Category: Blog

All work brings dignity because we are made to work. But there are levels to the goodness of work, and good work makes you more human. These three categories: purpose, possibility, and prosperity form a Venn diagram or concentric circles, and that diagram will move based on what’s most important to you. And what’s important may change over time too. Work-life balance may be more important when there’s small children in your home. And you may go through a season when creativity is more important to your flourishing. And hopefully, this framework will give you some tools to evaluate where you are and what you’re searching for. For now, we have come to the last episode in the series. The last category of our three P’s of good work is prosperity. And prosperity comes with three elements: compensation, reward, and nurture. Let’s start with compensation, everybody’s favorite part about work. Compensation is the cash and benefits you receive for working at a job. While this is probably everyone’s most important factor in deciding work, I would urge you to be careful about overvaluing it in your search for good work. Some people, money is their goal. Others, enjoying work is their goal.

Others, missional work is their goal. But regardless, you must be compensated. The next thing up is reward. Reward is the non-monetary compensation for working somewhere. This could come in a few ways, one of which is perks. Maybe your boss buys coffee or the company owns a Lakehouse they let employees use. Or at one of my early jobs, I managed an event space and one of my favorite parts was getting to take home leftovers from the events. This was a perk for sure. But then the second part of the reward is maybe the job is fun, cool, or brings status. It is fun working at a marketing firm and it would be cool to work for a Major League franchise. And there’s status associated with working for Congress, and that status can even set you up for future employment based on your status and experience as part of your work. Rewards can look a few different ways, but you will not see them on a balance sheet. Finally, the last element of this category, nurture. Simply put, do you have a company and people at that company that care about you as a person? Are you in an environment where you are nurtured and treated like a person, or are you treated like a machine?

With the amount of time we spend at work, having friends at work, a boss who knows your name and treats you well, and a culture that is nurturing, are keys to having good work. Why settle for less? At Adelsberger Marketing, it is literally part of our mission to value our team. And while we’re not perfect in all of these elements, it’s my goal to make our company the best place to work in West Tennessee. Hopefully, this tool, the three P’s of good work, has been helpful to you as you think about whether you have good work or not. If you have any feedback on the three categories, I would love to hear it. Send me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com. Thank you for listening to the Content Machine Podcast and we’re going to continue to produce thought provoking podcasts to help you be a better leader and marketer. Please subscribe.

This is the second episode in our series about the three P’s of good work. The second P is possibility. Having possibility in your work is a key to good work. One of the things I like about Frameworks, like the three P’s of good work, is that it gives you a tool to think about a subject. A framework helps you, with the insight of others, to think about a subject in a structured way, which can help illuminate that subject in a way that is a bit more divorced from personal experience. The second thing a framework does is it can give you language to discuss something. Having the words to describe something that can be difficult to describe can give you the tools you need to communicate about it and think about it. Our team has a shared vocabulary that allows us to communicate clearly about design, but we have to approach that conversation very differently when we work with a client who is not knowledgeable about design. Even if you disagree with the structure of the three P’s, hopefully it will give you some clarity to make a better decision for yourself and your work-life. This is the second episode in our series about the three P’s of good work.

The second P is possibility. Having possibility in your work is a key to good work. And within this category, there are three elements: autonomy, creativity, and advancement. Let’s start with autonomy. Good work involves lots of autonomy. Autonomy is the ability to make decisions about the work. That involves an employer trusting you with a task. Autonomy allows your brain to think and process and gives you the ability to be flexible if problems arise. Autonomy makes work less robotic and more human. Being able to make decisions about how the work gets done, maybe rotating assignments, working at your own pace, solving a problem, or working without close supervision are all forms of autonomy. It is closely related to the next element, creativity. Creativity is the freedom to create within work. This is not just about, quote-unquote, creative work. It’s about all work. The more a job, any job has the freedom to be creative, the better it will be. Obviously, this applies to work in our field, but it also happens in all types of work. For example, we had someone out to run electricity to our pool pump. There were a hundred ways that you could have gone about getting the electricity from one side of the house to the other to set up the pool pump.

The electricians at our home were able to think through it, using creativity to determine what the best path was. There is creativity available in most jobs. And while some people are more predisposed to thinking creatively, I believe anybody can be creative. Some just exercise the muscle more than others. The final element in possibility is advancement. Having the potential to advance and grow and change in your job is something that many people do not think about ahead of time when they go to work somewhere. Some workplaces hire you to do one job and never expect you or encourage you to grow and develop. This is not a sign of good work. A sign of good work would be a job that allows you to grow your skills and develop new ones and potentially give you the room to get promotions and grow responsibilities. As humans, we are ever growing and changing, and work should reflect that. Some organizations are flat and there are not many titles to go around, but that doesn’t mean they can’t allow you to grow your skills and invest in people that way. This wraps up the second of the three elements of good work, possibility, autonomy, creativity, and advancement.

If you have any feedback on these categories, I’d love to hear it. Send me an email at kevin@adelsburgermarketing. Com, and thank you for listening to the Content Machine Podcast. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the last part of our series.

