Make Your Mark

by Jocelyn K. Glei

“You never hear, ‘George increased market share by 30 percent,’ ” Huffington said at a recent event at Soho House in New York City. What you do hear in eulogies, she says, are stories of “small kindnesses.”

the most successful people in the workplace tend to be the ones who give selflessly to others without expectation of returned favors.

In Thrive, Huffington argues that power and money have too long been life’s main yardsticks of success, and that we should measure our achievements instead by four new metrics: Wisdom, Wonder, Well-Being, and Giving. If the eulogy test is an indication, Giving is likely the most memorable of the four.

“Our Mission: Do all the little things, so that others can do the things they were meant to do.”

Make reciprocity part of your business strategy. Strive to share some part of your expertise, content, or product with your community for free.

Don’t forget to have fun, and imbue your brand experience with “small kindnesses.” Customers notice the little things; no detail is too small to be an opportunity for delight.

The true leader’s job is to help everyone around them do their job better.

Because a dismissive attitude toward leadership is exactly what makes us end up with bad managers in the first place. When you decline an opportunity to lead, you open up a vacuum for other people to take on management roles, sometimes the very people you set out to avoid. What’s more, you’re essentially leaving the happiness and productivity of your team to the whims of fate.

I’ve always thought that the hardest and most valuable thing in work is to get a group of smart people to work together toward a common goal.

What I’ve learned through this process is that leadership isn’t about power or control or hierarchy; it’s about serving. If you really want to get people fired up and get them to excel, your practices have to be grounded in the idea of “servant leadership.” It’s really the only sane way to run a company.

But all of those things, however exciting, lack the core component of helping people directly. Specific people. Not humanity, not a disenfranchised class of people, but individuals I can see and understand. To me, it’s the only thing I have done professionally that gives me more than it asks of me—and thus is sustainable.

But when good people start learning about servant leadership, something wonderful happens. The people around them start sighing with relief. Finally! Someone has taken on the challenge. So go. Learn about it. Start getting comfortable with the idea of being a manager. It’s exactly what we need. You are exactly who we need.

if you want people to make smart decisions, they need full context and all the available information. Put simply, you can’t expect people to make the decisions you would make without all the information that you have.

There’s a craft to making a team, and creative leaders take pride in that craft.

I’m still making—I’m just making something different. I’m participating in making communities, and learning a lot in the process, the same way I would get to learn while making things on the computer. Only now the timeline is longer. A lot longer. You don’t get the immediate gratification that you might as a designer when the timelines are shorter. But artists are used to delayed gratification. I look at the work I do now as a new kind of art.

“Do not judge me by my successes; judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.”

One of the greatest drains on a company’s resources is a lack of clarity and direction. No matter how fast a runner you are, if you’re running in the wrong direction, you’ll never win the race. Great leaders know this. If your business’s strategy and goals aren’t communicated clearly—both from you to your team and internally among the team members themselves—you will waste the most precious resource you have: time.

The tasks that most knowledge workers undertake are increasingly self-directed, a key factor in employee retention, performance, and overall happiness. Internal teams are created, reorganized, and disbanded with remarkable speed, a necessity when building for a future no one has seen.

At Behance, we frequently host internal “sneak previews,” where a small project team will give everyone a demo of what they’re working on and explain how it relates to the business’s broader mission. This sort of forum encourages individual teams to take a leadership role and show off their expertise, while engendering a deeper understanding of how their work fits into the overall strategy.

My colleagues Zach and Jackie coined the word “FaceMail” for the age-old act of walking over to your colleague’s desk and starting a conversation. Sometimes the oldest technology is still the best.

When it stops working, stop doing it. The single worst reason to continue doing something is because you did it before. When a system or process starts to show signs of strain, ask what it was originally designed to solve and whether that problem still exists. If the problem no longer exists, scrap the process. If it does, refactor your process to make it work again.

Don’t be afraid to share information broadly and repeat yourself constantly. It’s always good to err on the side of over-communication to keep your team on track.

Reexamine the way your team is working at regular intervals—especially when you’re growing rapidly. If a process isn’t working anymore, scrap it and refactor immediately.

Here’s the thing: Every idea that matters hits the market too soon. While you’re busy practicing and preparing, you’re also hiding from the market, keeping your worthy and world-changing idea from the rest of us. If you wait until you are ready, it is almost certainly too late.