings, costs and complexities of the other models.

The benefits of this model are clear, but nevertheless are such that they warrant spelling out. The more obvious ones are:

1. Its inclusiveness for 100% of your people
2. Its consistency and equitability
3. The low-cost of implementation
4. The elimination of any kind of share dealing with the related legal and administrative costs
5. Its applicability to any type or size of company.

Of course, there is also the win-win scenario that results from turning around your current lose-lose situation as described above. This creates the highest level of employee engagement associated with ownership and, in doing so, inspires the shared values that invoke collective leadership and responsibility, and aligns all your organisational endeavours. This reduces the amount of management needed and the level of your personal management effort. What better foundation do you need for your leadership legacy?