The average person spends about 18% of their waking life working. That’s a huge amount. And it is likely the single largest block of time you spend doing one thing other than sleeping throughout the course of your life. How can we make the most of that time? What makes good work? While that answer is different for every person, after spending some time thinking about it, I think good work falls into three categories. This podcast is the first in a series of three that are taking a look at the categories of good work and the elements within those. Hopefully, this will give you some language and thought process to help you think about how to evaluate if your work is good. Good work makes us more human. The first category is purpose. Purpose entails things that are bigger than ourselves and more meaningful than compensation. Purpose breaks down into three elements: mission, alignment, and accomplishment. Purpose elements are things that really point to who we are and what we care about as people. Let’s start with mission. When we talk about mission and good work, we are talking about the mission of the organization. Does the mission of the organization and what it supports around its work mean something to you?

This may vary depending on the type of organization. You might work at a nonprofit whose mission deeply aligns with your heart. Or you might work at a manufacturer that is not missional but contributes to charitable causes. Having a missional alignment doesn’t just have to be about a charitable cause too. It might be providing a service to a demographic that you care about or helping support people who have a similar experience as you. A missional element to companies and organizations can help increase the level of good work for someone considerably, sometimes overshadowing the other two categories, possibility and prosperity. The world is trending more and more towards trying to infuse missional elements into workplaces where there wasn’t anything like that in previous generations. So be sure to think critically about any workplace efforts to do so and make sure that they are true to the company and true to the people. The second element is alignment. Does this job align with who you are and what your needs are? We all have different skills and strengths. When you are working in your strengths and gifting, you’re going to be happier at work. When you are forced to work in areas of weakness, you’re going to be frustrated at work.

Now, we all have to be team players, and there will be times where you have to play in an area of weakness to help the team win. But on the average, are you able to play in areas of your strength? Good work aligns with your strengths. Additionally, based on the season of life that you’re in, you might need more work-life balance than not. Does your work accommodate for that? Good work respects your life outside of work. The third element of purpose is accomplishment. It would be frustrating to work and never get to finish something or be a part of a finished product. Part of good work is being able to accomplish things. Whether that be a singular task that is part of a whole or being part of a team that finishes a larger task. Accomplishment is good for the soul. While you may have a small part to play in the whole of a project, are you able to take credit for and see the rest of the project to finish? Accomplishment is part of good work because it helps validate the things that you’re doing. Are you able to feel accomplished at work?

It is a key step to finding purpose in your work. We’ll be back next week with part two of good work. If you have any feedback on our three categories, I would love to hear it. Send me an email at kevin@adelsburgarmarketing. Com. Thank you for listening to the Content Machine Podcast and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next two parts in our series.

I have mixed feelings about personality tests. My standard answer whenever someone asks me what my enneagram number is is I’m whatever number doesn’t care about enneagram numbers. But at the same time, I know that some personality tests can be really useful. Recently, a client of ours, Chad Wilson at Foundation Bank, mentioned that his team had started to go through the Working Genius Working styles test. And on that recommendation, I took a look and bought the book, and now our whole team has gone through it. And I have a few thoughts. One of the reasons I like this methodology is it’s focused on how you work and work together with other people as opposed to your personality or who you are as a person. I think that distinction is important here. We all have different personalities, and I want the goal of something like this, like a personality test, to be how can we work together to win with the focus being on the work? This feels less psychoanalytical and more practical and professional. Lencioni, the author of this book, breaks the entire work world into six skill sets, which may come off as simplistic, but I think he really does a good job with it.

Those six categories are broken down into the phases of work. This simple breakdown contains the entire work experience really clearly. Those skill sets are wonder, invention, discernment, galvanizing, enablement, and tenacity. And while this is also very simple, it has a lot of depth to it. There are only six options for you to score in. They also remove any percentages. So it’s a very clear layout of what strengths and weaknesses are. Working genius breaks it down into two areas of genius, two areas of competency, and two areas of working frustration. Each person can do any of the six, but where you’re going to be the happiest and most effective is showed on that chart. The book is written in classic Lencioni format. Half of the book is a simplistic allegory in the form of a fictional office situation. The other half is more of a breakdown of the model of working genius. This isn’t a long read, but it helps to show you how the tool can be used in the entire workplace. The book pushes you to an assessment. The assessment is online only and is $25 per test. The online platform is actually really nice.

It is set up for an admin to make group reports and then send it to the entire company, which is what we did for our group. You get to take the test once, so you got to go with what you are given. And so far, our team has taken it and only one or two people have objected to one of their letters, which I think this means they have it dialed in pretty well. It’s a shortish test, taking maybe about 10 minutes. I don’t think Working genius is going to turn our organization upside down, but I will look at it for a tool and for languages and techniques to help me lead my team better. Getting a better idea of how our team members work will be helpful. Working genius provides a team map that helps to show where people fit together in the whole work environment. And so when we are thinking about hiring specific positions or assigning people to tasks, having an idea of how they might work and work together and having language around that will help us execute better. Have you taken a personality test that you’ve enjoyed? I’d love to hear more about it.

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Thank you for listening to the Content Machine Podcasts. This is part two of our interviews with Matt Marshall of the United Way.

