Frances Frei: The Impact That Outlasts You
This year, the Laidlaw community welcomed its first-ever cohorts of Scholars at Harvard, NYU Abu Dhabi and MIT, three new beginnings at universities the programme had never reached before. There is something fitting about marking that with words from Frances Frei, one of Harvard Business School's most influential voices on leadership, which turn on the impact a leader leaves behind. Her definition has almost nothing to do with the leader themselves:
Frances Frei: "Leadership, at its core, is about making other people better as a result of your presence and making sure that the impact lasts in your absence."
A Definition That Points Away From the Leader
Frei is one of Harvard's most influential voices on leadership, known for her work on trust and for studying how the best leaders create the conditions for everyone around them to do their finest work. What stands out in her definition is where it places the emphasis. It says almost nothing about the leader themselves, their vision, their authority, their command of a room, and everything about the people they lift and the good that carries on after them. Leadership, on this view, is something you can only really see once someone has left, in whether the place and the people kept flourishing without them.
What This Asks of You
If you are one of the fifteen beginning at Harvard this summer, or a scholar anywhere in the community with a research project or a Leadership in Action placement ahead of you, Frei's definition is worth taking with you into it. The instinct at the start is to measure the work by what happens while you are doing it, the findings you gather, the progress you can point to at the end. Frei asks something more demanding. Will the people you worked alongside be better for it, and will what you built keep going once you have moved on? A project shaped around that question tends to look different from one built only to succeed while you are there, and it is a good question to sit with now, at the beginning, while the shape of the work is still yours to decide.
Values in Focus
Frei's message speaks to the Laidlaw value of being #Good and the Oxford Character Project virtue of #Humanity. Being good, in leadership, means measuring your work by the difference it makes to other people rather than by what it earns you, and building things whose benefit outlasts your own involvement. Humanity, in Frei's framing, is the recognition that a leader exists for the people they lead, and the care to leave them, and the work they share, better than you found them.
A Call to Reflect
As you consider Frances Frei's words, we invite you to reflect and share in the comments: think of someone whose influence stayed with you long after they had gone. What did they do that lasted?