A glance back

I still remember Mr Ball teaching us about glaciers. He was my middle school geography teacher, and his lessons could be unexpectedly physical affairs. To demonstrate how a glacier moved across a landscape, he would push against our desks until we, and sometimes the furniture, began moving with it. He taught us about solifluction, too, a perfectly respectable geographical process involving the slow movement of waterlogged soil down a slope. Mr Ball pronounced solifluction with such theatrical relish that, to a room full of teenagers, it sounded faintly obscene. I can still hear him saying it. I doubt he went home after that particular lesson thinking he had just created a formative educational experience. It was not the final class of the year, an inspirational speech or one of those cinematic moments in which a teacher stands before an enraptured class and changes everybody’s life. It was geography. On an ordinary day. We were learning about dirt moving downhill. Yet forty years later, I remember him.

You probably have a Mr Ball of your own. A teacher whose enthusiasm made a subject come alive. A coach who expected something from you before you expected it from yourself. A manager who took your slightly ridiculous idea seriously enough for you to try it. Perhaps somebody who listened differently, trusted you with something before you were quite sure you were ready, or said one sentence that quietly lodged itself somewhere and never entirely left.

Not all such memories are warm. We also remember the teacher whose response taught us not to put our hand up again, the coach who humiliated rather than stretched us, or the manager whose reaction to bad news taught an entire team to stop bringing it. The imprint does not have to be positive to last. For years, I suspect we think about these people largely from our own side of the encounter: what they gave us, taught us, awakened in us or perhaps diminished in us. Then, somewhere along the way, the perspective changes.

We have been leaving rooms too. Every meeting we finish, every conversation we walk away from, every difficult piece of news we receive, every question we ask, every person we encourage or interrupt, every decision we make in front of others leaves something behind. Most of these moments will never look remotely significant while they are happening. They are simply the ordinary traffic of organisational life. Which makes me wonder whether we sometimes look for leadership in the wrong places. We look for the big moments: the strategy launch, the difficult decision, the organisational transformation, the speech everybody remembers, the crisis successfully navigated. We talk about leadership legacy as though it sits somewhere at the end of a career, waiting to be assessed once the leader has finally left the building.

Mr Ball makes me wonder about the bits in between. Perhaps leadership asks us to become more present to our own presence: not simply how visible we are while we are in the room, but what actually happens between us while we are there, what remains when we leave, and what those accumulated traces become over time.

When you’re in the room

Leadership advice has a great deal to say about visibility. Be visible. Get out among your people. Walk the floor. Hold the town hall. Visit the sites. Keep communicating. Let people see you. There is good reason for this. A leader who is inaccessible, remote or known primarily through their email signature will struggle to build much of a relationship with the people they lead. Visibility matters. But visibility can only get you into the room. It cannot make anybody in that room present to you.

The distinction matters because leadership presence is sometimes treated almost as a quality the leader possesses and projects: walk into the room with confidence, command attention, speak with authority, communicate clearly, hold yourself well. Yet a leader can do all of those things in front of forty people who have mentally left the building. They may be nodding politely while thinking about the argument they had before work, the deadline waiting on their desk, what they are having for dinner, or why this meeting could have been an email.

A captive audience is not necessarily a present audience. In Human Being, Ashkan Tashvir describes presence as a Way of Being grounded in authentic relatedness: giving our attention and care so fully to another person or matter that genuine connection and mutual understanding become possible. Presence, understood this way, is not simply physical proximity, nor something one charismatic person performs while everybody else receives it. It occurs in relationship. It takes two to tango. It means I can be doing an apparently magnificent job of leading and still not be present with you. Equally, I can bring every ounce of attention, care and curiosity I possess to an encounter and discover that you are not particularly interested in meeting me there. Presence cannot be imposed. There must be some willingness on both sides to enter the encounter, to listen and be listened to, to affect and be affected.

It is why the ordinary moments matter so much. Presence does not only live in the hour set aside for the important conversation. It is in the thirty seconds after somebody tells you something you did not want to hear. It is in whether you keep typing while someone is speaking. It is in what happens to your face when a junior colleague offers an unfinished idea. It is in whether disagreement makes you curious or defensive, whether the mistake becomes an opportunity for judgement or blame, and whether the person standing in your doorway experiences themselves as an interruption or as somebody worth turning towards. None of these moments arrives carrying a little sign saying LEADERSHIP IMPRINT BEING CREATED. 

Mr Ball was not conducting a masterclass in educational legacy when he pushed our desks across the classroom. He was teaching glaciers. Whatever passed between teacher and students that day was sufficiently alive, however, that something remained after the bell rang. That may be the invitation for leaders. Not to turn every encounter into an exhausting exercise in Meaningful Leadership, or to imagine that we must be perfectly attentive every minute of every day. Rather, it is to recognise that we rarely know which moments will matter to somebody else. We may not get to choose which of our leadership moments leave the deepest imprint. We do get to choose how present we are to the ordinary moments while they are happening. And eventually, of course, we leave the room. The interesting question is what stays there.