Well, so you come in and you start pretty quickly changing the dynamic of what it’s done for forever. From a leadership perspective, how are you working on that change with the team? How are you communicating that? Did you have push back? How does that go down?

Yeah. It’s been an interesting, I think, transition for sure. What happened was right when I first started, obviously, I had interview with the board and explain what I hoped the vision for the organization could be. But as I had our very first staff meeting, I just walked into that staff meeting and I just sat down with the staff and asked them, What do you need from me? What do you need from me from this leadership position? What would you like to see? And all those types of things. That really was the genesis of all the rest of it and in that transition because one of the things that communicated at that meeting was the same thing that I had already picked up on. There were some areas of need in the community that they felt like we could address. Now, I’m not going to sit there and say that any of us at that time knew what that was. It wasn’t so much that as much as it felt like we could do more. And so over the course of the next several months and next year or so, we just continued to have those conversations and delve deeper into what does that mean?

And again, things like the Alice Report really helped us to identify that. And then the services we were providing through the pandemic also played a role for sure. If anything, I think I’ve always said to everyone, a lot of the work and the thought process that went into those first early months on the job, late 2019, early 2020, we already had begun to identify where we really wanted to go. We weren’t sure how we were going to get there, but we had figured out where we wanted to go. And what we felt like ended up happening, rather ironically is that the pandemic really put these thrusters to that and just it exposed… It’s like the Warren Buffett quote, “When the tide goes out, you say you’re swimming naked.” That’s right. It exposed, shows so many things that were maybe hidden by the economy or things like that.

I think one of the things that the pandemic naturally did was it highlighted need in our community even more. And so it helped clarify for us, okay, yeah, this is where we need to be investing. So early on, those were the feelings we had. And so over the course of time, as you’re working with the staff and you’re trying to identify, okay, what does this really practically mean on a day to day basis? I think a lot of I don’t really sense any real moments of real push back, not at all. If anything, I felt always a very strong sense of excitement and enthusiasm from our team on direction and where we were going. I think a lot of that was because I’m very team oriented in terms of those types of things. And so, yes, I may have initial thought or a vision for something, and I really love vision casting. That’s definitely where I love to sit. It gets hard for me, the details of all the stuff. That’s where I have to have awesome people around me to help with all of that. But yes, I would walk into the room at times and just have this vision for something, but the process of fleshing that out was always a team project, and I very much welcome that. I think it allow for the staff and the board to feel a part of that process. This was our vision. It wasn’t Matt Marshall’s vision. It was United Way’s vision on how we get there.

There’s a little bit of that that’s going to be more engaging because you’re doing something new that’s requiring buying as opposed to just doing the same old thing again and again. That’s right. It gets people really heavily invested. You have been leading for a couple of years now. When you think about how to brand and market the United Way, how does that thought process work for you?

I’ll go back to… I don’t think we’ve solved this issue yet, if I’m honest. I think we have taken some great strides. But the key problem I walked into… So my first week, all I did was watch a ton of webinars and conferences and all this type of stuff from United Way, worldwide and from all over the United States talking about United Way. I tell everyone, I just was two days into that and I was like, Oh, I see the problem. As I alluded to earlier, no one could tell you what United Way does. The vast majority of people. I tend to separate this out by generations and by age groups because I think if you were to ask someone, generally speaking, who’s 50 or older, they probably could. But if you were to ask someone, generally speaking, what we may be referred to as your Gen Xers, your millennials, and for sure now Gen Z, who is United Way, your Gen Xers would say, Yeah, we’ve heard of United Way and we could tell you maybe what they do. Your millennials would say, I’d say only 50 % of them might say that they’ve heard of United Way, definitely couldn’t tell you what they do. And I’d say most of your Gen Z would be like, Never heard of United Way, have no clue what they do. Millennials recognize the logo. They probably get that. And so Gen Z might not even get that far. And so that’s been the core issue is like, okay, the marketing problem is just that itself, like, brand recognition. And so we actually just from United Way Worldwide did a huge national survey on all of this and looked at the data, and it was really interesting. And so for me, hyper localize that. Our issues are the same just as pretty much anywhere else. Decent brand recognition. People who do know us, have respect for us and trust us, generally speaking. But again, the vast majority of people couldn’t tell you what we do. Or even if they could, they have question marks because many of them would say we sound like a middle man. And I don’t think they’re exactly wrong. And so we don’t want to be just a middle man, right? Yeah, it’s a bad place to be. Yeah, it’s a bad place to be. But it’s like, but how can we be more than that?

And so a big piece of marketing has been trying to figure that out. How can we change the way people view our work and view the impact we’re having in the community? How can we create great stories from the successes of that impact that we’re having in the community, both through our partner agencies and through our direct programming now, how can we get people excited about what United Way is doing and want to be a part of that? And so all of our marketing strategies have been geared around trying to solve those problems, trying to answer those questions. And so, again, I think we have grown by leaps and bounds over the last three and a half years in relation to that. But I would be really honest to say we’re still far from where I think we could be.

And when you’re introducing your new concepts, do you feel like that muddies the water even further? Or how do you feel like that plays in?

