3 Business Lessons on Helping Your Employees Amplify Joy with William Harris

We say this often at Proven Chaos: If you’re not your best at home, you can’t be your best at work. If you aren’t your best at work, you also can’t be your best at home. As leaders, we not only need to achieve this balance for ourselves, we also need to help our people achieve it as well. Privileging joy in the workplace does not have to come at the expense of profits. 

I spoke with William Harris, Founder and CEO of Elumynt, an e-commerce marketing agency, and the head of marketing for Sellbrite, a SaaS company focusing on multichannel e-commerce growth and management. (And yes, for those of you wondering, it’s pronounced: “element.”) William’s philosophy is simple: Amplify joy through profitable business growth. Here’s a quick summary of the 3 lessons I learned from William about how to do just that: 

1. Embrace career growth as a jungle gym, not a ladder. 
2. Confront your fears head-on. 
3. Granting employee autonomy does not mean ignoring performance issues. 

Lesson #1: Your career path doesn’t need to be linear!

Most people would think making a career transition from nursing to marketing is impossible, but not William. Working as a nurse in the open heart unit of a Minnesota hospital, William honed his skills making quick, high-stakes decisions based on the wide array of metrics collected for a patient. He also served as a nurse in whatever units needed him, which gave him a bird’s eye view of the nursing schedule. It was when he recognized– and solved– a problem with how the schedule was managed that an opportunity to work as a marketing manager presented itself. 

More and more, we’re seeing folks with career paths that look more like jungle gyms than they do ladders. It’s by keeping ourselves open to opportunities we would never have considered that we receive our best opportunities for growth. As a leader, this perspective on career pathways can also keep you open to internal hires for whom a lateral move or a full-on department change could yield better results than an outside hire. 

Lesson #2: Amplifying joy sometimes means first confronting your fears.

In the early days of Elumynt, William was not his best self at home. Launching a business comes with a host of struggles and hardships, which he was bringing home to his family at night. Then, when he did bring on his first employee, it was in March 2020, a month that many of us could not forget for the way it altered our personal lives and the business landscape. 

As clients paused their advertising plans and we all waited to see what would come next, William undoubtedly had many fears. He nevertheless kept pushing forward, keeping track of new processes being developed and metrics to review that Elumynt could always return to as a roadmap for navigating change. William eloquently reminded us that every CEO has to go through some sort of reckoning with fear, no matter how seasoned they are. “All you need is 20 seconds of courage,” he says, and you’ll get better and more confident with every courageous step you take. 

Lesson #3: Creating a culture of employee autonomy does not mean you become hands-off!

When I asked William how he so quickly turned Elumynt into the Best Places to Work, he humbly said, “by accident.” William believes that leaders have a moral and ethical obligation to take care of the whole individual. At the most basic level, this means he covers 100% of medical, dental, and vision. He also rewards autonomy through policies like unlimited PTO, unlimited bonus potential, and bonuses that are tied to things like how much revenue an individual brings into the company (which that person gets back at the end of the year). Policies like these give people back “control over their destiny,” in William’s terms. If someone needs to go pick up their kids, get an oil change, or just take a week to reset, they can do that with no questions asked while also having full control over their potential earning power. 

However, William was also quick to note that a fear of micromanaging (which entrepreneurs tend to do) should not stop you from intervening when something is incorrect or if there’s a different outcome you’d like to see. For William, “[i]t’s unloving if you know someone is doing something in the least efficient way to not give them a tool or skill set” that helps them. When done right, correcting your team isn’t micromanaging, it’s an act of service that empowers them to make decisions in alignment with both their own and the business’s values. 

To learn more from William about the role of joy in driving business growth, make sure to listen to the full episode!

About Best Places to Lead

Your company has the potential to be great. The leader’s responsibility is to unlock that potential – or doom it to mediocrity.

​​On the LIVE Best Places to Lead show, you’ll learn the hard-fought lessons from the front lines earned by business leaders who have already had their teeth bashed in and lived to tell about it. We’ll share the tips, tricks, mindsets, and frameworks that allow great leaders to lead differently.