A short first-person talk by Chad Silverstein recounting how a simple 'pay it forward' initiative in his office—starting with three acts posted on a whiteboard—sparked widespread acts of generosity and became part of the company culture. He also shares a striking anecdote about an employee who donated a kidney to a client contact's husband, illustrating the depth of the giving culture and its positive effect on morale and team behavior. The piece offers practical leadership advice: be creative, model values, and celebrate people to shape culture.
Chapters
I always used to do some really cool things in my office. I was a big culture guy, so I always wanted to make sure that people were happy, having fun. My goal was to create a kind of place that I wanted to go work in every day. And so I watched that movie, Pay it Forward, and I just thought it was such a cool idea to pay it forward. You know, it's a cliche today. People throw around that term. So anyways, this was many years ago, and we had big whiteboards in our office, and I. One morning, I put three pieces of paper up on that board. I did three really nice things for three people. And I went to them and asked them, hey, do me a favor. Pick three people and just keep it going. Pay it forward. And I'll never forget, I left that day for appointments, and I came back to my office in the afternoon, and you could not find one white speck on the wall. There were so many Pay it forward sticky notes on that wall. It just, like, exploded. And people were just doing things for people that I looked at the board and thought, wow. Like, not only do I have a special office with incredible people, but the ideas and the creativity and the generosity, the sensitivity. There were just so many incredible things. And I'll never forget thinking about how powerful that was at my company, like, just how crazy that was. That, like, just some crazy idea, watched a movie, threw it up there, and the impact and the ripple that that could have in a culture. And we had a lot of people working for us at that point. And, yeah, so I think you have to be creative. You have to have. You have to have great people at your office, for sure. You know, I was very blessed. One of my employees, I'll never forget, she came into my office one day. She was with me for about eight years, and she said to me, chad, you know, our client over in Cincinnati? And she told me the name of the client, and she had a relationship with the contact, Janet, at the office. And she said, you know, Janet's husband's sick, and he needs a new kidney. I was like, wow. And I was hearing the story, man. She looked at me and she said, I'm gonna need to take time off because I'm gonna donate my kidney. I remember thinking, are you kidding me? Like, she didn't even know this person. She was friends with the contact, and she was gonna go donate her kidney. I mean, I was speechless. And she actually did it, and I was happy to pay her the entire time she was out, because I've never seen anyone do something so selfless in my entire life, and it really. It really showed me who she was. And it just did something like in the office, like, to just nowhere around people like that that just wanted to give, give, give, give. And we just had this culture of giving, and people did it on a high level like that. And sometimes it was as simple as, I'm running out to Starbucks and I'm gonna bring back your coffee for you. But we made that a discipline, and we made that part of our core values. And I think, you know, that had an impact on us. It had an impact on the feel of being in this office, especially at an office where people necessarily didn't love their job because they were on the phones getting yelled at. And that was a really special thing, looking back, how we had that in our culture. So, again, depending on type of team that you're building and the kind of culture that you want, you have to be a leader and come up with creative ways to celebrate, win, have fun, and pull out the best of the people that you work with.
