Patrick Lencioni continues his series of excellent leadership/management books with The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for Managers (And Their Employees) (J-B Lencioni Series). As usual, he uses a fable to make his point. He tells the story of Brian Bailey, a retired CEO who is trying to determine why people hate their jobs and how it can be fixed. Through the fable and the more direct final section, Lencioni identifies three forces that make a job miserable: anonymity, irrelevance, and immeasurement.
When workers feel anonymous, especially to the boss, they tend not to care about their work. They just want to get through the day and go home. It is up to the manager to take a genuine interest in each person so that this anonymity is dispelled.
When people feel irrelevant to the company, they often decide that their work doesn't matter. While they may be key to the success of the organization, they may not know that. Someone needs to tell then the role they play and how their work helps others.
While immeasurement may be a word that Lencioni has created, it is a simple concept. Workers need to be able to measure success. They need to know that they have fulfilled their goal. We have to be careful to measure things that we can control, but we all need some way of knowing that we have succeeded.
Lencioni is clear that these are simple concepts, but his insights are excellent. As usual, Lencioni takes very simple things and shows that any manager can master them with some effort. This is one more really helpful tool in leading people.
Get more detail about The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for Managers (And Their Employees) (J-B Lencioni Series).
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