The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (by Patrick Lencioni, Jossey-Bass, $33.95)
KEY POINTS:
Three Signs is a novel approach to careers advice, being written as a fable.
United States-based consultant and keynote speaker Patrick Lencioni starts by asking why people stay in jobs that make them unhappy.
He reckons there are more people miserable in their jobs than there are happy
... and the cost is huge both in economic and human terms. Unhappy workers affect productivity and co-workers; and, when they go home, spread their frustration to family and friends.
Strangely enough, he starts The Three Signs of a Miserable Job with a happy worker, one Brian Bailey, who is CEO of a fitness machines company in the San Francisco Bay area. He is good at his job because of his ability to communicate and understand everyone within the business' social spectrum.
When the company is sold, Brian is out of a job. He embraces early retirement, dusts off his snow skis until a knee injury sees him laid up, and bored. He realises he needs to be gainfully employed; problem solving is what he loves. So what next?
Surprisingly, he takes on a job as the night manager of a struggling pizzeria. And it's this pizza base that Lencioni uses to demonstrate how career satisfaction is the direct result of the manager-employee relationship, as Brian takes the workers under his wing and turns the pizzeria into a thriving business.
Lencioni says a miserable job makes a person cynical, frustrated and demoralised. It drains energy, enthusiasm and self-esteem.
Miserable jobs can be found in every industry and at every level. Highly paid professional athletes, CEOs, top models and actors can be more miserable than waitresses and fast food workers. Staying in a miserable job affects morale, health and can lead to drug and alcohol abuse, violence and other problems.
Lencioni says that every human being who works has to know that their work matters to another human being ... and that's the manager's job.
It sounds obvious, but Lencioni says that IS the problem, it is obvious but not widely acknowledged.
So, when Brian is headhunted out of the restaurant to "prop up" a chain of sporting goods shops and then a London upmarket hotel chain, he wonders whether his theories (Lencioni's, of course), based on observations at the restaurant, will work in other industries. And, in this book anyway, they do.
So, Lencioni's three corners of the employee unhappiness pyramid are "immeasurability", anonymity and irrelevance.
Anonymity is the feeling employees have when they realise their manager has little interest in them as a human being, that they know little about their lives and their interests.
Workers feel irrelevant when they cannot understand how their job makes a difference in the lives of others.
And "immeasurability" is the inability of employees to assess for themselves their contribution or success.
Problems identified, Lencioni offers action plans and case studies.
But the situation can improve only when the manager is interested in addressing the problem.
