Value the Process: Developing Others

Mark Cole:
Welcome back to the Maxwell Leadership podcast. Now if this is your first time, still welcome back. We’ve been waiting on you. This is the podcast that is committed. We are dedicated to adding value to leaders who multiply value to others. My name is Mark Cole, and today John Maxwell is going to teach us how to value the process when it comes to developing others. After John’s lesson, my co host Traci Morrow and I will John together and discuss the lesson. But also we’ll offer practical ways that you can apply it to your life, your leadership, and the people around you.

Mark Cole:
If you would like to watch this episode on YouTube, or if you would like to download the free bonus resource for this episode, visit maxwellpodcast.com/process. That’s all for now. We’ll be back shortly. But here is John Maxwell.

John Maxwell:
The law of explosive growth says that leaders who develop leaders multiply. I talk about what I call followers math versus leaders math. Followers math is addition and leaders math is multiplication. When we start working with followers, we add. When we start working with leaders, we multiply. In the earlier part of my life, I poured myself into people to get followers. Then one day it occurred to me that if I would work as hard to develop leaders, those leaders could go out and always influence followers. So that if I would work on leaders, leaders would find not only other leaders, but they would find other followers.

John Maxwell:
So let’s talk today about how do you develop people. Let’s say that you get them on your team. You pick somebody with potential. What are you going to do with them when you bring them on your team? Value process more than events. Now, what I have found is most people, they value events more than process. And the reason why is events are fun. Events is where you bring people together. Events are where there’s a lot of inspiration.

John Maxwell:
Now, what I find is people, they get carried away with the events. Nothing wrong with events, by the way. Here’s why this works for your notes. Events are good for decisions. Process is good for development. I am not here teaching you either or on this, it’s both end. Does that make sense? You bring people to events, they make decisions. But after they make decisions, what are we going to do with them? That’s where the development comes in.

John Maxwell:
You see, again, we overestimate what we can do in a day. We underestimate what we can do in a year. We’ve got to look at ourselves and say, okay, what do I see this person becoming? Six months, a year, a year and a half down the road. Now, here’s another one of the laws in my book. Called the law of process. The law of process is very simple. The law of process says leaders develop daily, not in a day. You’ve never seen a leader develop in a day.

John Maxwell:
You’ve never seen a leader become a leader at an event. You don’t become a leader at an event. Now, you may go to an event where you have within you a passion stirred up to become a leader. You say, then how do you develop leaders? You don’t develop leaders with a microwave. You develop leaders with a crock pot. You crock pot your leaders. I didn’t say crock pot. Also, there’s a little bit of that going on, too.

John Maxwell:
You crock pot leaders, they’ve got to simmer. They’ve got to be seasoned. They have to marinate. It takes time. You can grow weeds in just a few days, but if you grow an oak tree, it takes years. Please appreciate the process. When I pastored in San Diego, my whole commitment was to raise up leaders. So if you would have been privileged at any time to come to that church, you would have seen a church of thousands of people.

John Maxwell:
But you would have seen a church literally with hundreds of leaders. We’d have 35, 3600 people on an average Sunday come to that church in attendance. But we had over 700 leaders, 20% of the people in that congregation. And when I say leaders, let me explain to you what I mean by leaders. It took us four years to develop a leader. The first year, I put them on what I call my farm team. For me, the farm team, where I’m talking about how you size up person’s potential. I had to get them around me.

John Maxwell:
So what I would do is when we had spot somebody that looked like they might be an eaglet, we would say, hey, why don’t you come and join me for a year and be on my prayer team? And I would take them away, and I would take them to a retreat, and I’d talk to them about the things of my heart and what I wanted to see happen in that congregation. I would watch for those that would migrate to me. I would watch for those who would begin to have the same dream and the same heart and the same feel for things that I had. And after having them on my farm team for a year, if I thought that they had that kind of potential, I’d say, now I want you to come on my board for three years. At the end of the third year, you go off the board. And so on the first year, I would teach them the basics of leadership. The second year, we would practice the basics of leadership. The third year, I would have them pass on the basics of leadership to someone else.