Yeah. No, I actually think… And the only reason I can confidently say no is because we spend a lot of time thinking and talking through it. I think it has the potential to do that, right? So as an example, as a nonprofit of nonprofits, there could be folks who just might say, you just need to do what you always did. And maybe you should back up at this point and say, Well, why didn’t we just continue to do what we’ve always done? Well, it wasn’t working anymore. If I’m just going to be blatantly honest, it wasn’t working. Our donations over the past 20 years had just been on a steady decline. And so we were getting less and less donations, which matter not only to our organization, but more importantly to all those organizations we support. And so we want to be able to provide as much funding and backing for them as we can. But if their donations are just steadily going down, well, eventually it’s going to hit the fan and we’re not going to be able to do that anymore. And so we had to shift in some way. And so part of this, the problem we’re solving for is not only… And I’ve said this from day one, I’ve been really honest with all the nonprofits and with the community. When we started our own programs, I didn’t say, Hey, we’re going to start our own programs, and we’re just not going to do that old stuff anymore. No. We said from day one, I want to raise more money for all of our nonprofit partners and raise money for these programs because they’re both needed and need that support. And so, yeah, it could have been bad, right? It could have. But I think how we’ve been able to really do that fairly well is by growing support for the other nonprofits, too. Starting a West Tennessee Nonprofit Network, starting a giving Tuesday 731, where we help those nonprofits raise money on giving Tuesday, have the newsletter going out to all the nonprofits and to the community about all the different things that are happening, not just with United Way, but everybody else. It’s providing all that general support at the same time that we’re also trying to raise up these solutions for these other community issues. I think we’ve done a pretty good job of that. And where I see proof in that, because you could ask that question, Well, how do you know? How do you know if you’re doing a good job? Well, again, and I say this truly with all the humility in the world because it’s not about me and it’s about our team and it’s about more importantly, the community because they’ve done this. And this is what I said at the celebration breakfast a couple of weeks ago. We just had our largest ever fundraising year in the 81 year history of United Way. That’s a huge deal, right?

It’s a huge deal. That’s a huge deal.

And I think that lends credence to people are getting excited about this work. Again, they’re getting excited about our brand. They’re getting excited about the things we’re doing. And that’s the community. That ain’t me. That’s not United Way. That’s the community. And again, it’s just about how can we figure out how to insert ourselves into the Jackson and West Tennessee’s sight guist? The spirit of the times to help people understand what we’re doing and how they can be a part of that.

Yeah. And I bet there’s a strong correlation between people who stopped doing United Way campaigns and then stopped giving altogether.

Probably so.

Yeah. Because it’s a little bit on autopilot. That’s right. So probably the net donations go down and the United Way is great at helping funnel those things. Well, you’ve answered the rest of my questions in that one question. So, Matt, we appreciate your time to come on here. Appreciate what you’re doing for West Tennessee. And if people want to know more about the United Way or want to get involved with the United Way, what should they do to do that?

Absolutely. So there’s so many different ways they can get involved. So I’ve only talked about this many of our programs so far. One’s I didn’t mention that are awesome programs. And the first one I’ll mention that you can get involved with today is the Read Seen program. And so we recruit volunteers from all across Madison County, specifically, we look to grow this program into other counties here in the coming years. But those volunteers then go into the school system and read and help kids increase their literacy scores, which is so incredibly important. And so we are always looking for more volunteers to help with that process. But people can also get involved in some other things that we’re doing. So we hired some tutors on another program called Tutor U this summer that will also be executing over the course of the next school year, both here in Madison County and also in Haywood County. People could sign up to be a volunteer for that. The difference between Reed team and Tutor U, Reed team is more based on sight words, and Tutor U is based on phonetics. So it requires a little bit more training on the phonetic side, but both excellent programs. We want to tackle that from both sides to give students the best chance at reaching those levels that we need them to reach for our test scores across the state and all that type of thing. That’s just an example of how people could volunteer.

But we always say you can give, advocate, or volunteer with United Way. Everybody can do one. If you don’t have time to volunteer, maybe consider advocating alongside us for these needs in our community. And if you don’t have the time to advocate, but you have resources, consider giving. And again, that can go directly to our programs, but also that can go to dozens of agencies here in West Tennessee that you care about as well. And so everybody can do one of those things. They can find out more information about United Way by going to uwwt.org. Go online, learn all about our programs, learn all about the agencies we support, learn about the things that we’re doing and the things that are coming up and get involved with that. They can follow us on social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. We have a YouTube page as well where we have some videos up there about stuff we do.

And then, of course, they can connect with Adelsberger Marketing and everything that’s going on with them because we’re friends and you talk about us sometimes too. You wear our United Way shirt and you rep us.

Matt, thank you for your time and I hope you all will go help the United Way.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening to part two of our podcast with Matt Marshall from the United Way. We hope you’ll go check out the United Way and listen to future episodes of the Content Machine Podcast.

Humans have fickle hearts. Our desires can swing wildly from one moment to the next. In fact, just preparing to write this podcast, I was having a hard time finding the motivation to even get started. So, what do you do when you have goals to work towards on days that you just aren’t feeling it? This week on the Content Machine podcast, we’re talking about how having a process can help you build discipline even when the motivation just isn’t there.

