Peter Drucker gets this right:

“The young knowledge worker whose job is too small to challenge and test his abilities either leaves or declines rapidly into premature middle-age soured, cynical, unproductive.

Executives everywhere complain that many young men with fire in their bellies turn so soon into burned-out sticks. They have only themselves to blame: they quenched the fire by making the young man’s job too small.”

In other words, you burn people out mainly by giving them too little, not mainly by giving them too much.

If you treat your employees simply as tools — that is, simply as interchangeable parts who are there to do what you tell them rather than to take initiative and ownership of their job — you are are not just being an ineffective manager. You are harming your employees (as all bad management ultimately does).

Post 5 in the series The Three Signs of a Miserable Job

Today we are getting back to our series on Patrick Lencioni’s book The Three Signs of a Miserable Job.

In our last post we looked at what makes a job miserable. Before looking at the three solutions to this, we are going to take a look at the benefits of overcoming miserable jobs — or, in other words, managing for job fulfillment.

Which is what this is really about. As we continue through Lencioni’s book, it strikes me as slightly depressing to talk about “miserable jobs”!

But the point of his book, and this series, is not to focus on miserable jobs, but on job fulfillment. Looking at the causes of job misery is just a lens to help us learn better how to manage for meaning in our work — and not just for our own sakes, but, if we are managers or leaders in organizations, for the sake of those who work for us.

There are four benefits of managing for job fulfillment that Lencioni discusses: increased productivity, greater retention, lower costs, and cultural differentiation. Then I’m going to add one more at the end, and then one nuance. (And to these reasons could be added some of the other benefits covered in the first post in this series, when we discussed why this issue is important.)

1. Increased Productivity

The simple and basic truth is that when you find your job to be more fulfilling, you do a better job at it. You work with “more enthusiasm, passion, and attention to quality” because you’ve developed a sense of ownership in what you are doing. This matters in itself; but if an organization needs more justification than that, it’s that this greater engagement and passion results in higher productivity for the organization — whether that is defined in terms of greater accomplishment of the mission (for a non-profit) or greater profits (for a for-profit — which also should be driven first by their mission, rather than profit, as I’ve blogged elsewhere).

People that love what they are doing do better work. They are more creative, they work harder, and they are willing to go the extra mile — and do it joyfully.

2. Greater Retention

High job fulfillment results in high retention because people typically don’t want to leave jobs that they love. Further, this has the added benefit of attracting more solid employees, because “fulfilled employees tend to attract other good employees to an organization, either by actively recruiting them or merely by telling friends about their enthusiasm for their work.”

3. Lower Costs

One result of greater retention (and better recruiting) is obviously lower costs, because you have to spend less time finding and training new employees.

4. Sustainable Cultural Differentiation

This is perhaps the most significant benefit to the organization. Here’s how Lencioni puts it:

The opportunity for differentiation from competitors by building a culture of job fulfillment cannot be overstated. In a world of ubiquitous technology and rapid dissemination of information, it is harder and harder to establish sustainable competitive advantage through strategic and tactical decision making. Cultural differentiation, however, is more valuable than it’s ever been, because it requires courage and discipline more than creativity or intelligence.

In other words, cultural differentiation not only makes your organization a better place to work overall, but is also hard to copy — and thus is a competitive advantage.

5. It Serves People

The fourth reason managing for job fulfillment matters is that it serves people. People ought to find fulfillment in their work, and organizations should manage themselves in such a way as to be intentional about this. Not to do so is to fail to respect and honor your employees and treat them as real people who matter.

And thus, managing for job fulfillment is not optional. If people were machines, it probably wouldn’t matter much. But since people are in the image of God, we ought to manage our organizations in such a way that our people are treated the way we would want to be treated. The Golden Rule does not cease to apply when we walk into the doors of our organizations. (For more on this, see my article “Management in Light of the Supremacy of God“; Lencioni also talks about this a bit in the epilogue to the book — on which, see my post “Management as Ministry.”).

One Nuance

Discussing the nature of job fulfillment can seem like we are putting to much focus on extrinsic factors — as though whether a job is fulfilling or not depends on our environment rather than our response to our environment. So let me say loud and clear that I am not affirming or encouraging that type of thinking.

Instead, the point is that, if we manage people, we ought to be looking out for our people in this way. It’s simply a matter of serving people well (see above). And job fulfillment is not necessarily automatic, because there can be things that get in the way (namely, the “three signs” that we will be discussing next). So managers have to be intentional in clearing out obstacles to job fulfillment, and this is one key part of their role.

