Work with meaning

Excuse the the stutters, stumbles, and stammers: here’s a one-take recording of this edition if you prefer to listen: Spotify link

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It is cold. It is raining. It is that in-between hour of early evening. So a cocktail is the logical choice to fill the time before dinner.

There is no menu. What's the need for the menu? I assume it's possible to order anything you might desire.

So we do. With Japanese whiskey. 

And then the performance begins.

The tools are laid out in order of their use: jiggers, bar spoons, strainers, muddlers, ice picks, planes, and knives.

The glasses, chosen from his lifetime collection—each piece hand-selected from antique shops and carefully curated over decades—are spotlessly cleaned. Bottles arranged with the labels facing us. Garnishes prepped.

Chunks of pure ice are selected for the shakers. Another for the rocks glass. Some rough carving with the ice pick as the chunk is fitted to its eventual vessel. Then the fine sculpting: small, precise movements with an ice plane to perfect the shape. A final fitting. 

And: the glass is placed beneath a radiant heat lamp to create an ultra-thin layer of melt on the ice surface to help the ice "seat" perfectly in the glass, round any sharp edges that might affect the drinking experience, and ensure the ice temperature is optimized for the cocktails to come.

The final act is just as engaging: precise focus, precise measurements, precise movements … perhaps I spot a sacred pause and a final perfection check … before precise presentation.

It is spiritual. And that's the point. If you've had the pleasure of traveling through Japan, you've certainly crossed paths with shokunin—the craftsman's spirit where mastery comes through obsessive attention to detail. In this six-seat bar, everything was elevated to an art form: including the placement of your belongings in a storage closet directly behind your seat.

Reverent.

And the Manhattan, the Old Fashioned, and of course, the highballs, are, well, perfect.

It was this scene that came to mind when I recently revisited Amy Wrzesniewski's research on finding meaning in work.

She points to three ways ("orientations") people view their work: as a job, a career, or a calling. As a job, work is viewed primarily as a means to a financial end, where work is something to get through to enjoy life outside of work. Viewed as a career, work is about advancement, promotion, increased pay, prestige, status—climbing those corporate and industry ladders.

As a calling, however, work is an end in itself, providing fulfillment and meaning—people believe their work contributes to making the world a better place. People with calling orientations report higher job satisfaction, more meaning in work, and find work more enjoyable.

For all of us, especially in healthcare, work as a calling was a primary reason to choose the work we do. 

And then you work for a while, and you either get lucky because that calling remains present … or it gets difficult to maintain the calling orientation because, well, work. And life. And if you've read my explanation of what's going on, it's easy to understand why.

So is that just how it is? For something we do for half of our waking lives, is meaningful work too much to ask for?

No.

Which brings me to another piece of Professor Wrzesniewski's work: job crafting. Job crafting can transform work orientation, from a job or a career to a calling.

Job crafting is designing your work—adjusting tasks, relationships, or how you think about your role—to create greater purpose and satisfaction. People in all kinds of roles and in all types of organizations job craft—suggesting, importantly!—job crafting is a way for us to take agency over our experience of work by turning what we do into a calling.

Here it is again, for emphasis: we can improve our work experience using job crafting.

Job crafting is a well-established research concept. There's robust evidence that people are actively reshaping their work, and that this reshaping generally leads to positive outcomes like increased engagement, well-being, and performance, through three primary strategies:

• Task crafting: Changing what you do or how you do it, like when a physician adds "What else should I know?" as a question in every patient visit—turning the encounter from checklist completion into conversation.

• Relational crafting: Changing interactions with others, like when a nurse manager arrives early twice a week to round with the night shift during their final hour—not to supervise, but to hear what they saw and stay connected to the patient care happening on his unit.

• Cognitive crafting: Changing how you think about your work, like when an operations manager starts bringing a frontline story to every budget meeting—reframing her role from defending constraints to advocating for the resources that make excellent care possible.

Job crafting is about both the stories we tell ourselves and the small, concrete actions we take. Both are necessary: how we think about our work shapes what we notice, what feels possible, and what we're willing to try. Without action, it remains an aspiration. The cognitive shift creates the opening; the behavioral change walks through it.

"In job crafting," writes Professor Wrzesniewski, "new possibilities open for the meaning of work by allowing for the creation of meaning in any job by the way in which it is constructed by the individual. Through job crafting, one can realize a Calling orientation by reshaping the … boundaries of the job in ways that allow one to view the work as making a bigger contribution to the wider world."

The behavioral (task, relational) crafting is more straightforward—you can try a change this week and see what happens. The cognitive piece is, perhaps, a bit trickier. 

Telling ourselves better stories about our work isn't just deciding to be positive. It requires examining the stories we're already telling (often unconsciously), questioning whether they're complete or accurate, and looking for evidence that might support a different interpretation.

For the operations manager, it meant shifting from "I defend budgets" to "I advocate for care"—a reframe grounded in the genuine purpose of resource allocation and one that leads to action: bringing frontline stories to budget meetings, changing not just how she thinks about the work, but what she actually does.

The starting point is noticing: What story are you telling yourself about the hardest parts of your work? Is that story based on complete information, or are you missing evidence? Where might you look?

Sometimes this noticing and reframing happens naturally through reflection. Sometimes it requires conversation with trusted colleagues or mentors. And sometimes—especially when dealing with burnout or deeply entrenched patterns—working with a coach or therapist can help surface and shift the narratives that keep us stuck.

And here's the meta-point: Job crafting is itself a different story about work. It's the story that says you have agency, that small changes matter, that meaning can be created rather than just found, that systems can be nudged. Adopting this framework—believing that crafting is possible—may be the first and most important story to start telling yourself.

That's the story of shokunin in a humble Kanazawa cocktail bar; it is, for example, Bud Caddell's story of consulting as craft; and it can be your story of the work you do, too.

Two questions:

• This week, where is there a small space between how you work now and how you could work? What's a change worth trying—a small change in what you do, or how you interact with others?

• What's one part of your work where you might not be noticing the impact you're having?

Around The Water Cooler ⛲

“When deciding whether to take a fork in the road or continue on, the choice isn’t between taking a risk or playing it safe; it’s between these risks and those risks. It’s a choice of which risks not whether to risk anything at all.” Whose Risks? Whose Benefits? by Mandy Brown

“So, what if, instead of thinking about solving your whole life, you just think about adding additional good things. One at a time. Just let your pile of good things grow.” - Rainbow Rowell

I created my own AI medical team. It changed the way doctors treat my cancer. by Steve Brown

“Heartbreak is the heart of all revolutionary consciousness. How can it not be? Who can imagine another world unless they have already been broken apart by the world we are in?” - Gargi Bhattacharyya

Thanks for reading. Hit reply and let me know your thoughts.

How To Work is healthcare-focused work design inspiration (from the experts!) to nudge your perspectives and practices into better alignment with the world of work as it is, and away from what it was. Here’s my take on what we’re working through.