Seven olive trees

Today we planted seven olive trees along the drive to our house in the Algarve.
The trees are already about 10 years old and, if they’re looked after well, will outlive me by decades, perhaps even centuries.

There’s something rather humbling and exhilarating about planting something that you know you may never see reach its full potential. But others will after me.  
And that makes me happy.

In life and work one of the best things we can do for ourselves is to plant things for people who come after us.
We tend to measure our leadership impact through what happens while we’re in charge.
Revenue growth. Profitability. Share price. New clients. Bigger teams. Successful projects.
They’re all important.

But perhaps another measure of leadership is what continues to grow after you’ve gone.

The people you’ve developed.
The leaders you’ve helped create.
The culture you’ve shaped.

The opportunities you’ve created for people who may eventually go on to achieve far more than you did.

The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson called this ‘generativity’ and described it as the motivation to support and guide future generations.   
A 2021 meta-analysis covering 48 studies and more than 15,000 people found that generativity is positively associated with a range of desirable work, career and personal outcomes, including stronger motivation and sense of purpose.

I’ve spent a lot of my working life building businesses, leading teams and trying to make things happen.
But the times in my life when I have been helping others learn and thrive have been some of the times I have felt most fulfilled.

And in my coaching work, I’m increasingly interested in what happens when the focus shifts from doing it yourself to helping other people do it themselves.

A founder who is still the person everyone turns to.
A senior executive who needs to develop a team that can operate without them.
A leader who has learned a huge amount over their career and wants to find a way to pass those lessons on to the people coming behind them.

We explore questions like:

Who are you developing to be even better than you?
Where are you still holding on because it’s easier to do it yourself?
Who could you help today to prepare for tomorrow?

And perhaps the biggest one:
What do you want to leave behind?

Which brings me back to my olive trees.

Someone first planted them 10 years ago.
I don’t know who.
But they did the hard work of nurturing the saplings in their early years, and now I’m lucky enough to watch them to grow into adult trees.

One day, someone else will drive up the driveway and enjoy the trees we planted this week.
I’ll probably never meet them.
And somehow, I quite like that.