By Rev. Dr. Alfonso Wyatt
The first Monday in September is a federal holiday celebrating Labor Day. Most Americans gladly accept this is holiday even if it does not have meaning beyond a day off. I want to use Labor Day to speak to workers of all stripes, hues, and ages in the faith community; secular settings; the self-employed; in corporate America; advocacy groups; or workers in government. Over the years, I have delivered numerous organizational capacity-building workshops designed to increase worker efficiency. I want to pose this seminal question to present day workers, managers, supervisor, CEO.s, pastors and the like. You may have to read the question a couple of times in order for the meaning to be revealed.
The question my sister and brother is: Do You Make Work Work or Do You Make Work Work? In case you are confused by the question, allow me to do an abridged version of my Making Work Work staff development workshop free of charge.
After working over four decades, most in a senior leadership capacity, I have discovered there are two types of workers—one that makes Work Work and the other that makes Work Work. Here are two abridged case studies to help you differentiate between the two in case you are laboring to follow me.
- Worker Number One makes Work Work by striving to make a concerted effort to show up each day determined to do what he or she is supposed to do at a high level. This person knows in their heart and mind that work is not a right but a privilege. This unique person looks at their job description as their starting point and not as the end point.
- Worker Number Two makes Work Work by any means necessary by doing the least, blaming the most, or riling up factions against those who want to make Work Work by inflaming the “slacker-fire” in people who don’t want to work but want to be paid. This group includes the vaunted “Ph.D.’s of Negativity”, well-schooled in the art and science of what did not work, what can’t work—so why bother to work.
Worker Number One realizes that work is hard enough—that is why it is called work. Yet, he or she does not labor to make work harder by taking on attitudes or behaviors that pull efforts apart rather than propel a team forward. Worker Number Two is never happy at work (probably not at home as well) and sees his or her real job is to go to work and spread poisonous dissention. Back in the day, poison was dispensed at the water cooler, in the bathroom, or over the phone. Today, malicious “clique chatter” can be virally spread by social media to dozens, hundreds thousands, or millions of people at the click of a button.
One of my mantras that resonates with Worker Number One types and is anathema to Worker Number Two members is this: “If you cash the check then do the work.” I would go on to say, “The day a worker comes to me with a complaint and tears up his or her check in the process, that person will have my undivided attention.” I can truthfully say that this situation has never happened. The work reality is that there are employees who not only hate their jobs, they are not doing their jobs—yet these soured toilers will gladly cash the check while complaining all the way to the bank (metaphorically speaking in the age of direct deposit).
I remember when I ran an alternative high school while in my mid-twenties. I inherited a group of cast-off teachers that made Work Work. I was overmatched trying to appease workers who could not be satisfied no matter what actions I took on their behalf. I decided to leave the position—actually, I was part of an unfortunate group of the first civil servants ever to be laid off by NYC. I walked out saying, “If I am ever in charge again I will never create a psychological work environment.” Unbeknownst to me this was my first step in making Work Work.
I dedicate this Strategic Destiny Dispatch to John Green Patterson (April 2, 1845-September 1, 1940), the “Father of Labor Day,” born the son of John R. and Temperance Green, free blacks of Newberne, N.C. He was elected to the Ohio legislature in 1890, there introducing the bill that established Labor Day as a state holiday; the U.S. Congress made it a national holiday in 1894 (excerpt taken from Internet).
Beloved, John Green Patterson surely knew how to make Work Work given the vast, overt, organized and sanctioned system of institutional racism he faced every day of his life. We really have no excuse not to make Work Work.
I must do the work of the one who sent me while it is day. Night is approaching, when no one can work. John 9:4
