>> Originally published on LinkedIn on March 8, 2016
How do you define and measure successful leadership? Or, put another way, what does success as a leader look like, and how do you know when you've attained it?
Until last weekend, my definition was centered around the idea of how well a person can passionately rally teams in impacting the lives of others. I'd measure how successful I was as a leader by comparing goals to results or counting the number of people affected by my team's work.
But at 12:45am last Sunday morning, I realized that measuring success in this way does not tell the whole story. But more about my epiphany in a bit.
Let me first explain how I got there.
Last year, I was the Public Relations co-chair for Northwestern University Dance Marathon (NUDM)—a 30-hour nonstop dance-athon that celebrates a year-long fundraising effort by more than 1,000 NU undergraduates. My co-chair, Arielle Miller, and I led a team of 50 students in running the marketing, communications and public relations for the largest entirely student-run philanthropy in the nation. In each of the last six years, NUDM has raised more than $1 million for worthy causes such as pediatric cancer, Duchenne muscular dystrophy and, as of last weekend, childhood hunger.
From a public relations standpoint, Arielle and I considered NUDM 2015 a great success: we had secured media coverage for the first time from The Today Show and ABC News, rallied celebrities such as Stephen Colbert, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Mark Wahlberg around our cause, and led social media marketing campaigns that generated at least a $20,000 lift in fundraising. We had set goals for our team and they exceeded every one. Plus, we had loads of fun along the way.
By the year's end, we had raised $1.1 million and wrote the second largest check in our organization's history to support Starlight Children's Foundation. In doing so, we funded the creation of 11 welcoming and kid-friendly hospital environments for chronically ill children in the greater Chicagoland area.
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Fast forward one year. I've graduated and moved on from my NUDM days. Arielle transitioned into a new role as one of the two heads of NUDM 2016, leading an executive board of 20. Two all-star PR committee members from 2015—James Keane and Kalli Koukounas—have replaced Arielle and me as the committee leads for 2016.
Now back to my epiphany. So it's 12:45am and students have now been dancing for 29 hours and 45 minutes without a nap or coffee (a truly miraculous feat). The exhaustion is palpable. Emotions are high. The NUDM tent drips of sweat. Lights flash. Magic is in the air.
As “Light It Up” by Roméo Testa plays faintly in the background, members of the finance committee reveal the final fundraising total digit by digit. A thousand students erupt in tears and cheer for the $1.2 million dollars raised.
It was in this moment of pure elation when two thoughts crossed my mind:
My emotions were bizarrely mixed. While I was unbelievably proud of the accomplishments of NUDM 2016 and the thousands of lives it will change, I couldn’t help but think that I’d come up short last year. My mind raced with new fundraising ideas, marketing strategy tweaks and risks not taken.
Then came my epiphany.
NUDM 2015 had only become a verified success with 2016's triumph. We had set the stage for something bigger and better. We had left the organization in a better place than where we had received it.
It wasn't about what NUDM 2015 had accomplished or about what I personally achieved. It was about the 2015 executive board enabling the 2016 board to do more than we could have even dreamed.