John Maxwell:
That was an eaglet in the congregation. And by the end of the fourth year, the third year, being on the board, after three years of leadership training, in the last session we had together before they went off, and I always brought a third on and a third off every year. Third, new board members, third off. That’s how I kept training all the time. And at the end of their third year, the last thing we did before we said goodbye to the one third that had now for four years been trained as a leader is we asked them, okay, now that you’re going off the board, what will be your leadership responsibility? They would tell us what they’re going to do as far as a leadership responsibility. They would tell us who they were going to bring on the board to replace them. Whoa. Fact, when we began to develop them in one on one training, before I ever sat down and said, I’m going to pour my life into you, we always asked a question.

John Maxwell:
What the question was, before I tell you I’m going to pour my life into you, you have to answer this question. When I’m done pouring my life into you, will you find somebody to pour your life into? And if they said they would not find someone else? We never trained them. We didn’t want any training, any development to go to a dead end street. And then we would spot these potential leaders. And as I was raising up good leaders around me, I had them start training and start teaching other leaders. Now, you’ve got to understand this system. If you came down to Atlanta, Georgia, and you came down and saw what we had in this organization, you got to understand, we only have about 120 employees, but you ought to see that place. All 120 are on a growth plan.

John Maxwell:
They get together every month and we teach a growth lesson, and then we get into small groups and we talk about how we’re going to apply that growth to their life. And then I have people that have been very good leaders over the years. They now mentor one on one and in groups of two and three other groups. And then I have the Dan Rylands and the Tim Elmores that specifically take seven at a time per year through leadership development. Now, the reason I’ve got an incredible passion for this, because I know what happens once you really commit to developing leaders. A little bit earlier, Skip was talking in the introductions about that I was always growing, and I thought to myself, oh, I wish I had my small suitcase down here, because if I’d have my small suitcase down here. If you went into the back flap of that suitcase, you would find five portable books. These are these quote books that you can get.

John Maxwell:
I’ve got several of my own, but you’ve seen them in Hallmark. You’re just quote books. You’d find five of them. Do you know what I’ll do tomorrow morning when I get on that plane at 530? I’ve got to go to Detroit. And then I go from Detroit to Atlanta. I’ll take those five quote books, and I’ll go through every one of them, and I’ll mark the good quotes, and I’ll pull them out of the portable, throw the rest of the book away. By the time the wheels of that plane touch Atlanta at nine, five tomorrow morning, I will have pulled out of those five books anywhere from 100 to 140 outstanding quotes that I will have already marked. And I’ll put it in Linda’s folder.

John Maxwell:
And by 1030 tomorrow morning, in my own home office, on the credenza behind me, in the place that I have Linda’s pile of stuff, I’ll put those 120 to 140 quotes in the next couple of days. They’ll all be filed category wise. I do it every day. You keep learning. You keep growing. You take what you learn and you pass it on. You see when you discover the joy of learning, and then you discover the joy of sharing what you’ve learned, and then you discover the joy of helping the person that you share what you learn, turn around and share what you shared with them with someone else that they have just learned. All of a sudden, you develop this awesome synergy, this high morale in your organization, until people can hardly wait to be around you because they know that you’ve got something fresh and new and different, and that’s going to help them in their life.

John Maxwell:
Think about it, folks, think about it. Are there not some people, you haven’t seen them for 20 years, but if you saw them tomorrow, they would have nothing new to say. You would just say, you know, they’re still in the same place, singing the same song. We don’t want to be that kind of people. If we’re going to develop people, we have to understand the value of the process. Hey, John Maxwell here. I’m in the studio. We’ve been recording all day, and I was thinking about, really one of my very favorite experiences that we have, and that is called day to grow.

