Gluckstadt, Mississippi is a commodity of a place. Its only obvious value is its proximity to Jackson. For most of my life it has been just another exit off I-55. My in-laws moved there though, and it became the setting of two of the most significant moments of my life.

Last Thanksgiving my family and I traveled there from Hot Springs for the holdiay. The morning after we arrived we received a call from our pediatrician’s nurse. Our youngest child (Noah) had not grown in a number of months. Trying to identify the cause, our doctor had ordered blood work the week before our trip. The nurse had received the results and wanted us to come in that morning to repeat the test. When my wife told her we were out of town, the nurse asked when we planned to return. She said it was important that we conduct a follow-up test as soon as possible to rule out a possible issue. After several minutes of pressing questions from my wife, the nurse admitted that Leukemia was a concern.

In an instant, my perspective on life changed.

The next several hours were filled with phone calls, prayer and tears. Fortunately, an old friend from the Jackson area is a pediatrician. We were able to get in touch with him through his office and he agreed to see us that afternoon. He performed the necessary test and processed the results while we waited. Noah’s original test results had apparently been skewed by a bacterial infection. There was no sign of Leukemia. Thankfulness came easily that year.

My other Gluckstadt incident was much less dramatic but in a way, just as significant. On a different visit my oldest son (Sam) and I went to the grocery store together to pick up a few things. As we drove, we chatted about random things. After a pause in the conversation, Sam said, “Daddy, I hope I work at Chick-fil-A someday.” I asked why. “Because it’s a good job,” he said. I asked what he thought made it good. “Well,” he said, “it gives you a way to provide for your family, it lets you take care of people and it’s fun”

Sam’s thoughts are helpful if you understand the first story. On that awful day of what-ifs, it was irrelevant if Noah would ever produce a paycheck or help people or even have fun. We weren’t afraid of the loss of his potential. We were terrified we might lose him.

Many of us have confused what we do with who we are. A profession is a beautiful thing but it is no substitute for personhood.

So if you have a job that provides for your family, or helps people, or is fun; you have something good. And if you have a job with all three, congratulations on finding the sweet spot. Regardless, your job is still just a spot. Jobs are like towns. They are not life itself, but are instead, places to live. And the people of a place can make that spot magical, even places like Gluckstadt, Mississippi.

Sooo…that was an awkward silence.

Even with only a handful of readers I thought I’d get a little pushback after my last post. Not that I’m trying to be a sensationalist but don’t you think it was a bit bleak? Maybe I didn’t do a good enough job. I believe our current culture of work is actually more grim than I painted it to be.

Nevertheless, I am not without hope. The post was meant to be part one of two with the second part communicating what I believe we can do to transform our work from something that is life-crushing to something that is life-giving. Part two is on the way. In the meantime, I’d love to hear you chime in.

What do you think? Was I wrong?

Summer’s over. The cycle begins again.

Don’t despair. Just hold on. Five o’clock comes every day; the weekend, four times a month.

Be a good boy. Nose to the grindstone. This is the price you pay to live.

Stop being selfish. Think of the people around you. This is the real world, son. There are mouths to feed.

Sweat for the money. Leave the playthings behind.

Don’t worry, you’ll get coffee and a thirty-minute lunch. Chin up, buddy. Summer will come around again.

What a tragic existence.

What was life like before we made ourselves slaves?

The quick-service restaurant operator, the walk-up pizza place guy and the manager of the snack food shop are all wrestling with the same question. “How do I find the right employees?” Answering the question through endless trial and error threatens to take the fun out of their work.

There’s very little middle ground in the practice of selecting employees. Get it right and the results are very satisfying. Get it wrong and everyone in the business quickly becomes miserable.

Like any other practice, discerning a person’s potential fit is a skill that can be developed over time. That being the case, why do so many employers struggle in this area?

It isn’t an issue of failing to adequately assess a candidate’s abilities. The constraints that must be satisfied are obvious. Is the candidate available during the hours they are needed? Do they have the necessary physical ability? Do they possess sufficient mental capacity for the types of problems they will have to solve?

We even do a fair job assessing a candidate’s relational ability. A five minute interaction is enough to determine whether a candidate is adept at the social skills the work requires.

