Since the pandemic shifted many jobs to work-from-home (or anywhere) and the Great Resignation|Reshuffle|Renegotiation|Rethink further upended our work order, organizations have been madly surveying and throwing a lot of stuff at the wall to lure and keep the people they need to run their businesses.

There’s no question that our relationship to work has forever shifted, at least for those whose jobs don’t require a physical presence, and we’ll be wrestling and experimenting with this before we figure it out.

It didn’t start with a pitch deck or a business plan. In 2009 while walking in his San Fernando neighborhood, Rick Nahmais noticed citrus trees bursting with fruit that would mostly end up in the trash. Food lines were growing as the Great Recession ravaged people’s lives and livelihoods. The light bulb went on. The following three weekends, he and a few volunteers harvested over 800 lbs of oranges and tangerines from a friend’s yard and took them to a local food pantry.

Groundhog Day again. Gallup released its State of the Workplace: 2022 report and one headline, Stressed, Sad, and Anxious: A Snapshot of the Workforce, summarizes what is a surprise to no one.

What is a bit different about it, though, is despite the myriad reasons for misery at work shouting at us from headlines daily, Gallup lays blame at the feet of managers.

When Jack Dorsey stepped back into Twitter in 2016, he inherited an annual loss of over $500 million on revenues of $2.2 billion, and a languishing stock price, when other platforms were booming. Dorsey reflected recently, “We got overly reactive to everything our peers were doing. We didn’t have a clear sense of what our purpose was, and that really hurt us a lot.”

To get a clear understanding of what business Twitter was really in, Dorsey and his team used a framework known as “jobs to be done.” They mined data to understand what users were “hiring them” to do, prioritized what was core for them, and aligned the organization to that core.

A common theme has emerged in the last many months for leaders I work with, sending them scrambling for direction. Climate events, racial violence and discrimination, #MeToo, and the head-shaking economic inequities made worse during the pandemic have combined to cause employees to demand action. Leaders are experiencing staff conflict, confusion, and anger, and are losing valued people. People are expressing dissatisfaction with internal processes that they feel perpetuate systemic discrimination and inequality and some leaders are being pressured to take public activist positions on issues. Sometimes the issues are outside the organization’s mission.

We spent the last four posts taking a deep dive into how to inclusively unearth the solid core of an organization: vision + mission + values. It’s exhilarating to find just the right words that capture our true essence, and to share and celebrate it. Yet, it’s just the beginning of the beginning. Living our vision, mission, and values — what connects us to the cathedral we’re building together vs. individually laying bricks — is the real work.

In The Culture Code, Dan Coyle recalls in 1982 when J&J learned, to their utter horror, that seven people died in Chicago after ingesting cyanide-laced Tylenol. They faced a crisis they were utterly unprepared for, they had no playbook. But they had something much more powerful that drove one of their first decisions (ignoring advice from FDA and the FBI) to recall all 31 million pills on the market at a cost of $100 million.