“Let’s make today great, fam.” How to create a work culture where people thrive.

Ask a group of 35 college students how they define leadership, and you’ll get 35 different answers. Leadership is abstract. It’s crafted by each individual’s upbringing and experiences. As I stood in front of the Jacht Fall 2016 team on the first day of the semester, I stood with a sincere intention and desire to learn how to make us a family.

Whether as students or young professionals (especially in the ADPR world), there will constantly be moments of leading peers and co-workers. And that’s hard. Really hard. Sometimes the people on our teams will come in as close friends, long-time employees/members of the organization; other times, they have no experience in the company and don’t know co-workers at all. This is Jacht: all coming in at different levels of friendships and experiences.

Clearly, approaching this diverse group of my peers was a beautiful challenge. I needed to learn how to reach our collective goal for clients effectively as a young professional while interacting intentionally with each individual as a student. For my case study/thesis on Transformational Leadership (how leaders are idealized, how to inspire followers, how to highlight individualization and how to help followers think with growth-mindedness in a peer-led environment), I write a daily journal about my Jacht CEO experience. In any work environment, the culture is as important, if not more important, than the work. Here are the trends that stand out thus far while working to create a positively impactful work environment:

• You’re never too busy or important. I hate the feeling of asking someone a question and perceiving that they’re annoyed, they’re too busy to help or you’re bothering them. If you’re new to an organization: ask lots and lots of questions. Best way to learn. Now, if you’re experienced/returning to an organization, take a quick second to empathize with how you felt when you were new to a role or organization. You needed help, right? You had questions. You were overwhelmed. Now you’re on the other side. You’re never too busy to answer questions. And don’t just answer them, but answer them with patience and a desire to help. My time and schedule as CEO are no more valuable than every designer, copywriter or account executive. Without each person doing their job well, my role means nothing.
• Make people feel good. This is simple, right? A total “Thank you, Captain Obvious” moment. But sometimes we have a really hard time telling people they rock because we get consumed in transactional tasks. Let’s talk about easy ways build each other up. For example: Highlight awesomeness. We refer to Mondays as MondaYAYs and do a quick slideshow at the beginning of the week to highlight 3–4 people who kicked butt within the last week. Simple. But I love the look the faces of the nominees. And I see them work even harder after their work ethic was recognized. We often discuss our values collectively and address how we are living them out. If we find we’re not being intentional about our values, we address how we can daily do so. We host one-on-one meetings where each individual member gets to externally process their Jacht experience with our student-leadership team. These things take time, but it’s time well spent. Now, in the picture above, you’ll see me standing in front of what we like to call the affirmation wall. On it is the headshot of every member of Jacht. At the beginning of the semester, we all took the Clifton StrengthsFinder test to learn about how we thrive as individuals. It was undeniably gratifying to see people find self-awareness and confidence in this process. Helped them articulate things about themselves they couldn’t before. On the affirmation wall, to the left of everyone’s picture is the top strength they feel they can enhance and utilize in Jacht most. And those little pinkish-purple squares are positive notes we put on a person’s picture when they’ve done something to make our day brighter/better. My favorite hobby is watching people write the notes, but even better: watching people read them.
• Admit failure. Do yourself a favor and watch this TED talk: The power of vulnerability. It rocked my world. Totally helped me approach vulnerability as a strength. I was really good at finding reasons/making excuses of when I messed up for a long time. The truth is: saying “I don’t know” and “I totally messed that up” feels like freedom. It’s exhausting trying to find reasons all the time. It’s OK to be wrong. It’s important, actually. Best successes come from lessons of failure. In Jacht and in any organization, vulnerability is not weak. As Brené Brown explains in that TED Talk, vulnerability is courageous.
• Speak clearly. This covers a lot of ground with multiple meanings. First, this means be transparent. This ties into admitting failure/vulnerability, but being transparent builds trust within the team. This means making sure everyone feels informed. As we take on new clients in Jacht, we share that information with EVERYONE. When we are making interview selections, we are honest as a leadership team about the process at each phase. We review important things in a recap meeting at the end of each day. On the literal side of this bullet point, people respond well to clear, concise directions. Simplicity. Don’t convolute simple things. Explain the “why” behind the “what” without any unnecessary information. People should walk away from meetings and know what to do next. We often get good at talking in circles without actually creating a plan. Have clarity when explaining. People just like feeling informed.
• Be present. This one is tough; yet, it’s the most important of all. In our Jacht work environment, everyone is getting an email a minute, there are constant group chats with notifications flying about and team meetings cause people to move in every direction. Plus, we’re all sleep deprived as college students. We try to be expert multitaskers when our brain cannot do it. Obviously, this makes it hard to be an active listener at all times. But being present doesn’t really mean anything intensive. Here is a simple solution: put down your phone/shut your computer when you speak with someone. When talking to someone who is looking at a screen, it is clear they are not paying attention to you. Which means it feels like they don’t care about what you have to say. And that doesn’t feel good.

When looking at the picture of me in front of the affirmation wall, you’ll see at the very top it says “Meet Our Family” above all of the individual headshots. Originally I wrote “Meet Our Team,” but we’re much more than that. I had a high school AP Government teacher named Mr. Blum. Every single day at the end of class, he would say: “Family, we’ve got three things for homework. 1) Have a great day! 2) Change the world. 3) Don’t get arrested.”

While the list is memorable and goofy, the word “Family” always struck me most. That one word made us feel like we had more of a sincere community in our classroom. Like we all intertwined. Like we were all valuable. As I study and do research on Transformational Leadership, I feel fortunate I have had people like Mr. Blum (along with multiple educators) as living examples of what that leadership style looks like.

“People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.” -Maya Angelou

In the advertising and public relations world, there’s an extraordinary amount of creativity and energy and excitement. But with those things comes the necessity to critique, to ask hard questions and interact with people who have totally different perceptions than you. How you approach that challenge says a lot about your organization. Culture matters. Community matters. It makes collaboration way more synergistic and genuine. Ultimately looking back on it, no one will care that I was CEO, no one will think of deadline stresses or client meetings. But I do hope they remember walking into the Jacht office every Monday, Wednesday, Friday feeling like they were appreciated and valued as members of our family.