An artist, Elizabeth King, once said, “Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions.”

I love this quote because it’s so very true in human life. As humans, our fickle desires can sometimes lead us to forget the intentions we had when we were thinking clearly, thinking more positively, or maybe even thinking with a bigger picture in mind. We might be eating dinner the night before and decide that tomorrow is the day. Tomorrow I will start doing X, or I will accomplish Y. But when tomorrow comes, our hearts have swung around, and our intentions are no longer set on doing X or Y. It doesn’t make you a loser, it makes you a human.

But I think this is what Elizabeth King meant when she said the phrase, “Poverty of our intentions.”

The poverty is fought by discipline. Discipline is capitalized on by a process and a plan. Being able to make a plan is somewhat easy. Sticking to and executing that plan, that’s where the magic is. Having a process around important things in our lives can give us the ability to be successful in those activities, even if our intentions or motivations have taken a dip in that moment. Look, if I was able to make a plan the night before and execute that plan perfectly the next day, every day, I would have conquered the world by now. But to be honest, it’s just not realistic. That being said, here are a few things I’ve found that can help us fight off the poverty of our intentions. Set yourself up to win by being a student of yourself. Pay attention to the triggers that prevent you from following through on a plan. You may notice on nights that you get less sleep or days that you don’t have a plan written out that you are more likely to make the easier choice instead of the right choice.

In my life, I have found that a successful tomorrow starts the day before. I plan the next day out working towards getting good sleep and going to bed on time. These things give me a much more solid start for the next day. I also know that if I don’t go on a run in the mornings, I’m going to be about 70% of my potential self the rest of the day. The same holds true for my phone. If I start looking at social media too early in the morning, it can be a huge distraction throughout the rest of the day. All of these things are things I have noticed about myself over time and then work to build processes around them to help me to be more and more successful.

I also believe in reminders. Reminders to do things. These can be notes on the wall or perhaps in a more modern sense, your phone’s reminders app giving you notifications to do things. Reminders help me to be more successful. Whether that reminder is to plan out the next day or a reminder to go for a run, reminders help us remember what our intentions were. I even have reminders to take out the trash each week. Each night, I write out what my morning looks like and time blocks. The time from 4:15 to 8:00 is planned out to a T. The difference in results between when I do this and when I don’t is significant.

Related to reminders are checklists. Checklists are crucial to success of any repeatable task. I pull some of my thought processes on this from the book checklist Manifesto by Atoll Monde. You can listen to one of our earlier podcasts about that. Our agency has worked to document all of our repeatable processes, everything from the steps to make sure we are naming a new business successfully, or did we do all the steps to launch a new website successfully? Checklists are wonderful because our brains are prone to forgetting things that are routine. One thing I’d encourage you to think about is how to realign yourself when you get out of process. If you have gotten out of process because your intentions have sabotaged you, do you have a mental model on how to reset? Do you have a process to reset your intentions? I usually allow my brain to take a short break like a timed break. Then I return to the problem by outlining step by step what needs to happen, like step one, make a list. Step two, next item, so on and so forth.

I also find music helps me be successful. Usually focus style music like the deep focus, low fi beats, or Middle Earth lo-fi playlists on Spotify.

Learning to overcome your intentions with a process will change your world for a better.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the podcast. As always, if you enjoyed it or found it helpful, please leave a comment or shoot us an email. If you have time this week, we’d love to hear back from you. Let us know, do you have any processes in place in your life? What are the steps you take to get back on track when you get derailed?

On a previous episode of the podcast, we talked about what are core values and why you should have them. In this episode, we’re going to talk about what the core values are at Adelsberger Marketing.

What are the core values at Adelsberger Marketing? What makes up our unique culture? We have six core values, and we talk about these weekly, and review staff’s fulfillment of them in a quarterly manner. And a little bit of a particular order, here are the six core values.

Core value number one, team. We believe that we win together. Every project is a team effort. Every win is a team win. Everyone is treated with respect and everyone chips in. When we profit, everyone shares in it. We value the input of everyone. We are better together. We go further together. Team is vital to everything we do every day. There is not a single project that is only touched by one person. It is a little bit like a football team. On any given offensive play, the center and the quarterback at a minimum touch the football, but the offensive line also has to be there to do the job for the play to be successful. We will win together.

Core value two, fun professionalism. We like to have a good time at work. We believe in being on time, communicating clearly, and showing up to do the work, being professionals. But we are only serious when we need to be and are determined to enjoy working and working with each other. We love to laugh and should be able to do that at work. Of course, doing that respectfully, we show up and have a good time. If we can’t do that, why are we here?

Core value number three, creativity. We believe good ideas will win the day. We believe everyone is creative, including accountants, regardless of how much they reject that notion. We love to flex our creative muscles and make time and opportunities to intentionally do that. Better ideas give us more opportunities to crush it for our customers. In the coming world of AI, true creativity will be what allows us to thrive in the new model of work that will dominate the landscape.