And, second, the point is that regardless of whether anyone else is looking out for your job fulfillment, you can and should take responsibility for it. Finding your job meaningful is not simply a matter of deciding to find it fulfilling. There are real things about the structure of a job that can make it more or less fulfilling — just like there are real things about food or any such thing that make it more or less satisfying. Being aware of those things can enable you to change your environment to make it so that you are maximally able to excel in your role. That is part of being proactive and responding well to your environment — namely, changing your environment to make it better.

There are other things you can do besides addressing the three signs that we will talk about next. One of them is to take seriously Paul’s command to “work heartily as unto the Lord” (Ephesians 6). And it would be enjoyable to do a whole series just on that passage to mine what that means.

But I would also propose that “working heartily unto the Lord” includes doing what is in your power to improve your environment in order to reduce the presence of any obstacles that make job fulfillment more challenging. And that’s what we are going to talk about next.

Posts in This Series

• The 3 Signs of a Miserable Job: An Introduction
• What is a Miserable Job?
• What are the Effects of a Miserable Job?
• What Makes a Job Miserable?
• 5 Benefits of Managing for Job Fulfillment
• Addressing the First Sign: Anonymity
• Addressing the Second Sign: Irrelevance
• Addressing the Third Sign: Immeasurement

Post 4 in the series The Three Signs of a Miserable Job

This week we’ve been working through Patrick Lencioni’s book The Three Signs of a Miserable Job. So far we’ve looked at why this issue is important, what a miserable job is (and how it differs from simply a job you don’t like), and the effects miserable jobs have. Now it’s time to look at what makes a job miserable.

This is important because the things that make a job miserable are often distinct from the activities of the job itself. Hence, getting yourself out of a miserable job doesn’t typically mean you have to change jobs; it often just means you need to change a few things that are relatively simple and low cost.

There are often “three underlying factors that will make a job miserable, and they can apply to virtually all jobs regardless of the nature of the work being done” (Lencioni, 221). These three factors are: anonymity, irrelevance, and immeasurement. In this post I will briefly describe each of these factors; we will look at how to address them in an upcoming post.

1. Anonymity

Lencioni writes:

People cannot be fulfilled in their work if they are not known. All human beings need to be understood and appreciated for their unique qualities by someone in a position of authority. . . . People who see themselves as invisible, generic, or anonymous cannot love their jobs, no matter what they are doing.

Very basic, and very true.

2. Irrelevance

If you don’t feel like your job matters to someone, it will feel irrelevant — and thus miserable. Here’s how Lencioni puts it:

Everyone needs to know that their job matters, to someone. Anyone. Without seeing a connection between the work and the satisfaction of another person or group of people, an employee simply will not find lasting fulfillment.

3. Immeasurement

Why do we like sports so much? One reason is that there is a clear, objective measure for how a team is performing.

But imagine a basketball game where the winner was not determined by the number of points scored, but by the subjective impression of the crowd. That would be miserable because the team — and its fans — would lose the sense that there are objective things that they can do that influence whether they are performing better or worse. Lack of measurement in your job is like playing a game without keeping score.

Here’s how Lencioni puts it:

Employees need to be able to gauge their progress and level of contribution for themselves. They cannot be fulfilled in their work if their success depends on the opinions or whims of another person, no matter how benevolent that person may be. Without a tangible means for assessing success or failure, motivation eventually deteriorates as people see themselves as unable to control their own fate.

In many cases, it comes down to just these three things. If you feel miserable in your job, it may because one or all of these factors is in play: you feel anonymous, you aren’t sure your work matters to anyone, and/or there is no way to measure your progress.

In the next posts, we’ll look at how to address this and what benefits come when you do.

Posts in This Series

• The 3 Signs of a Miserable Job: An Introduction
• What is a Miserable Job?
• What are the Effects of a Miserable Job?
• What Makes a Job Miserable?
• What are the Benefits of Managing for Job Fulfillment?
• Addressing the First Sign: Anonymity
• Addressing the Second Sign: Irrelevance
• Addressing the Third Sign: Immeasurement

Post 3 in the series The Three Signs of a Miserable Job

So far we’ve looked at what miserable jobs are (miserable jobs are to be distinguished simply from bad jobs — that is, a job you don’t like) and why this issue is important. Now we are going to look at the consequences of miserable jobs. The consequences are both economic and social.

The Economic Cost

Lencioni points out that “economically, productivity suffers greatly when employees are unfulfilled. The effects on a company’s bottom line or a nation’s economy are undeniable” (Lencioni, The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, p. 219). Lencioni doesn’t elaborate on the economic cost, but there are two main ways miserable jobs affect the bottom line.