John Maxwell:
If you want to grow, you want to grow in every area of your life. I tell people all the time, you don’t want to go to something. You want to grow to something. But if you’re passionate about personal growth, development your team and growing them, you do not want to miss day to grow. I’m going to have some real players with me, Dion Sanders, Jamie Kern, Lima, myself. Oh, my gosh. You don’t want to miss it. So market, come and see us on day to grow.

John Maxwell:
I will promise you this. You come and bring your team. At the end of the day, you’ll come up and shake my hand and say, one of the best days I’ve ever invested in for myself and for my team. I’ll see you there.

Mark Cole:
Hey, welcome back, everybody. Man. Traci, just as we are right in the middle of month one of 2024, I’m listening to this lesson and truly being challenged by two things. One, the power, the value, as John says, of process. Get a process about something. He talked a long time about his process of content and filing, but also he talked about the process of developing others. And so, Traci, it’s going to be fun. I know you’re passionate about developing others.

Mark Cole:
You’ve built businesses and you’ve built it by developing those around you. I certainly want that to be true about me and my leadership. So I’m looking forward to launching out to a great subject today.

Traci Morrow:
Yeah, this is a great subject. And I feel like, you know, sometimes we’ve been learning from John for a long time and we hear him share a story in a new way, and I heard that today and we’ll get to that a little bit later. But what he first started out with was talking about the difference between in his early years of leadership as followers math versus leadership math. And he said followers math is addition and leadership math is multiplication. And so I’m just curious. I would love to chat a little bit with you and hear your thoughts. When John moved from addition to multiplication, I feel like every leader has to do that. Every leader gets to that point.

Traci Morrow:
So for our leaders who are listening in and maybe they are in an addition season, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with addition because I think it’s necessary for part of our leadership development. Would you say that there in your experience or through either conversation with John or your personal experience of developing leaders, is there an age or a stage of your leadership career where that crossover becomes.

Mark Cole:
You know, it’s so interesting. And you and I talked just a brief moment about this right before we started recording, after we had heard John. Today, I’m going to launch into this, Traci, and we’ll come back and visit it maybe once or twice. But it’s so interesting because, yeah, I think there is a season in a leader’s life to where they need to think about establishing themselves as a leader more than replacing themselves as a leader. And John certainly talked about here in succession, he talked about in establishing and passing on legacy, you’ve got to develop others. I mean, that’s the underscoring point that John is making. But there’s a time in a leader’s life to where he or she needs to be creating something worth extending. In other words, so many times I’ve watched a lot of leaders say, who’s going to replace me? What’s my succession plan? I’m going, there’s nothing that needs to be succeeded.

Mark Cole:
There’s nothing successful. So we don’t need succession. And as leaders, I think we have to have a fine line of understanding. I know that for me, I worked as John’s CEO for 13 years, and then there came a time to where I became my own CEO of my company.

Traci Morrow:
Right.

Mark Cole:
And as John’s CEO, I was constantly thinking, who can replace me? Who can work myself out of this job? Who can I replace me with? And I thought about that often, and I was cultivating people. I was developing people all along the way. Well, then I became an owner CEO, and I quit thinking like that. And I’ll tell you why not. Because it’s not right, and it’s not important in the value and process that John’s talking about now. I had to establish something worth extending. And as owner CEO, there is a new responsibility that succession is not my thinking. Succeeding is my thinking.

Mark Cole:
Having something that is successful. And I think it’s important personally as a leader that’s, to this day, just still working to be successful, that we don’t get the two confused, that we don’t try to do succession before we have success. We get successful, and then we think about succession.

Traci Morrow:
Oh, that is so good. I am taking so many notes. I’m sure you are, too, friends. I love creating something worth extending. That’s a great comment because I think so many of us are so excited to get to the leadership phase, to leadership math, that we forget we aren’t ready to be thinking about succession. And we think we want to be a good leader. We want to be a good leader. But first we need to concentrate on having something worth creating, something worth extending.

Traci Morrow:
So. Oh, I so appreciate that so much.

