John Maxwell is well known for stating that he wants to “add value” to those he leads and mentors. Maxwell’s “Law of Addition”, from his classic book The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, states that leaders add value by serving others. That law, which is what I believe servant leadership is all about, is my favorite law from what is one of my favorite leadership books. Leaders are there to serve their followers, not the other way around. Maxwell tells us that when you serve others, their success becomes your success.  But what does it actually mean to “add value” to others?  

Maxwell tells us that if you are a leader, you will have either a positive or a negative impact on the people you lead. How can you tell what that impact is? He tells us that there is one critical question to ask: Are you making things better for the people who follow you? If not, you are not adding value and your followers will be inclined to look for someone else to lead them. Good leaders want to make things better for those who follow them. They want to assist them with their daily work and with their long-term development.
I’ve always enjoyed being in mentoring relationships. The key to a successful mentoring relationship is being able to add value to the mentee. Each mentoring relationship will be necessarily be different, based on the specific needs of the mentee. I will always ask how I can help them. Leaders can add value by sharing their experiences and helping to address questions that the mentee brings to them.
As a leader in an IT department who didn’t have an IT background, I knew that there were areas in which I would not be able to add value to team members. For example, it would not make sense to put me in leadership over a software developer team. I didn’t have the knowledge or experience to add value to them. Maxwell writes that as a leader, your best place to be in an organization is where you can serve others best. The specifics will depend on vision, talent, opportunities, and organization, but the intention should always be the same—to add value.
I found that I could best add value to teams in less technical areas of the department such as learning, resource coordination and project planning. One thing I tried to do to increase the value I could add was to grow in my knowledge of the subject areas that I was responsible for leading teams. One way I did that was to get involved with the professional organization that aligned with those areas. Another was to take professional education classes associated with those subject areas. Without some knowledge of the work that my team members were doing, I wasn’t going to be able to add value to them.
As a leader, what do you do to add value to your followers?

Note:  Taken from my new book:

A LEADER WORTH FOLLOWING: 40 Key
Leadership Attributes and Applications to Master