Core value number 4, responsibility. Or it won’t fail because of me. This is highly related to our number 1 value team. We believe everyone is responsible for getting things done. Take pride in what you do and see that it gets done. Communication is key and confirmation of communication is required. Taking ownership of a responsibility and seeing that it finishes is how we survive. Don’t let the team down. As Bill Belichik says, “do your job.” When everyone does their job, we will win.

Core value number five, improvement. We will be better than we were six months ago. We believe in getting better. We believe in continuous improvement. We believe in learning and growing our skills. If we’re not better than we were six months ago, something is wrong. We will invest in time, tools, and education to improve ourselves to better serve our customers. We are always looking for opportunities to push our skill sets and expand our capabilities.

And finally, core value number six, get stuff done. We will deliver. This is the only reason I am still standing here in business. We believe in doing what we said we will do, and we will deliver what was promised, and if it’s within our control, we will deliver when it was promised. We all work hard and get our hands dirty. Getting things done is a sad satisfactory strategic plan.

Now, these six values are simultaneously true and aspirational. I think you would see all of them currently true in our organization, but we also want to make sure that they continue to be true and become more and more true of the culture and our team.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Content Machine Podcast. We would love to hear about your favorite core value from any of your workplaces. Send us a message or email.

Welcome to the Content Machine Podcast. This week, we’re joined by Matt Marshall, who’s a friend and local Jacksonian, who is in charge of the United Way here. But, Matt, why don’t you start by tell them just a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, absolutely. I’m married to Rachel, we have three kids, Arianna, Enora, and Elias, so two girls and a boy. I’m also a pastor at the Historic First Baptist Church in downtown Jackson. And yeah, long time member of the Jackson community for as long as I can remember and then some. Kevin, I know you’ve heard me tell this story before, but I’m actually a fifth generation Jacksonian and a seventh generation West Tennessean. Actually, just got to attend a family reunion, not this past weekend, the weekend before last, for the fourth. And I learned things I didn’t even know. And I thought I had dug through a lot of our family history quite a bit. And so, I found out that I was related to even more people in Jackson than I realized. So yeah, there we go. But yeah, I’ve been at United Way for about three and a half years and loving every moment of it.

So professionally, how do you get to the United Way from being a Jacksonian?

So, I’m born and raised here, went to school here, graduated from JCM back in 2002. And then I went to Union, so we share that in common for sure. I went to Union and I originally went to play soccer. So, I was on the soccer team my freshman year. And I did travel a bit growing up. So, I always felt as though I would go to school somewhere else. And so, I did actually, after my freshman year, transfer out and went out to Arizona and lived in Arizona for a couple of years. My wife and I were actually just looking at the apartment complex on Google Maps that I stayed in just this weekend, oddly enough. But went and lived there for a couple of years and then came back and finished at Union and got a job at Union right after. I ended up working at Union for eight years. I started out in admissions, recruiting students, and I did that for three years. Then for two years, I worked in the Vocatio Center where I helped students who were getting ready actually to graduate on the other side of things with building the resume and interviewing techniques and MBTI and all that stuff. I had a lot of fun with that. Then my last three years, I worked in university ministries. I got to lead go trips, but also work with Chapel and a number of other things. It was towards the last couple of years that I was at Union that I knew that I wanted to do something different.

When I first got back to Jackson from Arizona, I actually took two years off of school and worked in the public school system as a special needs assistant teacher. I had worked at elementary school at Thelma Barker. I really, really loved that and working with kids. And so those last two years, I was feeling like a pull back to that. I wasn’t exactly sure what that would look like. I ended up being contacted by Donna Agnew, who was the founder of Hands Up Preschool and she was getting ready to transition. And she had founded and run the school for five years. And so, they were looking for her replacement. I didn’t really know hardly anything about that process. But I knew about Hands Up. I’d heard about them before because one of the other things I did in university ministries was coordinate our campus and community day. I interacted with all the nonprofit leaders through that. One thing led to another. Lord opened the door for me to take over at Hands Up. I love that. Got to even – that first year, my own kid, Elias, that was his year for PreK, and so he went to the school with me, which was cool to be able to go to school every day and see one of your kids at work. Anyway, I ran Hands Up for two and a half years. When I had taken over the program, one of the things they had really tried to figure out was how to make the program more sustainable. And that’s a struggle in early education as a whole and in childcare historically. And so, I began to work with my staff there and my team as well as with the board. And together we came up with what we felt like was a good model to help get the institution to that point of being a lot more financially stable. And so, over the course of that two and a half years, our revenue grew by about 240%. And what happened by end of that second year of being there, so Scott Conger was the President of United Way at the time. And so, his very last thing that he did as the President of United Way was to host the celebration breakfast that they have annually. And at that celebration breakfast, they announced the nonprofit agency director of the year. And so, Hands Up was a United Way partner agency. And so, they selected me, which was a big surprise. I totally came out of the blue. And so that was the last thing that Scott did as the President of United Way. Then on Tuesday, as he was just starting out as the mayor, he called me and he said,

“Hey, the board was really impressed and they would just want to invite you to consider applying for the president position.”