Mark Cole:
You know, Traci, before we move, know, John talks about this idea of followers math as addition leaders. Math is multiplication, right? It goes along with. John wouldn’t have said this at the beginning of his life, too, because he was just glad to meet anybody, follower or leader. But the more mature, the more successful John has become. He uses statements like, you’ve got to earn my time. Everybody gets my love. I love everyone, but you’ve got to earn my time as a leader. And that really coincides with what John’s teaching here about followers.

Mark Cole:
Math is addition, but leader math is multiplication. I can tell you that when I walk into a meeting with somebody that I believe has great followership, the expectation when I walk out of the meeting and the content and the way I engage in the meeting is different than if I’m speaking to a leader. I had a leadership meeting the other day to where I said, okay, guys, just everybody close your eyes for a minute. Do you remember when you were following somebody? Do you remember when you needed them to make it simple for you? You remember when you didn’t want to be disappointed, you just wanted to be congratulated, congratulated. And they were all closing their eyes, and I said, okay, that’s not today. Open your eyes. You’re all leaders. And I’m getting ready to talk to you like leaders.

Mark Cole:
I wouldn’t say this if you were not leaders. I would say it differently because you were followers. But we missed the ball. We did something here that is not acceptable. And I’m not going to sugarcoat it, not going to talk to you about as if I were a follower or you were a follower. I’m going to talk to you as a leader. Here’s why I did that so often. As leaders, we don’t treat leader with the dignity that their responsibility expects or demands of us.

Mark Cole:
We, as the senior leader, don’t let them feel the weight of a course correction or a missed deadline or a missed goal too often, especially leaders like you and I, Traci, who’s very people oriented and people centric. And I’m not talking about being nasty. I’m not talking about forgetting to be kind. That’s not what I’m talking about. But I am also absolutely talking about a leadership tone that we should talk to other leaders with that puts expectation and responsibility. One more point on this. John told me the other day. He said, mark, here’s your problem.

Mark Cole:
You walk into a meeting full of leaders, and you walk out with more weight than when you walked in. He said, when you walk into a meeting with followers, it’s okay. Walk out with more weight. When you walk into a room with leaders, the senior leader needs to walk out with less weight because people have come around her or him and helped carry the weight of missed expectation or future opportunity.

Traci Morrow:
That’s right in line with what he’s talking about of the process of development. It’s not like all of a sudden the leaders that you’re developing go from follower to leader with a snap. It is the process of you beginning to share the burdens of leadership, not necessarily the glory of leadership. Those moments seem to be few and far between. I think people think of leadership as the glory moments, but really those are few and far between. It is sharing the burden of leadership, sharing the responsibility, the misses of leadership as a team. And as you begin to slowly release that for them to begin to carry that, that is part of that process that’s developing daily, not in a day. And why do you think I think this is such a hard decision for leaders to shift from being someone who develops followers to developing other leaders.

Traci Morrow:
Because I know it. Certainly I’ll speak for myself personally. When you are in your sweet spot in the zone, when you are a leader and you are leading followers, and you are kind of directing and making decisions, and they are following and executing those decisions that you’ve made, it seems that you get into a rhythm, a leadership rhythm of leading followers that flows because you start having success, you start hitting marks and you start operating as a great team. But when you make the decision to go from followers math to leaders math, that pace slows greatly. And I think that was one of the hardest things. I can remember having a conversation with you and John once about that process of deciding to no longer lead followers, but to lead leaders. Because it means you are slowing your pace to guide somebody in an area where you are in your sweet spot, running at a fast clip. To slowing your pace to develop leaders much slower.

Traci Morrow:
Not in a day where you can finish something in a day, but daily developing people to do something that takes longer than if you were to do it yourself. So why do you think? Maybe I just answered the question myself, but expand a little bit. Why do you think that is such a hard decision? And sometimes people never decide to switch over to leaders math. Why do you think that that is such a tough decision for people to make?