First, miserable jobs result in higher employee turnover — and that’s expensive. Higher turnover means you have to spend more money finding and training good people. And it means you lose the knowledge capital and experience that the people leaving brought to the organization. That is no small thing.

What’s worse is that companies often seek to address the turnover in the wrong way, and thus do things that attempt to solve the problem but actually have little effect. For example, companies often look to raising salaries and compensation when people start leaving. Salaries and compensation are important and you need to get that right. But often that’s not the issue — salary is not what makes a job miserable (though, again, it is important and under paying employees is going to have negative effects both for them and your organization).

As a result, an organization might increase salaries and benefits, thinking that it will solve the problem, only to find that it doesn’t. Lencioni gets at this in the foreword that he wrote for the book The Dream Manager: “In those cases where a company has been able to successfully use one of these tools to coax an unfulfilled employee into staying, they usually find that the solution is only a temporary — and a costly — one.”

This is because people work for more than money, and money is not what brings fulfillment in a job. Lack of adequate pay does create unnecessary hardship and discontent, but fulfillment comes from something else — and something much cheaper.

Second, miserable jobs result in lower productivity among those who do stay. Employees who are miserable in their jobs are less engaged and enthusiastic, and thus less productive.

And it turns out that this cost can actually be measured. As Matthew Kelly writes in The Dream Manager:

You do the math. What does your payroll amount to? If on average your employees are 75 percent engaged, disengagement is costing you 25 percent of your payroll every month in productivity alone. The real cost to your business is of course much higher when you take into account how disengaged employees negatively affect your customers and every aspect of your business.

Gallup’s studies have also shown a substantial tie between employee engagement and an organization’s productivity (see, for example, some of the early chapters of First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently).

The Social Cost

So miserable jobs have an economic cost that can be measured, both in terms of increased turnover and decreased productivity. But far more important than the economic cost is the social cost.

This is first of all because of what it does to the employee himself or herself, as we discussed in the first post of this series. But, second of all, this is because of the ripple effect a miserable job has. Lencioni writes:

A miserable employee goes home at the end of the day frustrated, cynical, and weary and spreads that frustration, cynicism, and weariness to others — spouses, children, friends, strangers on the bus. Even the most emotionally mature, self-aware people cannot help but let work misery leak into the rest of their lives.

That’s significant. Even the most emotionally mature are not immune to letting job misery spread into the rest of their lives.

What are the consequences of these ripple effects? Lencioni writes:

In some cases it is extra family stress and tension, and the inability to appreciate the blessings in life. As amorphous as that may seem, over time it impacts people’s emotional and psychological health in profound and potentially irreversible ways.

This presents an opportunity for managers and organizations. For designing work right — designing jobs to be fulfilling — is a way of serving people. Further, just as miserable jobs have spillover effects, so do fulfilling jobs. The first step towards doing this is being aware of what can make a job miserable, which we will look at next.

Posts in This Series

• The 3 Signs of a Miserable Job: An Introduction
• What is a Miserable Job?
• What are the Effects of a Miserable Job?
• What Makes a Job Miserable?
• What are the Benefits of Managing for Job Fulfillment?
• Addressing the First Sign: Anonymity
• Addressing the Second Sign: Irrelevance
• Addressing the Third Sign: Immeasurement

Post 2 in the series The Three Signs of a Miserable Job

When we think of a “miserable job,” our tendency is to think of a job that involves tasks we don’t like very much. But that’s not what a miserable job is. Your job can involve activities that you actually enjoy very much — and yet it can be miserable.

That’s why it’s critical that we distinguish between a miserable job and a bad job. They are not the same. Lencioni rightly says:

As with beauty, the definition of a bad job lies in the eye of the beholder. [Note that: there are not necessarily any intrinsically “bad” jobs — it depends on your skills and preferences whether a job is a good or bad fit for you.] Some people consider a job bad because it is physically demanding or exhausting, involving long hours in the hot sun. Others see it as one that doesn’t pay well. Still others call a job bad because it requires a long commute or a great deal of time sitting behind a desk. It really depends on who you are and what you value and enjoy. (p. 217)

A miserable job, on the other hand is

the one you dread going to and can’t wait to leave. It’s the one that saps your energy even when you’re not busy. It’s the one that makes you go home at the end of the day with less enthusiasm and more cynicism than you had when you left in the morning. (p. 217)

A miserable job “has nothing to do with the actual work a job involves.” As a result, “miserable jobs are found everywhere — consulting firms, television stations, banks, schools, churches, software companies, professional football teams.” Further, they are also found at every level — “from the executive suite to the reception desk to the mail room.”

That’s important: Every type of job, at every level of an organization, can be a miserable job.

