Membership as an honorary soror in Delta Sigma Theta came to me a little over a year ago, and the women, the work, and the welcome have moved me in ways I could never have anticipated. To be received by women who care so deeply about humanity, going far beyond their own individual high accomplishments, is something I value with gratitude.

Every event, every experience as a member of this organization, has brought people forward who come to me and say, ‘You’ve been my mentor.’ ‘You’ve been my best friend in my head.’ ‘I’m here because I took from you this information.’ That has been a regular occurrence, walking around and living my life for some time. To hear this from sorors across geographies and industries - sorors who I can and do say the same things back to - is a gift supreme.

Let us be clear about who is saying it. To be a member of Delta Sigma Theta, or of any of the D9 sororities and fraternities, means a person has already met some significant achievement and held to some high standards of living and behavior. Having these accomplished humans come forward to shower me with fellowship continuously ‘blows me away’. It has also put me back in the classroom and helped me to remember and to appreciate the lesson.

The lesson is this: there are people whose ideas and decisions we are helping to shape without ever having shaken their hands. The experiences we go through by the influence of people we look up to, people we admire, even people whose work we study for how they did that, how they built that, reference us to something important: we are doing that same thing for others, whether or not we are mindful of it.

This sits with me in a business way, and in a personal way. One of my life mantras holds the two together: ‘Never compromise who you are personally to become who you wish to be professionally.’ Living that, with my effort at legitimacy in how I interact with people, is the foundation of how I think we best mentor people forward.

Mentoring runs in both directions. While it’s a joy for me to teach young adults in ways that shorten their struggle without lessening their learning, there are young folks new in their careers who I learn from every day. While often, they are not living the style of life I would look to for myself, they are doing some of the same things I aspire to, and still find joy in doing. (That is its own education, and it is also a lesson in not judging people).

With the advantage of technology, mentoring has become a broader opportunity for all of us. We follow people through their social media. We meet people through the organizations we join, and through the events we invest in attending. All of it is an opportunity to find a mentor––and––to be a mentor.

At the end of the day, it comes back to what Mama used to say: ‘You may not be aware of it, but the whole world is watching.’ Mama said that before social media. Mama said that when we read news in print papers and magazines. Mama said that when there were three networks on television. Is it not even MORE true now?

The people who continue to come forward to call me a mentor were watching long before I knew their names. That is the mentor who never knew they were one: any one of us, living where others can see. We are each modeling a life for someone, and the work is rich and rewarding to make it one worth following.

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The drive from San Diego to Los Angeles for an eight o’clock meeting has one safe answer: leave the night before. Leave any later, and arriving on time becomes a gamble against traffic no one controls. Lose that gamble, and the door will already be closed. There is no slipping into a back seat, no catching up during a lull. The door stays shut until a break comes, and if the meeting has no break built in, the meeting is simply missed.

The practice traces back to Berry Gordy, who founded Motown. One of his rules from day one: once a meeting started, anyone not already in the room, ready to deliver, found the door closed to them. No one got invited back in until a break came, if one came at all. People learned quickly that he meant it, literally and figuratively. The rule reached this organization through a personal connection: a sister and a brother-in-law worked inside Motown, and there was the chance to meet Mr. Gordy directly and witness the scale of what he built and who it touched. That respect is part of why the rule got carried forward rather than left behind.

Berry Gordy understood the value of time and of respect to one another. So, he locked his meeting-room doors at the exact agreed-upon time. This practice, I believe, not only helped him run a business on disciplined behavior; it taught his executives and his artists to respect their ‘customers’… the fans who bought the music and the tickets to the shows.

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As the founder of Motown Records, Mr. Gordy held himself to a discipline he expected in others, and he focused intensely on efficiency. His leadership of Motown was, in part, inspired by the assembly-line discipline he encountered inside Detroit’s automotive plants.

People who recall their time under his leadership have spoken of his legendary Friday morning Quality Control meetings. These were high-stakes, product-evaluation sessions wherein producers, songwriters, and executives voted on which new recordings would be put to market. Mr. Gordy thought tardiness went beyond disrespect, and that it smelled of waste and opportunity cost. So, if you were not in the room at the agreed-upon time, the door to your opportunity, and to meeting your requirement, was closed. In my company, people understand that too many lates can result in loss of momentum, failure to meet expectations and deadlines, and a ‘no need to come back.’ Thankfully, understanding this means we respect each other, the work, and the opportunity! We show up on time.