Mark Cole:
Most people that see themselves in the people business, so leaders that see themselves in the running a business, that people are a commodity or a liability or an asset, they are not the kind of people that we gravitate to. Traci, you and I, we’re in the people development business. People ask me all the time, sometimes on a plane. I decide to get cute. Hey, what do you do? And I say, I’m in manufacturing. They say, what do you manufacture? I say, leaders. And they huh? And it just creates this conversation.

John Maxwell:
Start.

Mark Cole:
But let’s make no mistake, I’m in the people business. Most people that love this podcast. And hey, welcome back, all of you that took the holidays off, we’re glad to have you back. Glad you made the podcast a part of your daily journey. Again, we missed you over the holidays. But most of the people that listen to this podcast, they listen because they see people as valuable and they want to add greater value to them. So now let’s start with that premise. To answer your question, what makes it so hard? Well, we’re in the people business, and to classify somebody as not worth as much of my time as the next person is very, very hard for us to say.

Mark Cole:
Oh, I’m just all about leaders and I’m not about people. We’re in the people development business. So by the very fact that we gravitate to John Maxwell’s message or we love this podcast, means that we see all people equal and valuable and worth spending time on. But then when you come to a leadership decision to where you have to give an account for an hour spent and an hour in this environment with this group of people, or an hour in this environment with this group of people, the return on time is exponential. When you spend time with leaders, here’s the greatest way to illustrate that, Traci we have a nonprofit called Equip and the Maxwell Leadership foundation. Many years ago, John established our nonprofit to focus on leaders. We go into any country, any community, and we focus on the top 10% because we believe influence trickles down, not trickles up. And if we have limited resources, and we do, if we have limited time and we do, we’ve chosen to spend our resources and we’ve chosen to spend our time with people that will give us a greater return on trickling down transformation.

Mark Cole:
Do we frown on people that feed hungry and go to the bottom 10%? No. In fact, many of my personal dollars go there. But our focus as a leadership development organization goes toward where we will get the greatest return on the limited time that we have to spend there. Leaders, you’ve got to learn how to be accountable to the time you spend with people and not feel guilty when you have to make a choice between spending time investing in a leader and in time spending investing in a follower, it is not a humanity issue. It is a stewardship issue of your time. If you’re called to leadership like we are.

Traci Morrow:
That’s good. It’s a stewardship issue for sure. And we’re all in the manufacturing business. Yes. So now we can all use that. We can all be spreading that around. So kind of shifting gears. When he talked about, I love when he said events are good for decisions, the process is good for development, I feel like that’s sort of shifting from being a director to a know.

Traci Morrow:
A director just gives direction and people just follow those directions where a guide really shows you what steps to take step by step by step. I’ve said it before. I heard John say one time, or Kevin Meyer say about John, that someone who John has mentored for years, Kevin is a friend of the podcast and a great leader. And he said that when John takes an intuitive leader step, the average person who is learning to lead needs that step broken down into ten actionable steps. And so guiding somebody is a part of breaking down the process of what we do intuitively as a leader. And I found that a very difficult thing to break down. I can remember a team member saying to me one time, Traci, could you just break down what it is that you do intuitively in that moment? And I was like, wow, intuitively means I did it without thinking. So to have to think down and break that down into steps, that’s actually very difficult to break that down to guide somebody else.

Traci Morrow:
So I’m curious, Mark, is there a mini mark coal? I know you kind of hit on it at the beginning and we talked about it before we got onto the podcast. Is there like a mini mark coal that you are developing right now? Where are you at in your developing part of your if you are developing someone kind of for succession or are you not there yet? I loved what you shared with us a little bit before, with me a little bit before. And I would love to hear you share with our podcast friends.

John Maxwell:
Yeah.

Mark Cole:
You know, I mentioned a little bit earlier in the show that I think as an owner CEO, I think I’m still in the development demonstrating success phase of my leadership. And I don’t think you ought to worry about succession if there’s nothing successful to extend. So while as CEO for years with somebody else’s company, with John’s company, I looked at people all the time at developing them to take my place. I haven’t done that with great intensity. I’ve always got ideas, I’ve always got thoughts. I’ve got people that I’m developing within my mind. But there’s not a stated process or even an individual or individuals that I’m working in that particular area to say, hey, extend my legacy as an owner CEO. I think I still need to demonstrate success, however.

