The Leader’s Role in Creating Fulfilling Jobs - The Three Signs of a Miserable Job
This is a review of Patrick Lencioni’s best-selling book “The Three Signs of a Miserable Job.” According to Lencioni, if you attend any kind of social gathering, anywhere in the country, the topic of work is often a popular conversation piece. The stories told confirm that job misery is
overwhelming. This spans all income levels, ages, and geography. Some studies cite as many as 77% of people dislike their jobs costing employers up to $350 billion annually in lost productivity.
We will discuss how leaders from leads, supervisors, managers, and executives impact employee morale and job satisfaction. An employee’s relationship with their direct manager is the most important factor to job fulfillment.
The three critical elements impacting job misery will be discussed:
- Anonymity - All employees have a desire and need to be known, understood, and appreciated. Leaders must not allow their employees to see themselves as invisible, generic, or anonymous
- Irrelevance - We all need to know that our job matters to someone. Anyone. Our employees must see the connection between their work and their company’s mission
- Immeasurement - Employees need to be able to gauge their own level of contribution. They must be able to identify their own successes and failures based on objective and quantitative measures.
Especially during difficult and uncertain economic times, we as leaders need to take a genuine interest in our people, remind them of the impact their work has on others, and help them establish creative ways to measure and assess their performance. As all studies agree, employees don’t quit companies,
they quit bosses. If we have employees who are overwhelmed in job misery, we as leaders must take the responsibility to transition from job misery to job fulfillment.