How Will You Be Remembered?

“Management is doing things right, leadership is doing the right things.” —Peter Drucker

When you come to the end of your career in whatever leadership role you retire from, how will you be remembered? Will the number of people who show up at your retirement party not even fill a telephone booth or will it be a large hall overflowing with those who want to wish you well and thank you for everything you did to contribute to the organization?

Unfortunately, I have worked with some chief fire officers in my career where the only people who showed up at the retirement party was the retiree’s family and those who working in the building so they could get the free food. How sad is it that your subordinates could think so little of you and that you made no contributions to better the organization, but in fact you may have made it worse. For these individuals, that will be their legacy and how they will be remembered for years to come.

The Boy Scouts have a saying: “Leave the campsite better than you found it.” This means making sure you clean up any mess you created. All your trash should be picked up and all camp fires put out, restoring the campsite to its natural state. Even if you arrived and found cans and wrappers left by someone else, it is your responsibility to clean it up.

This saying can also apply to leaders of EMS organizations. Whatever leadership role you find yourself in, whether it is a supervisor, a middle or upper level management position, or maybe the head of the EMS organization, one of your responsibilities is to move the EMS organization forward and leave it better than you found it.

How do you do this? You become a leader instead of a manager.

One question I repeatedly ask is what is the difference between leadership and management? I’ve seen people use these terms interchangeably and I’ve even had people debate me that there is no difference between leadership and management. How wrong they are!

I tell people the difference between leadership and management is that we should lead employees and manage things. We manage budgets, fleets, payroll, inventories and computer systems, but we lead people.

The leaders who fail and their staff cannot wait until they retire lack vision of where the organization should be and, since they have no vision, they cannot share that vision with their subordinates.

Leaders who leave an organization better than they found it learn to create a vision of where the organization should be and then find that one ingredient that motivates people to share in that vision. Just because you create a vision of where the organization should be does not mean that your employees will rubberstamp your vision. You have to be able to share your vision and find a way of getting the employees to buy in to your vision.

Most leaders find a way to get employees to share their vision by empowering them in the process. As President Eisenhower said, “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” President Eisenhower certainly understood this concept. Who else could command millions of troops in battle to conquer Europe and he had never been in battle himself?

You may not care what your employees think about you when you retire. You may just wish to walk out the door on your last day never to be seen again. If you think that, then you were not a leader and you were probably not even a manager. In a leadership position you have a responsibility to lead your organization and your employees, and make your EMS organization successful. If you do not accept this responsibility, you should have stepped down from your position way before your retirement.

When you accept a leadership position, it is not just a title. It is a responsibility that you should fully accept and strive for the success of your EMS organization.