Employers get stuck in the trial and error cycle when they fail to identify a potential employee’s motivation. Chances are they don’t hop out of bed each day fired up to make you more profitable. What do they value so highly they’ll never get enough?

Making progress in work that matters, is a built-in reward for the right kind of employee. If you want to get better at finding them, answer a different question.

What does employment in your organization offer beyond a paycheck?

If you’re installing vinyl siding you mustn’t drive your nails tight. Otherwise the siding will buckle in warm weather. When you’re pulling wood on the green chain, rotate with the other guy every hour to preserve your stamina. In a quick-service restaurant, time your first batch of chicken to finish cooking ten minutes before the lunch rush. As laborers, most of our how questions get answered within the first day or two on the job.

Managers and business owners, on the other hand, are always looking for a better how.
“How do I hang on to my best workers?”
“How do I find good people in the first place?”
“How can we improve our customer service?”
“How can we make our marketing more effective?”

Regardless of whether our how questions have been answered, all of us need a good answer to the question “why does this matter?”. Without it our work becomes dissatisfying. If there’s ever been a time when you dreaded Monday mornings, you know what it feels like to need a better why.

Interestingly, there is a single method for answering both how and why. Tomorrow I am hosting a short event to outline that method. It’s not a sales pitch for something more, there’s nothing else to buy or do afterwards. You’ll leave the event with the method in hand.

If you’re looking for answers to how questions for your business, buy a ticket to tomorrow’s event. You’ll see a tenfold return on the money you invest.

If you need a better why, please allow me to make this my gift to you. At this point the cost of the event is covered and there is still space left. I’d be happy to have you come as my guest. At the end of the event a lunch will be provided. If you don’t mind skipping lunch or bringing your own, use the discount code “why-lunchless” and your ticket will be free. To join in the lunch, use the discount code “why-withlunch” and your ticket will only cost $10.

Whether you’re looking for how, why or both; claim your seat now. Registration closes today at 7:00 p.m.

I first learned of the world’s goodness at a kitchen table.

In the South of my childhood, love was tangible. It was served to you on steaming plates and in cold glasses of tea. In this culture of hospitality, grandmothers reigned supreme. Refusing Grandma was a capital offense. Declining her signature dish was the most egregious manifestation of this sin. Lord help the man that turned down chicken and dumplins.

My mom found a way to extend the reach of her kitchen when I moved away from home. Every few weeks she would send me a care package. Each one contained a note and some food stuffs hardy enough to survive a trip through the postal system. I survived several months on breakfast cereal and sports drinks.

My favorite gift from her came in one of those packages. I recognized it immediately when I opened the box. It was a Better Homes & Gardens cookbook. I had seen a faded version of that red and white checkered cover many times in my mother’s house. Its presence on the counter faithfully foreshadowed moments of culinary delight. As I thumbed through the cookbook my mother had sent me, I quickly realized its potential. Each recipe contained step-by-step instructions. By following the instructions carefully, I could expand my diet far beyond the realm of pre-packaged, shelf-stable products.

As I tried my hand at some of the simpler dishes, I gained confidence in my ability to cook. I began to search the index for recipes to some of my childhood favorites. The ones I found never seemed to turn out quite right. My cookbook was inferior to my mom’s. Her version was stuffed with index cards and scraps of paper – recipes she had collected along the way. Time-tested improvements were scrawled in the margins.

The cookbook I’d been given was only meant to be a start. If I followed the recipes I would slowly learn the principles of cooking. I would develop skills and knowledge that could be built upon. Experience would give birth to an ability to adapt.

I am learning business is much the same. Over the past nineteen years, I’ve collected “recipes” to use in various situations. To find out how you can bring these recipes to your organization, visit stepmorgan.com/workstory.

Photo credit: Steven Depolo

When I was twelve or thirteen years old I joined the Boy Scouts. I LOVED being a Scout. Everything about the Scouts was fantastic; there was a right way to do everything, there was a right way to do everything and it all happened outdoors. I idolized my scoutmaster and I read the Scout Handbook cover-to-cover more than once and in more than one edition.

I remember the section on hiking described something called the “Scout Pace”. It described a way to cover a distance faster by alternating between walking a set number of paces then running the same number of paces. Somehow this became part of the moral code for my life. I have to figure out how to do more, faster. I have to push. I’m not there yet.