Hence, “a professional basketball player can be miserable in his job while the janitor cleaning the locker room behind him finds fulfillment in his work. A marketing executive can be miserable making a quarter of a million dollars a year while the waitress who servers her lunch derives meaning and satisfaction from her job.”

This is the intriguing thing about the miserable job. It saps your energy and enthusiasm and sometimes even zest for life. But it’s not because you don’t like the activities. It’s because of something else. Three things, actually. Before getting to those three things, however, we need to first discuss the consequences of a miserable job in the next post.

Posts in This Series

• The 3 Signs of a Miserable Job: An Introduction
• What is a Miserable Job?
• What are the Effects of a Miserable Job?
• What Makes a Job Miserable?
• What are the Benefits of Managing for Job Fulfillment?
• Addressing the First Sign: Anonymity
• Addressing the Second Sign: Irrelevance
• Addressing the Third Sign: Immeasurement

For this week I am going to blog through Patrick Lencioni’s book The Three Signs of a Miserable Job.

I’m doing this for a few reasons.

1. This is one of Lencioni’s best books

This is the first Lencioni book that I ever read and I still regard it as one of his best. Lencioni is one of the best thinkers on leadership, management, and the modern workplace today. His books address core issues of our work in a simple yet very profound way. Reading this particular book led me to enjoy and benefit from all of his other works as well, and I hope many of you can have the same experience.

2. Low job fulfillment is one of the biggest struggles in the modern workforce

As I talk to people all over the country and around the world, it appears to me that lack of job fulfillment is one of the biggest struggles in the modern workforce. This is slightly paradoxical, because it is also true that we are living at a time where more and more people are finding greater fulfillment in their work than ever before. Nonetheless, I think Lencioni captures the issue well when he writes that “more people out there are miserable in their jobs than fulfilled by them” (p. 219). So, in spite of the progress that has been made, there is still a lot of work to do.

3. There is a substantial organizational and human cost to low job fulfillment

Low job fulfillment takes a significant toll on both organizations and people. The organizational cost is decreased productivity and effectiveness. But even more significant than this economic toll, I would argue, is the sheer human cost that lack of job fulfillment exacts. Miserable jobs generate a real form of suffering which has ripple effects into the rest of one’s life. If we can address the issue of job fulfillment effectively, the benefits to people will also affect spill over — thus having an uplifting effect throughout all aspects of society. More on this later.

4. There are simple remedies

Low job fulfillment, in most cases, has some simple remedies. You don’t have to go through complex management training to solve the problem of low job satisfaction. Neither do you have to implement complex plans and schedules and systems. Instead, there are some very basic, very simple things that employees and managers can do to address this problem. Usually it doesn’t even require switching jobs. (As we can see, any job can be miserable and almost any job can be meaningful — there is a difference between a miserable job and a bad job.)

And this is where Lencioni especially shines. Perhaps more than anyone else today, Lencioni illustrates that simple, common sense wisdom can have a far greater effect in making our jobs and organizations run better than most intricate and complex solutions. I hope that this series can be an illustration of that reality to the case of job fulfillment, and that in the process it can help many come to find greater fulfillment in their work.

One last word on the book: Like Lencioni’s other books, The Three Signs of a Miserable Job consists of two parts. The first part is a management fable that illustrates the concepts through a compelling story. The second part is a description of the concepts, or model. I will just be covering the model, and thus would highly recommend getting a copy of the book so that you can see how the concepts play out in the story.

Posts in This Series

• The 3 Signs of a Miserable Job: An Introduction
• What is a Miserable Job?
• What are the Effects of a Miserable Job?
• What Makes a Job Miserable?
• 5 Benefits of Managing for Job Fulfillment
• Addressing the First Sign: Anonymity
• Addressing the Second Sign: Irrelevance
• Addressing the Third Sign: Immeasurement

Drucker:

“[The effective executive is] forever on guard against the ‘impossible’ job, the job that simply is not for normal human beings.

Such jobs are common. They usually look exceedingly logical on paper. But they cannot be filled. One man of proven performance capacity after the other is tried — and none does well. Six months or a year later, the job has defeated them.

Almost always such a job was first created to accomodate an unusual man tailored to his idiosyncrasies. It usually calls for a mixture of temperaments that is rarely found in one person. Individuals can acquire very divergent kinds of knowledge and highly disparate skills. But they cannot change their temperaments. A job that calls for disparate temperaments becomes an “undoable” job, a man-killer.

The rule is simple: Any job that has defeated two or three men in succession, even though each had performed well in his previous assignments, must be assumed unfit for human beings. It must be redesigned.

(From The Effective Executive)