I won’t go into that whole long story, but while he did extend that invitation to me, it was not a foregone conclusion at all. If I remember correctly, found out later they had over 80 applications and they flew four people into Jackson to come in for interviews from across the United States. And it was a whole process. But again, the Lord opened the door and so I was able to become the next president of United Way. And so probably a whole lot more I could share, but I’m going to try to keep it to that. And it’s been by the Grace of God.

When was that? When did you start?

October 2019.

2019. So how is the United Way… You want to give us a pitch of what it is traditionally known as, and then talk to us about where it’s involving?

Yeah, sure. So, when I first came to United Way in October of 2019, again, I mentioned I’ve been at a partner agency in United Way. Union had always been big donors. They ran a United Way campaign for a long, long time as well. So, I was familiar with United Way. I always tell people, and it’s funny because I see this NFL thing right here hanging on you guys’ door. So, the NFL is one of United Way’s biggest supporters historically. So, I always tell people, the thing I remember most about United Way growing up was the NFL commercials that they would do with them with quarterbacks and stuff.

And the Saturday Night Live Peyton Manning commercial.

Yeah, for sure. Legendary. Yeah, for sure. And so that was what I remember most about them. But I probably was like a lot of other people that if you asked me, what is it that United Way does? I would struggle a little bit more to understand, to be able to articulate that for you. But remember, again, I’ve been from a partner agency, so I even understood a bit more about that. But when we talk about that, and for the listeners, we go, well, what does United Way do?

So historically, I always love to tell this story here. Everybody’s played Monopoly, generally speaking. And there are typically two cards that you can draw on a Monopoly board – and the one that you really want to draw, so you have chance or you have the community chest. Chance, you never know what you’re going to get. You could win money or you could go to jail, right? Well, the card that you always want to draw in Monopoly is community chest, because all you get from community chest is just money. And so that is actually United Way’s old name. We were originally the community chest.

And so now that being said, it drives me crazy that United Way never talked to Milton Bradley or Parker or whoever owns Monopoly and said, “No, just change the name. Just update the name.”

But anyway, we historically are the community chest. So, what that means is that for decades, people and communities all across the country, all around the world, have contributed or donated into a common community chest, a bucket, and those funds then get dispersed out into the community to other nonprofits. So simple way I’ve always explained it is we’re the nonprofit of nonprofits. And so that’s what we’ve done for decades and for generations at this point. So, we go into companies and we do campaigns where we ask each employee to give a little bit out of their paycheck that goes into that community bucket. And then volunteers in each county, in our case, we serve 15 counties, each one of those counties, a volunteer group, then makes decisions on who gets funded and how much. So that’s who United Way has been forever. But I recognized, literally in the first week, that as great as that is a process and a role to be able to play and to have the privilege and honor of having the trust of the community to do that, which we don’t take for granted. I also felt like because of my background and where I was coming from, that there probably were some other things that we could address as well. And so, we started to try to identify what those things were, but for all intents and purposes, we’re still that United way. We just added some things.

But you’ve added things that are a little bit of a different vein, right?

Yeah, for sure.

Because you’ve moved from being the nonprofit of nonprofits to, you’re also doing some direct service now. So, talk about what that change is like and why that change has happened.

I hinted at it a moment ago that I really felt as though when I came to United Way, again, being a son of this community and having been raised in this community and spent almost all my life here, that when we talk about the pillars of United Way, so health, education and financial stability primarily, when we talk about those, what we’ve done historically is we have partnered with other organizations that are doing service in health, education and financial stability, and we have funneled money their way to execute those programs. And we still do that today. But because of my background, and I always say this, I’m biased. My background is education, so I’m biased, first and foremost. But I also think that there’s a reason for that bias because I tell people, well, if you want really a healthy community, you want an educated community. And if you want a financially stable community, you want an educated community.

Yeah, chicken or egg situation.

Right. So, for me, education always really stood out among our pillars. But because that was my background, I also knew from my experiences that that’s where there was still a lot of need and a lot of opportunity to invest. And so, I immediately began to have conversations with our board and with our staff and with other leaders about needs in the arena of education. And so, what has transpired over the last three and a half years is us trying to better understand what those needs are in West Tennessee, and how can we step in to fill some those gaps. So, I want to be really clear, the thing I didn’t want to do was start working in an area where there were already people doing work, particularly nonprofits. We didn’t want to do that. One of the reasons why United Way has been as focused on those community chest type of initiatives is because we don’t want to duplicate efforts. We don’t want other nonprofits to duplicate efforts.

That would make any sense. That’s wasteful.

That’s right, completely. And so, we want to stretch every dollar to go as far as it absolutely can. And so, I didn’t want to get in that business of saying, well, I don’t care what anybody else is doing. We’re going to do this. Not at all. We want to better understand what the needs were and where those gaps were and then try to meet people there. And so, what that has looked like is, to your point, us for really the first time for our United Way, getting involved in more direct services. So historically, our programs look like the Vita program, which is a partnership with Cadence Bank locally, where we help prepare taxes. We offer it as a free service to citizens in our community during tax season. So, we’ve run that program. We have Christmas partners, which again, going back to the duplication thing, that was set up to work across various different nonprofits to serve people in our community during the Christmas season to make sure kids had something underneath their tree without there being duplication. And so, we helped run and facilitate that program. Then we had our single care, which is a prescription program, which really all we really did was market it. It wasn’t really a program per se of ours. And then we had disaster and emergency assistance as needed. And those were for the most part, the programs we were running. And so, again, where the shift has taken place is, okay, well, where were there still gaps? One of the biggest things, there were two areas in particular that we saw huge need for investment.