It has since been extended somewhere Mr. Gordy’s version never had to go: the digital meeting. Joining from a living room, a home office, or the beach does not earn a later entry than joining in person would. Arriving late gets noted the same way, whether the meeting happens across a table or across a screen, and the way back in follows the same rule, either way. Eight o’clock means eight o’clock, by whatever time zone it is set in.

A closed door earns its meaning only when it does not bend: not for the person who drove up from San Diego and hit traffic, not for the person joining virtually from three time zones away, not for anyone. Everyone meets the same door. Everyone earns the same way back through it.

A closed door is a form of respect extended, in advance, to everyone who arrived on time. Their eight o’clock does not get diluted by someone else’s ‘eight-oh-five’. A meeting that starts on time for the people who showed up on time keeps the whole promise a start time makes.

That promise is easy to state and harder to keep, because keeping it consistently costs something every time. It costs an uncomfortable conversation with someone accustomed to slipping in late. It costs the appearance of flexibility, which some people will read as coldness. What it buys back is larger: a room where the time on the invite is the actual time, where the people who organized their morning around eight o’clock are not quietly penalized for it, and where showing up ready is worth exactly what it should be.

Time carries a different value now than it did when Mr. Gordy first locked that door. Technology has taken on transactional work at a pace no one anticipated, and much of what used to cost an afternoon now costs a few seconds. That shift has raised the price of what remains ours alone to give: judgment, presence, the read of a room no model has walked into. Respecting someone’s time, in that light, is an investment in the part of the work a machine cannot make for us. It keeps the advantage on the human side of the clock, where it belongs.

The door still closes at eight. It always has, and what it protects is everyone in that room, whether they made it in or not, being told the truth about what time actually meant.

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Early in my career as a business owner, a pull existed that I could not shake. Somebody needed help with a hiring decision. ‘Say yes’. An organization with no funds wanted a keynote requiring travel and stay. ‘Say yes’. A young woman needed mentoring, a community needed a voice. ‘Yes’ to all of it. The desire to be a super-shero who could leap tall buildings was real; I would fly around helping everyone who asked.

Eventually, it was too much. At the end of the day, when the cape and stilettos came off, there was just a mere mortal standing there. Something had to be left over for the family, and for me. Yet I did not know what to say yes to and what to say no to.

My spiritual advisor is a man admired tremendously in my home. He gives wise counsel. Even more, he helps me think about things in a different way. He helped work through this desire to be a super-shero. He said, “The important thing in life is to know your ministry. Your ministry isn’t to work long hours so you can give every person whatever they ask for. Your ministry is what you are passionate about and gifted to. Once you identify your ministry, then you can passionately give to what, and where, you care about. Giving with passion to one or two things is more powerful than giving to many things out of a sense of obligation.”

That made perfect sense.

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What Ministry Actually Means

The realization came quickly after: the ministry was the business and all of its employees. That was where passion and purpose aligned. When we are in business, the first working responsibility is to that business. When we are not expanding, satisfying our customers, and serving our employees, that is the signal to work more inside the business, not less; not to scatter the effort further outside it.

His counsel also settled a question that used to feel impossible: which charities and nonprofits to support. Hundreds of requests come in each year. Every one of them is worthwhile. We cannot support them all. Knowing the ministry makes the answer clear. Passion for education runs deep. So any education-related request that comes in, we look at seriously and now vet from there. That does not mean there is no care for the others. It means the investment is intentional rather than scattered.

There is an immediate difference between someone passionately committed and someone going through obligated motions. People who are passionately committed have identified their ministry; they know what they have to offer the world. It is the thing they will do regardless.

Let Your Dreams Build Your Purpose

As a teenager, a label got attached to me that was worn without much protest: daydreamer. Sunday school, for me, had a way of sparking the imagination, and Mama heard all of it. One Sunday, a rush of big ideas came home with me, the way teenagers do, fast and certain and unfinished. It led to one of the few times my mother was disappointed to the point of frustration.

She said, “Baby, you come up with all of these great ideas and big dreams, but then you don’t follow through on them. Why don’t you write down those dreams and then figure out a plan for how you’re going to make them happen? Whatever you’re dreaming about, make it your purpose. Then you’ll stay focused on it and make it happen.”