When you leave the room

Eventually every leader leaves the room. Sometimes only for lunch. Sometimes for a week, a year or another job altogether. The more interesting question is what happens to their leadership when they do. Visibility exists while I can see you. Presence exists in what happens between us. Leadership imprint is what I can still experience after you have gone.

We tend to notice this most clearly when the leader is absent. A complicated issue arises and somebody asks the question they have heard their leader ask a hundred times. A team comes under pressure and still knows what it will not compromise. A junior person challenges an assumption because experience has taught them that disagreement is welcome here. Someone makes a decision without seeking permission because they understand both what matters and the boundaries within which they can act. The leader is nowhere to be found, yet traces of their leadership are everywhere. 

This is what I mean by leadership imprint. It is not a new theory of leadership, nor an argument that people should learn to think exactly as their leader thinks. It is the residue of repeated experience: what people have come to understand about purpose, expectations, standards, relationships and how things are done around here. It can be heard in the questions people ask, seen in what they notice and felt in what happens when things become difficult. 

Importantly, imprint is not automatically positive. A team can learn that mistakes are dangerous, bad news should be softened and difficult decisions are best pushed upwards. People can become highly skilled at anticipating the leader’s preferences while progressively losing confidence in their own judgement. That, too, is something a leader can leave behind. If I leave the room and everybody immediately tries to work out what I would have done, I may have created dependence rather than capability.

The more interesting outcome is that people know what we are trying to achieve, understand what matters and possess enough judgement to respond intelligently to circumstances I may never have encountered. They can distinguish between a principle and my personal preference, between something that genuinely requires escalation and something they can decide themselves. They are not reproducing me. An imprint leaves a trace. A mould dictates the shape.

Most leaders would probably say they want to leave things in good hands. The phrase itself implies trust: I can go. You have this. But good hands are not simply obedient hands. They belong to people capable of exercising judgement when the answer is not obvious. That kind of judgement cannot be transferred in a handover document, nor does it develop simply because a leader tells people to “take more ownership”. Judgement is learned partly by watching and listening, but eventually it has to be exercised. 

Anyone who has watched a child learn to walk knows the difficulty. There is an almost irresistible urge to reach out at the first sign of instability. We know how to keep them upright. We can prevent the bump, shorten the struggle and get them safely to wherever they are going. But if every wobble is met by an adult hand lifting them from the floor, the child becomes exceptionally well supported and not particularly good at walking.

Leadership can work the same way. Someone brings us an unfinished problem and we solve it. A decision is taking longer than we would like and we make it. A colleague heads towards an approach we would not have chosen and we redirect them. Usually there are excellent reasons for doing so. We have more experience. We can see the risk. We know a faster route. Sometimes intervention is exactly what responsible leadership requires. But not every wobble is a fall.

If I continually step in because I can do something faster, better or with greater certainty, I may protect the immediate outcome while weakening something more important: another person’s opportunity to develop judgement. The work gets done, but the capability does not. Trust, then, becomes more demanding than simply saying, “I trust you.” It sometimes means remaining close enough to support without being so close that nobody else gets to find their balance. It means allowing somebody to make a decision differently from the way we would have made it and discovering that different does not necessarily mean wrong. That can be surprisingly difficult for experienced leaders. Expertise creates its own temptation. The more often we have seen something before, the easier it is to believe that our job is to spare other people the long route by giving them the answer. Yet some things cannot be inherited as conclusions. They have to be learned through experience. Judgement and discernment are among them. 

This is another way leadership imprint forms. Over time, people do not simply learn what their leader knows. They experience how questions are approached, how uncertainty is tolerated, how mistakes are handled, what deserves attention and when courage is required. If the relationship has created enough room, they begin developing their own ways of doing those things. They are influenced without becoming replicas.

I think of wet clay. Press your hand into it and something of the encounter remains when you lift your hand away. But the clay is not your hand. It retains its own substance, its own possibilities and eventually its own shape. At some point, the leader has to lift their hand from the clay. Only then do we discover what remains. And sometimes, if we are willing to look, we discover that the people we have led are thinking, deciding, questioning, disagreeing, caring and acting perfectly well without us. Perhaps even better than they did when we were in the room. That is not evidence that our leadership is no longer required. It may be some of the best evidence that it was there in the first place.

The leaders we carry with us

We often talk about standing on the shoulders of giants, although the shoulders beneath us are not always those of famous people. Sometimes they belong to a teacher, a coach, a manager or a leader who saw something in us, stretched us, trusted us or simply showed us another way of being. Their influence can travel much further than we imagined at the time.

I can see this more profoundly in my own leadership. In my first executive leadership role, I worked for a Chief Executive who gave me extraordinary opportunities. He backed ideas that were sometimes sufficiently outlandish that I frightened myself simply by suggesting them. He gave me room to think, create, stretch and have a go, while somehow leaving me with the sense that he was there if I needed him. He did not need to make me into a version of himself. He created room for me to become more capable of being myself.

