Leadership
Why doing more than you are paid for wins hearts and minds
Garth Delikan, the Lifestyle Guy, explains how leading by example and giving unasked value built loyal teams, a close kickboxing class and a national workshop booking.
Video from The Lifestyle Guy.
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Why does giving more than you are paid for pay off?
Garth Delikan argues that extra effort wins people's hearts first and their minds follow. As an advertising managing director he stayed late beside his team and thanked their families, as a kickboxing instructor he matched every press-up, and as a speaker he gave a struggling delegate two unpaid hours that later turned into a national roadshow of workshops.
Garth Delikan, known online as the Lifestyle Guy, used one of his livestreams to talk about a habit he says has shaped his whole working life: always doing more than you are paid for. He was clear that he is not a business coach, so instead of a framework he offered examples from his own career.
Those examples span very different rooms. He spent 18 years at a large advertising agency in central London, running a department and serving as managing director of companies inside the group. He then became a kickboxing instructor, and later a corporate speaker running workshops on subjects such as stress management.
The thread through every story is the same. He believes that when you win people's hearts, you win their minds, and that small, generous acts are how hearts are won. What follows is how he put that belief into practice in each of those settings, and what it returned to him over the years.
Key takeaways
- Leading by example means doing the hard work alongside your team, not handing over a brief and going home.
- Thanking the families of people who work late recognises that the effort costs the people around them too.
- An instructor who matches every press-up and every kick earns a respect that instructions alone cannot buy.
- Unpaid time given to one struggling person can return far more value than the fee you chose to give up.
1. Roll up your sleeves when the deadline bites
In advertising, Garth Delikan says, heavy deadlines and demanding briefs often ran late into the night. As managing director he could have briefed his team and gone home. Instead he rolled up his sleeves and stayed, sometimes until one or two in the morning, so his people could see he was in the trenches with them rather than watching from a distance.
He could not always stay, because he had other obligations and a young family, so he found other ways to show appreciation. When someone worked late, he would send their partner a bunch of flowers. His reasoning was simple: the late night was not only a cost to the employee but to the people in their life who were waiting for them at home.
If anyone worked late more than three times, he paid for them to go out to dinner. Other directors at the agency laughed at the idea and told him they did not do that. His reply was to ask which part of the agency was making the most money. His department was among the most profitable and popular in the organisation, and he says that was no accident.
2. Be the last one standing
After leaving advertising, Garth Delikan became a kickboxing instructor. He knew that students often try to outdo their instructor, so he decided early on that he had to be the fittest, fastest and strongest person in the class. He saw it as a mental commitment: his students were aspiring to be him, so he had to give more of himself than they did.
That meant leading every drill. If the class did 100 press-ups, he did all 100 with them, grinning the whole way through even when it hurt. If they practised jumping spinning kicks, he insisted on landing on the same spot every time, even across fifty attempts. He calls it giving 110 percent, because that was the example he wanted them to follow.
He also understood that being an instructor was about personality as much as technique. At the end of every class he invited anyone who wanted to join him for a beer at the pub across the road. He describes that period as the time he had the biggest circle of friends he can remember, built on the fun and the shared effort of the class.
3. Give your time when nobody is paying for it
The same instinct carried into his corporate work, where he loves standing in front of a group of fifty or a hundred people and getting them involved. During one stress management workshop in Newcastle, he noticed a woman who stayed quiet and seemed less engaged than the others. At the end he asked how she had found it, and she told him a lot was going on in her life.
Although he had a last train to catch, Garth Delikan stayed behind and spent two hours of his own time with her, with no extra fee. He missed the train, stayed overnight in a hotel and paid his own way home the next day. Two weeks later she emailed him. She turned out to be an executive director at BP in the UK, and she booked him for a national roadshow of workshops.
He did not give those two hours expecting anything back. He applied the same thinking to volunteering at his local hospital most weekends, working on reception, showing lost visitors around and helping people in wheelchairs. For him, giving fills up your spiritual cup, and giving more value than you are paid for pays dividends to your clients and to yourself.