Mama was right. She still is. A great deal was written about ActOne before day one of its existence. The writing made it real enough to plan for; the plan made it real enough to build.

Your Ministry Will Come to You

From a very young age, there was a knowing that doing good was the direction. That desire came from the world around me, not just from any single place of worship. Yet figuring out exactly how to do good, what form it would take, where it would land, happened over time and not on a schedule.

My minister once said, “You don’t have to search for your ministry. It will come to you when you’re ready, if you live on the path of doing good as you do well.”

What that asks of us is simpler than it sounds: be open and pay attention. When your life’s purpose comes to you, it does not always come as a whisper. You will not miss it if you are paying attention to how you live and what you are doing. One day you will discover where you will make your imprint on the world and how you will do your good thing. Then, for the rest of your life, you will know your ministry.

What We Do with All of This

Men and women eventually find themselves asking the question: “What do I do with all of this? I’ve built a career, so what? What now?” It is a common question. The answer lies in that ministry, that good thing that each of us must identify for ourselves.

When you find your ministry, focus on it with passion. Then maybe when you reach this stage of life, you too will have something worth sharing with the next generation.

God bless you.

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On my vision board, there is a picture of a person who matters to me. Around it are the things that must be achieved in alignment with what that picture represents. My vision board travels with me everywhere. On my iPad screen every time it opens. Framed on the wall of my closet at home, which is my personal space, the one I go to when I need to be me in a very defined way. It keeps my courage up where I need it to be.

Courage. That is the word worth reaching for when we think about what a goal actually requires. Strategy is the plan you build once you know what you are moving toward. Courage is what keeps the destination alive long enough to build the plan.

Wishes are not Goals. That has always been true, and it is still true. Goals carry strategies, avoiding wasted thoughts. Yet there is a second error now, quieter and more costly that can occur around this: people are forsaking their goals in favor of their strategies. Moving so fast toward what feels achievable that what was worth wanting gets left behind. You arrive at a completion point, count the check marks, and realize somewhere in the accumulation the original destination went missing. It is sad when that happens. Sad because the person did the work and still did not get what they were after, and the reason has nothing to do with their effort.

The ownership of a home is an example worth holding. Researchers at Northwestern and the University of Chicago published a study on what happens when people stop believing they will ever own a home. They titled it “Giving Up.” What they found is that once the goal feels permanently out of reach, behavior changes entirely: saving stops, consumption rises, work effort drops, and risk tolerance climbs to places it never would have gone. The aspiration dies and the conduct follows it down. This is a goal story wearing a housing story’s clothes, and it is playing out right now across some members of a generation who have decided their path is closed.

Don’t give up on the idea of having a home. A house is not a home. Yet the aspiration of home, of stability, of something built and lasting, of a place that is yours, is worth protecting even when the path has altered the course you must take. The goal you had when you were so much fresher in your adult life may express itself differently than you first imagined. Keeping it alive positions you to recognize the path when it opens. Abandoning it forecloses options you have not yet imagined. That thing you leave off because of what you are afraid of today may be the very thing that could have been the highlight of your goal.

It is not an either/or circumstance. Having a long-term goal you cannot yet reach be supported by a strategy for what is achievable right now, can coexist. What cannot coexist is forsaking the goal for the sake of the check marks.

On a vision board there is usually a picture or a quickly worded outcome. The company goal may be $1,000,000 in sales. The personal vision may be the house you have eyed and intend to buy. Underneath that house are the transactions, the values, and the timelines required to reach it, and one of those may well be the company’s number. The aspiration is not the strategy. The aspiration is what makes the strategy worth executing.

At ActOne, we celebrate this distinction every year through Founders Club. The people who reach certain results earn an all-expenses-paid trip. Jamaica one year, the Dominican Republic the next. Hawaii and Mexico before that. A gala night, the red carpet rolled out, beautiful names called from a stage, many bringing children or significant others along to share the celebration. In the offices, long before anyone has earned anything, the vision boards go up in some employee lounges with pictures of next year’s destination, the team goal written out beside a thermometer marking the progress toward it. What comes back to me time after time from the people who arrive at Founders Club is that it was the vision board that steered them there. By the time we reach that celebration, tremendous accomplishment has already been made. Most of the time, what they earned first was something important to somebody else. A gift to a community charity. A school they wanted to support or send a child to. The trip is not the destination. It is the proof that the aspiration held.