Traci Morrow:
Right?

Mark Cole:
If you looked at 2023 and what I started 2023 doing compared to what I’m doing in 2024, I have been successful at establishing succession in the areas of finance and strategy for Maxwell leadership enterprise. So in other words, leaders don’t just look at succession from a positional standpoint. My whole position has to have a succession plan. Look at succession in the form of responsibilities and tasks as well. And I have a CFO that is absolutely empowered to make financial decisions that I’m not even empowered to make anymore. I have truly worked myself out of a job, and as it relates to some components of the job of my organization, I have submitted myself to the person that succeeded me in what I was doing twelve months ago. So, leaders, as we look at 2024, as we look at this bright, brilliant year ahead of us, where are the areas? It may not be an entire organization, it may not be your entire position, but where are you working on succession and how are you doing it? I love what John shared, Traci, about his board and about high potential. He called them eaglets.

Traci Morrow:
Yeah, I kind of had to take.

Mark Cole:
A minute, what’s an eaglet? But I do know what an eaglet is. But I’ve heard of leaders being considered eagles, but not almost potential leaders being eaglets. But I think that’s a cute way to look at it.

Traci Morrow:
I do, too.

Mark Cole:
But John said he had a really rigorous process of taking an eaglet, seeing if they would respond to his vision. Those that did, put him on the board, the first year they were learning the board. The second year they were doing stuff of the board. The third year they were replacing themselves. I love that succession. We need to be doing that same thing that John is doing with his high potential people at a board level. We need to be doing that with responsibilities that we know. One of the things that I love about John is he not only gives us a book like developing the leader within you, which talks about being a leader on the inside, he wrote a book many years ago called the Leader, developing the leaders around you.

Mark Cole:
We did a 2.0 on that book, too, just like we did developing the leader within you. And it’s called the leader’s greatest return. And what is a leader’s greatest return? It is developing others so that they can take what you did further, faster and more effective. That’s the greatest return. It’s when a leader can step back and see the next generation or the next person build on what they’ve done and take it even further. So John wrote this book, the leader’s greatest return. It went so well to leaders that wanted to develop others and to value the process of others that we created an online course for it. You can find it right now on maxwellleadership.com.

Mark Cole:
It’s $499 and it will help you develop the next generation. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you podcast listeners. If you’ll go to the show notes, that $499 kit, our digital process, that digital course, we’ll give it to you that’s listening to the podcast, we’ll give it to you for $99. And how valuable is it for you podcast listeners to invest in yourself so that you can invest in others that will go farther, faster and with more effectiveness than you? So go take advantage of that. It’s in the show notes the leader’s greatest return online course. We’ll put it in there for $99. But Traci, back to my point. When we as leaders begin to pour ourself into others, not only is the greatest return there, but I’ll tell you the other thing that’s there is it frees us up to do the next greatest assignment that only we can do.

Mark Cole:
So we do get benefit. It’s not just for the organization’s benefit. It’s not for the developing eaglet, as John says benefit. It’s for us as leaders that we can go and take on the next assignment and let somebody else lead what we’ve been leading.

Traci Morrow:
I had never heard him talk. I mean, I’ve heard John talk, know, work yourself out a job, mentor yourself out of job. But I never heard of him describing his farm team and developing his eaglets. And I thought that was so interesting to be so specific that he literally had people replacing themselves and picking their replacement. It really gives such an exact example of how you can develop your leaders to do something like that and how that might look in your own organization, podcast listeners, as you are listening. How can I do that? How can I duplicate that in my own leadership? So as we close out, I have one last question. He was talking about shifting from this math, and I just would like to just really end on that as an exclamation point. I think no matter where our listeners are, whether they are a young teenager starting out in their leadership journey, or someone in their twenty s, thirty s, forty s, and their sixty s and seventy s beyond, we can pass on what we’re learning at any stage of our leadership journey.