Decades later, I can still find traces of that experience in how I lead. Not because I consciously ask what he would do, and certainly not because I have reproduced his leadership style. His imprint became part of mine. I can see it in my instinct to give people room, in how much I enjoy somebody arriving with an idea that is not yet entirely sensible, and in my belief that one of the privileges of leadership is helping another person discover that they are capable of more than they thought.

What interests me is how these influences travel. We do not inherit another person’s leadership intact. We absorb some things, reject others, combine them with other experiences and eventually make them our own. Then, often without noticing, we pass something onward. Leadership travels through people in ways organisational charts are particularly bad at capturing.

Perhaps this is where the idea of legacy becomes much less grand and much more immediate. We tend to locate leadership legacy somewhere in the future, imagining what will remain after the final farewell, the retirement speech or the handing over of the office keys. But Mr Ball did not wait until the end of his teaching career to begin leaving his legacy, and my Chief Executive did not wait until one of us left the organisation to begin leaving his. They were laying it down in ordinary encounters while they were still there.

Maybe we have the timing wrong. Legacy does not begin when leadership ends. It accumulates while leadership is happening. That means we do not have to wait until the end of our careers to discover it either. Sometimes we are fortunate enough to see the fruits of our leadership while we are still leading. Someone we once managed handles a difficult conversation with a confidence they did not have when we first met them. A person we backed takes a chance on somebody else. A former colleague asks a question that sounds strangely familiar but has become entirely their own. A team continues to make thoughtful decisions without requiring our presence to do so. There is something rather lovely about that. We spend so much of leadership looking forward: towards the next strategy, target, problem, transformation or role. Legacy is pushed even further ahead, into some imagined future in which we finally have enough distance to assess whether any of it mattered. Perhaps every now and then it is worth looking in the other direction.

Glance back

Try it today. After your next meeting, before disappearing into the next one, glance back. Not necessarily literally, unless you enjoy confusing your colleagues. Take a moment to notice what just happened between you and the people in that room. Did somebody leave more able to think for themselves? Was something made clearer about what matters? Did someone discover that they could disagree with you, bring bad news, admit uncertainty or offer an unfinished idea without being diminished for it? What became more possible because of the way you were present?

Do not expect fireworks. The whole point may be that leadership imprint is usually being created in moments too ordinary to announce themselves as important. Mr Ball was teaching solifluction. Your equivalent might be a ten-minute conversation after a meeting, the way you respond to a mistake, the question you ask instead of supplying an answer, or the moment you resist the temptation to rescue somebody from a perfectly survivable wobble. We rarely know which encounters another person will carry with them.

Glance further back occasionally too. Think about someone you led five, ten or twenty years ago. What are they doing now that they once needed your help to do? What judgement have they developed? What courage, curiosity or confidence became more available to them? Perhaps there are traces of your leadership there. Perhaps there are also things you would now do differently. An imprint does not become worthy merely because it lasts.

This is why I am increasingly less interested in asking leaders what legacy they hope to leave, and more interested in what they are already leaving. Legacy is not only the strategy that survived us, the organisation we transformed or the photograph eventually hanging in a corridor. It can be found in human beings: in what they notice, what they believe they are capable of, how they exercise judgement, how they treat others and what they themselves eventually pass onward.

Every room we leave is, in some small way, practice for eventually leaving altogether. One day we will leave the meeting, the team, the role, the organisation and eventually the profession. But there is no sudden moment on that final day when our leadership transforms into legacy. We have been laying it down behind us all along, in encounters so ordinary that we may not have noticed their significance at the time.

This is the invitation: be more present to the ordinary moments in which your leadership presence is experienced. Visibility may get you into the room, but it cannot determine what happens between you and the people in it. Presence is relational. Imprint is what remains after the encounter. Legacy is what those accumulated traces become over time.

Mr Ball almost certainly had no idea that a geography lesson on an ordinary school day would still be travelling around in my head nearly forty years later. Yet here I am, writing about him. And that makes me wonder about the meeting you left this morning, the conversation you will have this afternoon, or the person who will appear in your doorway tomorrow. None may feel remotely like a legacy moment. 

This is precisely the point. Legacy is accumulated imprint, laid down in encounters that rarely announce their significance while they are happening. Every now and then, glance back. You may already be able to see it.

Dr Jordan Marijana Alexander is a writer, executive advisor and human systems strategist exploring how identity, place, culture and living systems shape participation in the modern world. She works alongside leaders, boards and organisations navigating complex questions of leadership, change and participation, and is the co-founder of RelateAble.Global. If this article has raised questions, sparked reflection or highlighted a decision you’re carrying, you’re invited to book a confidential conversation. You can follow DrJMA on LinkedIn and Engenesis for ongoing essays, reflections and research exploring leadership, identity, belonging and participation.