Goals must be checked regularly and moved as soon as achieved, lest stagnation occur. The revision worth resetting is not the timeline. A missed deadline does not retire a goal. Deciding the goal is no longer worth reaching for does. That decision tends to arrive dressed as realism, and sometimes the circumstances producing it are real. Yet real and permanent are not the same thing.

Forty-eight years of building a company and placing people into work has taught one lesson above all others about aspiration. The people who reach what they were after are often not the ones who had the smoothest path. They are the ones who kept the picture on the wall when the path changed. They are the ones whose courage outlasted the circumstance. They are the one who understood that ‘Together, We Win’.

Goals are not wishes. They are the reason the strategy exists at all. Keep the picture on the wall.

Back in the early years of building ActOne, some clients would call us with a specific request. They wanted to hire people who had come through Enterprise Rental Car. Enterprise, at that time, had invested in teaching their people what service meant. Understanding what each car on that lot meant to each person standing in front of you. This brand for this kind of driving. That one for a better cost proposition for short trips. They understood the elements of what they were offering, and how to put it in the hands of the right person. The whole market took notice. Companies were calling us asking for those people by name. Of course, we could not deliver to that specific; however, we could use the quality the requests implied to seek the best candidates to each position being filled. That is what teaching does.

We call it teaching at ActOne, and we were deliberate about the word from the get-go. Whenever companies said they were going to “train” someone, something always pulled at me. You train an animal. Some animals you can teach. Those animals include humans. So, we should be teaching people.

The difference between training and teaching, when my teams asked me to define it, always landed in the same place: you teach by example, applied reasoning, and agreement. You can stand in front of a room and run someone through the system, the process, the measurables. A machine can do that. Teaching is something else. The truest example came from my mother-in-law: your children more attention pay to what you do than what you say. Treat the people with ‘big ages’ around you well. Your kids will notice and learn from your example.

Developing people happens through the behaviors we live in front of them, alongside the investment of structured learning. That is the whole picture.

When the teams at ActOne understood it, a related concern arrived right behind it. Companies were recruiting our employees for the same reason others had gone off to do their own raiding from Enterprise. Our industry rallied to take anyone who had been with us for 18 months.

Those teams would bring me the costs, the hours, the curriculum, all of it. Was it worth it?

“What if we invest all this on development to teach and develop our employees and then they leave?” They would ask.

My answer has been the same since the beginning. What if we don’t develop them and they stay?

A person who grows and leaves carries something you gave them out into the world. That matters. A person who never grew and then stayed: that cost exists in everything, some of which you cannot quite name. In the pace of the work. In the ceiling you keep reaching for and cannot break through. In the culture that has quietly stopped becoming anything at all.

Development is about how much someone enjoys the input, as much as how well they output. How engaged are they in the learning? How invested in becoming more? A person being developed in their work brings something to it that a person merely processed through a training program never will. The difference shows up in how they handle the moment nobody prepared them for.

The people who invest their working lives in building something deserve the same investment before anything is asked of them in return. The large number of team members who have been with ActOne for more than a decade (in some cases, multiple decades), is the return on a mutual commitment made early and never abandoned. From the deepest part of my heart, I value them and appreciate what it means to their time with their families and cares, as much as to their teammates and our company.

Work is where most people invest the weight of their days; it is where we find out some of the stuff of which we are made. The leader who withholds development because the return feels uncertain is making a decision that reaches far beyond a budget line. That decision reaches into who the people around her will be able to become, and into what kind of leader she is going to be.

Developing people IS the work. Every person who walks through the door carries something not yet realized, and how well they grow depends in part on whether we were willing to nurture the circumstance that made it possible. That is a strong element of what it means to lead.

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Work is a blessing. That is a conviction my parents legacied to my siblings and me, and one that nearly half a century in the staffing industry has only deepened. Yet, a blessing withheld of its dignity is a diminished thing, and far too many people have invested their working lives inside that diminishment.

Growing up in Tarboro, North Carolina, Panola Street was a line that defined everything for me. On one side, our neighborhood. On the other, the world of work that many of our neighbors crossed into every morning. What they left behind when they crossed that street was not always visible on the way out. Coming home, it was.

