One of the principles I carry with me into every workday is deceptively simple: leave the world better than I found it. Leave people better than they were before they met me. This sounds like something you’d find on a motivational poster, and I understand the skepticism that might provoke. But I’ve found that when you internalize this as an operating principle rather than a platitude, it fundamentally changes how you show up : in meetings, in one-on-ones, in hallway conversations, and in the quiet moments where no one is watching. It becomes a lens through which you evaluate your own contributions, and it raises the bar in ways that compound over time.
The practical expression of this principle is straightforward: in every interaction, I try to find ways to add value to other people’s lives. Not in a performative way, and not in a way that centers my own expertise or opinion. Simply by asking myself, before and during every conversation, what can I contribute here that makes this better? Sometimes the answer is obvious : I have relevant experience, or I can connect someone to a resource they need. But more often, the answer requires a kind of creative humility that I think many leaders underestimate.
You Don’t Need to Be the Expert to Add Value
One of the most common traps I see technology leaders fall into is silence or disengagement when the conversation moves outside their area of deep expertise. A CTO sits in an architecture review for a system they didn’t design, or joins a product discussion about a domain they’re less familiar with, and they assume they have little to offer. I’ve felt this myself : that momentary sense that you’re just taking up space. But I’ve learned that this instinct is almost always wrong, and acting on it is a missed opportunity not just for you, but for everyone in the room.
Even when the technical subject matter is beyond your depth, there are dimensions of value that are almost always available to you:
- Ask questions from the customer’s perspective. Engineers and product managers can become so immersed in implementation details that they lose sight of the person who will actually use the thing they’re building. Simply asking “how would a customer experience this?” or “what would this feel like to someone encountering it for the first time?” can redirect an entire conversation in a productive way.
- Surface risks that others are too close to see. When you’re deep in a problem, you develop blind spots. Someone with fresh eyes , even without domain expertise , can often see risks, dependencies, or failure modes that the team has unconsciously accepted. I’ve found that some of my most valuable contributions in technical discussions have been questions like “what happens if this doesn’t work as expected?” or “have we thought about how this interacts with what the other team is building?”
- Improve the relationships in the room. This one is underappreciated. Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is notice that someone hasn’t spoken, and invite them in. Or recognize that two people are talking past each other and gently reframe the disagreement. Or simply validate someone’s concern that others dismissed too quickly. These are not small things ; they shape the health of your organization in ways that compound far beyond any single meeting.
- Provide context that connects the work to the bigger picture. Teams working on specific problems don’t always have visibility into the strategic landscape. You can add value simply by saying “this connects to something I heard from the board last week” or “the sales team is seeing something similar from a different angle.” Context is one of the most undervalued contributions a leader can make.
The Compounding Effect of Consistent Contribution
What I’ve observed over many years is that this principle, applied consistently, creates a kind of gravitational pull. When people know that every interaction with you will leave them with something useful , a new way to think about a problem, a connection they didn’t have before, or simply the feeling that someone genuinely listened , they begin to seek you out. Not because you’re the smartest person in the room, but because you’re the person who makes the room smarter. There is an enormous difference between those two things, and I’ve found that the latter is far more valuable to an organization than the former.
This also changes how you prepare for your day. Before a one-on-one, I think about what I know about the person, what they’re working through, what might be weighing on them. Before a meeting, I think about the dynamics at play and where I might be able to contribute, even tangentially. This doesn’t require hours of preparation ; it requires intention. And the intention itself is the differentiator. Most people walk into meetings thinking about what they need to get out of them. Flipping that , thinking about what you can put into them , is a small shift in mindset with outsized consequences.
The Honest Tradeoffs
I should acknowledge that this principle has limits and tensions. There are days when you’re depleted, when your own problems are consuming your bandwidth, and the idea of adding value to every interaction feels like an impossible ask. I don’t think this principle should become a source of guilt or self-judgment. It’s aspirational by design : a direction to lean toward, not a standard to be measured against in every moment. There are also situations where the most valuable thing you can do is not contribute: to let a team work through something on their own, to resist the urge to add your perspective when it would only slow things down or undermine someone else’s ownership. Knowing when to step back is itself a form of adding value, though it requires the kind of self-awareness that doesn’t come easily to most of us.
I’ve also seen this principle misapplied by leaders who interpret “adding value” as always having something to say. That’s not what I’m describing. The person who speaks in every meeting, who always has an opinion, who can’t resist inserting themselves , that person is often subtracting value while believing they’re adding it. True contribution sometimes looks like a single well-timed question, or a quiet follow-up message after a meeting, or simply making someone feel heard during a difficult moment. The goal isn’t to be visible ; it’s to be useful.
Over time, I’ve come to believe that this orientation toward contribution is one of the most reliable indicators of leadership maturity. The leaders I most admire are not the ones with the most impressive technical credentials or the most commanding presence. They’re the ones who leave every room a little better than they found it, and who leave every person they interact with a little more capable, a little more confident, or a little more connected than they were before. That kind of leadership doesn’t scale through authority ; it scales through the quiet accumulation of hundreds of small, intentional acts of generosity.