One, the field I came out of, childcare. And unfortunately, it was already tough. That field was tough when I was in it. And there was already not enough access and not enough support for families in our community of all different types. But then the pandemic hit, and we had childcare centers all around the region closing their doors and not being able to make it on the other side of that. And so, it was already an issue before and now it’s exacerbated. And so back in 2001, when the Department of Human Services first started tracking the number of licensed childcare facilities across the state, there were about 81 to 83 childcare facilities at that time in West Tennessee. And licensed childcare facilities, I should say. Not in West Tennessee, in Madison County. In Madison County, there were 81. Now, there’s somewhere underneath 30. And so, this is a need. This is a need. This is a huge issue. And so that was one of the first programs or one of the first things we started working on. So, I hired Olivia Abernathy. We partnered with Tennessee’s for Quality Early Education, and we started doing research. Again, we didn’t just dive in and just say, oh, we’re going to do something here. We want to even more so better understand the need.

So that was one area. And then the other really big one was the Financial Empowerment Center. The other big need that we saw was just around, again, the financial instability of our communities. So, shout out to the mayor. Again, Mayor Conger, when he was in my role, had already begun to look at this and analyze it. And we had produced the ALICE report and the data about needs in our communities across West Tennessee. And as he became Mayor, he started an anti-poverty task force, of which I had the privilege to chair initially and work alongside Lauren Kirk from his office. And we started diving into that and saw the need for a financial empowerment center here that would offer free financial counseling services. And so that was another area where we really pushed heavily. And so, we were able to get that launched in March of 2022. And we have a shared services platform now to begin to work on the childcare issue. And then both of those things led to a bunch of other programs.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Content Machine Podcast. This was part one of a two-part episode with Matt Marshall. Stay tuned for the second half.

Have you mapped out your company’s core values?

Core values should be one of the most important things for a team, which is why this week on the Content Machine Podcast, we’re talking about everything you need to know to start defining your team’s core values.

Sometimes core values are unspoken. Every team is built from different people, so every team develops its own set of values. But oftentimes, you should flesh out these ideas. Why? Because unlike a mission statement that generally talks about our why and our team goals, and you can check out our episode on mission statements if you haven’t already, core values talk about how we should act on a daily basis. Something to consider is that core values ought to be simultaneously true and aspirational. So here are three things that make core values meaningful presence, celebration, and evaluation.

With core values, you want to make sure they are visible and present with your team. If you are not regularly refreshing their value and meaning to your team, why should you expect them to remember them and work by them? We want to make the ideas behind our core values sticky. Sticky meaning easy to remember when considering how we operate the company. How can you do this? Well, one, make a standard graphic for each value and make it easy to use. At Adelsberger Marketing, our multi-talented designer Katie Howerton, took care of this for us. She took our values and put them together with graphics that are fun, visually appealing, and match our company’s themes. Having something that your team can easily find and visualize will make the concepts easier to remember. Think about ways that you can get these graphics in front of them. Maybe it’s on stickers or a weekly review of one of the core values as pieces of the company’s identity. I have seen several places that put the core values on the wall of the organization, and I’ve seen others make swag like coffee mugs with the values printed on them. Help build them into your company culture by making them a regularly occurring part of the life of your team. Ideally, like a mission statement, the team should be able to say what those values are if prompted, and that isn’t just going to happen through Osmosis.

You should celebrate your core values. We work every week to cover one of our core pieces of identity, which I include as themes, mission, vision, core values, during our midweek catch up call. This is a way for me to keep those things in front of the team, but it is also a great opportunity for me as a leader to look for staff members who are doing these core values in a notable way and celebrate them for that. It’s not always a weekly thing, but it’s a tool I can use to encourage staff members who are going above and beyond.

And finally, we use it for evaluation. This is a methodology used by EOS or entrepreneurial operating systems. Each quarter we sit down with each team member and work with them to review on a small scale whether they are practicing core values or not. The scale we use is plus, plus minus, or minus, meaning I did this and I’m doing this, I could improve in this or I’m sometimes showing this value, or I did not do this. The simple scale gives some additional accountability to team members because they are having to evaluate themselves, and it helps them see the core values more clearly. With our team, we start with a self-assessment, and then go over that with them and talk through each point.

Core values need to be true, meaning team members and even clients can see them in the organization. And they need to be aspirational because the truth is, we can always be a little bit better. In a future episode, we’ll talk through the core values at Adelsberger Marketing and what they mean to us. But if you’re wanting some more information on core values, or if you need some perspective on a jumping off point for developing your own, make sure to tune into future episodes of the Content Machine Podcast.

If you enjoyed this episode, feel free to drop us a comment or an email or text it to a friend. Does your team already have a set of core values? We’d love to hear back from you. Shoot me an email, send me a text. I’d love to hear what you’re doing at your organization.