Today I didn’t push, I rested. My work didn’t slow to walking pace, it stopped. No trips to the office. No podcasts. No email. No anxious thoughts. Instead there was conversation, good food, laughter and rest for my soul.

I’m excited about returning to work tomorrow. I have a feeling I’ll get more done with this rhythm. And even if I don’t, at least this way I’ll enjoy the trip.

What is it about us humans that gives us such an infinite capacity for simultaneous ignorance and arrogance? Do we all share this ability or am I uniquely gifted?

For years I’ve struggled to recognize my gifts. If I could just identify them, I would be able to put them to use. Deliberate practice would hone them until they were practically superpowers. My millions were as good as made, if only I could identify my gifts.

Theoretically I believed I possess a mix of gifts and talents that makes me unique. In practice I believed that everyone has the same abilities as me. I thought the only way my gifts would be exercised was through intentional effort. And I thought my gifts were yet to surface. This is a pretty depressing view to hold twenty years into your work life. It places supreme value on some blessed moment of enlightenment when your gifts are revealed. And it makes everything before that moment a waste of time.

This is the same brand of foolishness that causes us to think we must be as skilled, knowledgeable and accomplished as the leaders of a field we just entered. It’s expecting ourselves to get it right on the first attempt or else!. It’s trying to live other people’s stories rather than celebrate, enjoy and learn from them while we live our own.

There’s a joy that’s mine for the taking by being what I’m built to be. For too long I’ve given that joy away. From now on I’m going to stop straining to reach some extraordinary experience and instead, enjoy being what is ordinary to me.

One of my favorite things to do when I worked at retreat centers was to facilitate team-building sessions on a challenge course. I presented problem solving scenarios to groups with as much imagination as I could muster. These scenarios would contain copious amounts of toxic peanut butter and bottomless pits with an accompanying story to explain their presence. Afterwards we would discuss what silly stories and trust falls had to do with work in the real world. To give the conversation a boost I would often refer to a cheat sheet of team work and leadership principles I copied from books by Dr. John Maxwell.

Last year I joined a book review program offered by Thomas Nelson Publishers. Choosing my first book to review was a no-brainer. Logging in to the site for the first time I immediately noticed a title by John Maxwell. I thought of the dog-eared cheat sheets that had been so helpful and clicked to make my selection. When the book arrived in the mail a few days later I tore into the packaging and began reading it immediately.

Initially I was disappointed. The format was different from the books I had read years before and I was a little thrown off by that. This really wasn’t a shortcoming of the book, nevertheless it colored my response and may have made other issues seem more significant than they are. A key message of the book is ‘communicators who connect make their communication about the other person’. And yet the book includes a section where Dr. Maxwell’s writing partner sings the praises of Dr. Maxwell for nine and a half pages! There are also a number of stories from readers used to illustrate points but the context of those stories is not communication. This was distracting for me and made it harder to follow the logic of the chapter.

Because I benefited so greatly from some of Dr. Maxwell’s books I wanted to write a glowing review of this one. After finishing the book, I dreaded writing the review so I put it off. When I finally returned to the book to make notes for the review, I was surprised to discover how much I liked it. Having time for my expectations to adjust freed me to enjoy the content. Not feeling obligated to march straight through the book, I dodged the sections I found distracting and really zeroed in on the message. I found the book is filled with nuggets of helpful communication tips. Each chapter ends with a recap of the main thought and suggestions for putting it to use when communicating one-on-one, with small groups and to audiences.

Although it’s rare these days for me to find myself on a challenge course, I still speak to individuals, groups and audiences on a regular basis. This book has earned a place on the shelf of books I reference in that work. That is, at least until I finish my new cheat sheet!

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through the BookSneeze®.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

I saw this quote every day I worked for two and a half years. I’m embarrassed to admit it has taken me nearly three years to appreciate its value. Initially I dismissed it for being pretentious. Ironic. It was my own arrogance that kept me from seeing the subtle wisdom it contains.

The quote presupposes a shared value with the reader. Namely, that effort should not be made merely for survival’s sake but to savor life. These days when I see those words on the wall they hold three reminders for me:

“[Work] is essential to life; therefore, make it good.” In your work do you merely produce what is sufficient or are you striving to create something good?