The people on our side of Panola Street went to work in jobs where dignity was not guarantee once they got there. The work was menial. The hours were kept. On Sundays, the churches filled, and they filled for more than one reason. There was the word of God, yes. For those of us who believe, dignity lives at the heart of that word. Yet there was something else drawing people through those doors: the simple, nourishing experience of being seen. Good morning, Miss So-and-so. How is that new grandchild? You look well today. We are glad you are here. People were going to church, in part, because church was where someone greeted them respectfully by name, and meant it. That hunger does not come from nowhere. It is created by the places that withhold it the other six days of the week.

Nearly half a century in the staffing business has taken me to many corners of this world, and one thing holds constant in every one of them: Dignity is what every person deserves. Am I seen? Am I respected? Does the conversation we are having value me as a full human being? Humiliating people into better performance does not work. It burns through talent, burns through hearts, and burns through communities. In companies where the dignity of EVERY worker is built into the culture, high performance and predictable outcomes are common, and innovation soars. When people are individually let go, or lay-offs occur, there is not the brunt of surprise. Communication has supported expectation.

Once, early in the growth of our company, my brother came to me about the need to exit a staff member. That was a big occasion because very rarely did we have to let people go. Before he got to the details, he stopped.

“We’d better remember,” he said, “what Daddy used to say. It’s not what you’re going to tell someone. It’s how you’re going to tell them. Always create a circumstance for them to keep their dignity.” The truth is, when you deny someone their dignity, you lose yours.

Daddy was real big about that, and his words became a part of his legacy to us. In our family, in our community, on our side of Panola Street, dignity was the floor upon which everything else was built.

During forty-seven years of helping people find jobs and build careers, one thing this work has confirmed over and over is that when people choose to leave a company, especially the ones whose departure surprises you, whose absence lands harder than anyone anticipated, the reason is not always pay. It often is relationship. How were they respected? How did they perceive their value to be seen? How often were they thanked? Where do they see their growth opportunity? The energy a person invests in their work is dynamic, and it often is in response to what the environment gives.

In the early days of company, we put a small mirror in front of every phone. We would go into offices, and if we saw a phone without one, we would ask about it. We had these mirrors made with the brand logo in the corner. The reason was simple: when people see themselves as they speak, they bring a different level of energy, a heightened care for honesty, a different quality of attention to the conversation. They see themselves reflected with clarity and dignity with which we see them. Think about it: With that mirror in front of you, you see yourself for what you are saying. What we think we communicate and what we actually communicate are often two different things. And that mirror belongs in every room where the people who make everything else possible are working. When you walk in to thank the coordinator who arranged everything you did not see being arranged, she or he can see herself/himself reflected in your gratitude. Treating them with dignity is a mirror to how you see them.

We tend to, literally, pay our respect based on how well someone’s brand is known. We’ll pay for shirts to wear with an athlete’s or artist’s face placed across our chest and then, pass that celebrity’s family member who may have been instrumental to renown of that celebrity on the street without a word, because the shirt isn’t there to tell us who they are. We pass by some of the most upstanding human beings every day, people who never got a shirt with their face on it and so never received the appreciation they had long since earned. There was a janitor in one of our client companies who noticed, after eighteen years of cleaning a building, that the boilerplate had turned a shade redder than it should be. He flagged it, and saved the building––he was heroic. We learned of this, and that he received no applause. He didn’t ‘get a shirt’. He made due with a simple hand shake and ‘thank you’. My brother, Carlton, decided to quietly take him to dinner one evening after. He presented him with one of our company tee-shirts and a small financial token of appreciation, while letting him know that we valued him. He was not our employee, but he well may have saved our employees’ lives who were working there on assignments. There are heroic things done every day by heroic people, and the silence around them is a choice we are all making.

We are entering an era in which more and more of what gets done will be done by agentic workers, by technology that does not pause, does not tire, does not need a Sunday morning to feel human again. That is coming more and more rapidly and repeatedly, and some of it is welcome. People are daily adjusting their emotions - something the AI and tech does yet do - to ‘survive’, let alone thrive in this changing world. Executives and managers in companies are as uncertain of their futures as are line workers and administrative professionals. Yet, as this era continues to evolve, the obligation from human beings still in the rooms, grows larger. Faces and hearts cannot disappear from work. The people working alongside new systems, and the people receiving what these systems produce, are still full human beings asking the same question people on each side of Panola Street in my early hometown were asking.

Am I seen, with dignity, when I enter here?

Do the people in this place know my name?

The answer to that question has always resided within a leadership decision that guides the values and the cultures. It still does.

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