The Three Signs of a Miserable Job
by Patrick Lencioni
A fable about a retired executive who buys a pizzeria and discovers why jobs are miserable: anonymity (no one knows you), irrelevance (your work matters to no one), and immeasurement (you cannot gauge your own contribution). The fix is a manager's job and it costs nothing. Later retitled The Truth About Employee Engagement.
Read it if…
you manage people and want the simplest model of engagement.
Skip it if…
you want survey-based engagement science; this is a fable with a model.
Three things you will actually use
- Know your people as people.
- Show them whom their work serves.
- Give them a way to measure themselves.
Do this first
For each report, know one personal thing, name whom their work helps, and give them a metric they control.
Our verdict
Simplest engagement model.
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Most useful one-page model.
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