How To Avoid Creating Miserable Jobs

Wrapping Up the Series on Engagement and Servant Leadership

How To Avoid Creating Miserable Jobs

We’ve spent 12 posts looking at how you as a leader can bend the needle on employee engagement. We based those off the Gallup Q12 survey that’s been helping companies measure and drive engagement for decades. It’s important to remember that the goal is not better survey results, no matter what tool you’re using to get that data. You want to create and maintain actual engagement from every one of your direct reports.

Over a decade ago, I came across what at the time was a new book by Patrick Lencioni: Three Signs of a Miserable Job. They republished it under a different title a few years later, though I prefer the original title. I get the change, of course, since having a book with the original title sitting on your desk as a manager could raise some eyebrows.

You should read the book. Like all of Lencioni’s fables, it’s a quick read and seeing the principles embedded in a well-crafted story helps to make them portable for you. If you haven’t yet, though (or if it’s been a while since you did) I’m going to use a summary here to tie up this series on engagement.

The first sign of a miserable job is Anonymity. People aren’t engaged when they don’t feel seen or known. Here’s the author’s definitional note:

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. As much as this may sound like an aphorism from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, it is undeniably true. People who see themselves as invisible, generic, or anonymous cannot love their jobs, no matter what they are doing.

We talked about this at length in discussing a caring heart (Q5) and on knowing talents/superpowers (Q3) and around a culture safe for friendships (Q10). Allowing a culture of anonymity where everyone keeps their heads down and silos from you and others on the team is surely going to lead to undesirable misery. Misery, we’ll use here, is the polar opposite of the engaged employment you’re seeking for everyone under your care.

If you can both know and see each person, as a person, and create psychological safety for them your team will engage more with you and with one another. And that will lead to a better culture and quality work.

Some of you are better than others at getting to know people, but it’s part of your job. This doesn’t mean pushing past intentional boundaries (while you’re creating that safety people may not want to talk about themselves intimately at all) but if your interest is genuine then eventually most people will open up a little.

Unless you’re a pastoral leader you shouldn’t expect that people open up about their marriages or families in ways that are a struggle. Keep things surface level and focus on things that excite the individual you’re trying to keep from being unknown. If they have a kid in youth sports that’s pretty safe. I like to drill down on hobbies and interests. There’s something immensely powerful and beautiful about watching someone nerd out about a topic you don’t fully get. I had a friend go on about the importance of good water for good coffee for several minutes recently and I feel like I know him better than I did before. The added benefit is you get to see what someone looks like (it’s not the same for everyone!) when they’re excited and you’ll be able to note when they’re doing something that energizes them at work.

The second sign is irrelevance. Again, Lencioni for context:

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. Even the most cynical employees need to know that their work matters to someone, even if it’s just the boss.

We glanced on this when discussing a mission focus (Q8) and when talking about expectations (Q1). Every job, if it’s a real job and has value, means something. Remember the story of the janitor who told President Kennedy he was helping to put a man on the moon? He knew not only that he was making the environment better for his fellow NASA employees, but that there was a tie-in to the overall mission to accomplish.

Make sure that each of your direct reports knows how that job matters to you or to the customer or to another part of the team. The reason why people with garbage jobs go home depressed is because they (rightly in too many cases!) don’t believe their job matters at all to anyone in any real way. Don’t let anyone under your care believe her or his job doesn’t matter! If there’s truly no meaning for it then get them something new to do, but make sure that you not only show them its value but that you regularly thank them for it.

The final sign is immeasurement. Lencioni probably coined the word here:

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.

We talked about people knowing, regularly, how well he or she is doing at their work, both at the beginning of the series in setting expectations (Q1) and near the end in charting progress (Q11). Imagine playing baseball and having no idea that the team with the most runs would win or worse yet not knowing how to score or prevent a run? Everyone wants to know they’re doing well and nobody should have to wait around for an annual review to have objective feedback.

Creating a system of measurement that is directly tied to success in work is crucial for engagement and avoiding misery. Make sure that the measurement isn’t just busy work but that it’s actually correlative with job quality and the work at hand.

Hopefully this series has had some value to you in giving some concrete ideas in creating engagement for those you’re managing. Now go read the book.