Traci Morrow:
But there has been in my life. I know there has been in yours. And John talks about his a stage where we shift from the high competition, not saying we don’t feel competitive at this phase of our life, but where we shift from competing against. We see the people we work with or the people we’re in business with as competitors, but our mindset shifts from competing to seeing the potential in others. And I really do think that there is a maturity that comes from that. We talked about different ages or stages in your leadership, but do you think that that shift of looking from seeing somebody as your competition to seeing the potential in them, would you say that that is the first sign that your math is changing, perhaps for somebody who’s like, wow, what phase am I in? I’m still viewing people. I’m still in that competitive leadership, that place where I’m leading followers. At what point is it too late? Am I too late? Am I too old? Should I be farther along than I am? What can people be looking for to know that it’s time to shift from being successful? Not that we should ever shift from being successful to looking more towards succession and developing others around us?

Mark Cole:
I don’t know. So my mind went two different ways as you were talking there.

Traci Morrow:
Okay.

Mark Cole:
One is with the maturity of going from competing people to completing people. The maturity of that. I don’t know if it’s a math equation or a motive equation. I think so many times as we’re trying to prove ourself and our worth, we see other people as competitors because we’re wanting to prove our worth. And the motive behind our worth should be so that others will benefit from our leadership. I’ve watched people mature in their leadership, that they’ve realized the significance of being selective in how they spend their time. But their motive didn’t change. And they saw people as objects to help them get where they need to go.

Mark Cole:
So they spent more time with a higher influence people, not because they were trying to give them an opportunity, but because they were trying to get a greater return on their time spent. They still had a motive issue. I’ve seen people that never could climb the corporate ladder because they were too busy boosting everyone else and never took the first rung themselves. It’s a motive issue. I think we have to balance it out between motive and math. As John was saying in the way that I took your question, and that is truly, leadership is about others. Our brand of leadership is about others. We believe the greatest leaders are the greatest servants.

Mark Cole:
We believe the greatest leaders never rely on position to get things done. They rely on influence to get things done. We don’t believe you can increase influence by getting a bigger position, only we believe you have to provide a greater sense of other people winning to gain influence. And so the math, yes, is absolutely important in just the balls and strikes and the success and not success of an hour a minute spent leader. Keep a good motive and spend time with leaders. They’ll give you a greater return. That’s not a motive issue. That’s a stewardship, a math issue.

Mark Cole:
But you should always be spending your time so that others around you will win. So the reason I spend time with leaders on a given day rather than a follower on a given day is because if I will impact that leader, many more followers will be impacted by doing that. It is a return on time of impacting people. So I love that you did that, Traci. I’m reminded of Angel. Angel listened to a podcast that we had called the Grounded Leader, by the way. We’ll put that in the show notes if you want to hear that, because angel, that was a great podcast. But here’s what angel said, and I want to wrap up our session today with Angel’s response.

Mark Cole:
He said, this was an extraordinary episode. Again, the grounded leader is what angel is talking about. I always listen from Spotify while walking. Today’s episode touched me to my core. I do believe in calling and humility. Going back to motive, I believe in calling and humility. That’s my driving force. That’s my motive.

Mark Cole:
It’s what Angel’s saying. Thank you, John, Mark, and Traci. You are all a part of my pool of mentors that contribute to my growth every day. And angel, I’ll say to you, I’ll say to anybody listening to this podcast, that when you can develop others and get a process around developing others, it may be John’s four year farm league process, it may be mine, finding certain areas that I need to work myself out of a job. But if you will commit to a process of finding and refining leaders, your greatest days are ahead. It’s a guarantee. The leader’s greatest return, as I talked about earlier, is when he can find somebody to empower that will take your influence to the next level. That’s what we’re about here at Maxwell Leadership podcast.

Mark Cole:
We want to bring powerful, positive change because everyone deserves to be led well.