Discounting Teamwork
Patrick Lencioni’s latest monthly article is now available. It’s called “Discounting Teamwork.” Here’s the upshot:
What’s the practical lesson for companies trying to improve? They should start by spending more of their time and effort creating a culture of teamwork than looking for outside talent, because the rewards for doing so are enormous. For starters, they’ll get more from the employees they already have, and even find stars who are already in their midst. Remember, great football teams birth superstars from the ranks of ordinary players who happen to have extraordinary attitudes. Beyond that, companies that create true team environments become places where other team-oriented players want to work. Great football teams attract players who are tired of playing for selfish, dysfunctional teams, and, in many cases, they even play for less money to have that opportunity.
Perhaps the first thing that a company needs to do in order to improve is to ask itself if it truly believes that teamwork is a strategic advantage, and that it, more than shear talent, brings about lasting success.
6 New Books from My Inbox
I’m going through my in box after being gone for a week, and there are 6 new books in it that I’m looking forward to reading or dipping into a bit more (or, 4 that are actually new, and 2 that are new to me).
King’s Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus
Tim Keller’s new book. I’m very excited about it — though I still haven’t had a chance to read Generous Justice (which I’m much looking forward to). Tim also did a recent interview with the Atlantic which is very good.
I haven’t dipped into this much yet and don’t know a ton about it. I think I came across it in a bookstore recently and ordered it from Amazon in order to take a closer look at it. But the topic (namely, cities) is important to me and it looks like it might have some helpful insight, so it seems worth taking a look at. You can also read an interview with the author and his recent article in the Atlantic, “How Skyscrapers Can Save the City.”
The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way
Michael Horton’s new systematic theology. I’ve really enjoyed and found helpful the parts that I’ve read so far. And I’m grateful for Mike Horton’s ministry in general, which you can learn more about at The White Horse Inn.
A production of the four gospels featuring the artistic work of Makoto Fujimura, “a devout Christian, and one of the most highly-regarded artists of the twenty-first century.” I was very interested in this when I first heard about it, and some friends graciously gave a copy to me this week (thank you!). You can also see Justin Taylor’s recent interview with Makoto Fujimura.
Acts (Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament)
I try to have a solid commentary on most books of the Bible. I’m reading through Acts now as part of my reading through the Bible this year and picked this up when I realized I didn’t have anything yet on Acts.
The Acts of the Apostles (Pillar New Testament Commentary)
Along with Bock’s commentary on Acts (above), these are probably the two best two commentaries on Acts.
Why Bookstores Matter
Al Mohler. Here’s an excerpt:
Being in a bookstore helps me to think. I find that my mind makes connections between authors and books and ideas as I walk along the shelves and look at the tables. When I get a case of writer’s block, I head for a bookstore. The experience of walking among the books is curative.
. . .
My Kindle and iPad are filled with digital books, and the e-book will be one of the dominant book forms and formats of the future. When I need an e-book, a push of a button makes it happen. Who wouldn’t welcome that development? But the e-book is not the same as a physical book, and both the digital and the printed book have their own charms.
Mike Shatzkin thinks the handwriting is already on the wall — “Book stores are going away.” He may be right, but I hold out hope that he is not. If he is, it is far more than bookstores that we will lose.
The Next Story
I’m looking forward to Tim Challies’ new book, The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion. The book releases April 1, but you can also pre-order to get a signed copy).
Here’s a commercial for the book that Tim debuted on his blog this week:
I’m sure I’ll be blogging more about Tim’s book as the release gets closer. The issue of technology and faith is something that we all deal with and can understand better, and, in my view, there are few who have thought through this issue with the insight and depth that Tim brings.
Was William Carey Being Biblical When He Said “Expect Great Things from God”?
William Carey is well known for saying “Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God.” Is that biblical?
Yes. Here’s one passage that gives the foundations for Carey’s words:
Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us [the same power that raised Christ from the dead -- Eph 1:19], to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen. (Ephesians 3:20-21)
There are two noteworthy things about this passage in regard to Carey’s statement: who said it, and what it says.
First, what does this passage say? It says that God can do far more than we can ask or think of. And he can do this abundantly. So God is able to do great things.
But is he willing to do them? That seems to be Paul’s reason for pointing out that God is able to do this “according to the power at work within us.” Note also the connection here to prayer. God is able to do “more abundantly than all that we ask.” His point is: Pray and ask for God to work — and he will do far more than what you ask!
So it seems biblical that we should indeed expect great things from God, just like Carey said. But should we therefore also attempt great things for God?
This takes us to a second observation about this — namely, who said it.
The one who penned this passage, of course, was the apostle Paul. And Paul accomplished far-reaching and incredible things for the gospel — to the point where he was even able to say that “from Jerusalem and all the way around to Illlyricum I have fulfilled the ministry of the gospel of Christ” (Romans 15:19). In other words, he attempted great things for God (and accomplished them!).
So, Paul’s words and example demonstrate the truth of William Carey’s statement. His words affirm that we should indeed expect great things from God, because God is “able to do far more abundantly than we ask or imagine.” And his example affirms that, from this expectation, we should indeed attempt great things for God.
The most important thing is to get the order right. Notice that Carey did not say: “Attempt great things for God. Expect great things from God.” He said the reverse. So, attempt great things for God — grounding all of your efforts and labor and dreams in God’s grace, supported by prayer, just like Ephesians 3:20 says.
Focus on Contribution, Not Your Authority
Drucker:
The effective executive focuses on contribution. He looks up from his work and outward toward his goals. He asks: “What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and the results of the institution I serve?” His stress is on responsibility. . . .
The person who focuses on efforts and who stresses his downward authority is a subordinate no matter how exalted his title and rank. But the one who focuses on contribution and who takes responsibility for results, no matter how junior, is in the most literal sense of the phrase “top management.” He holds himself accountable for the performance of the whole.
(From The Effective Executive)
5 Benefits of Managing for Job Fulfillment
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
Make Big Plans
A good exhortation from Seth Godin.
Put the Big Rocks in First
The only way to get the important things done is to put them into your life and schedule first, rather than trying to get the smaller “sand and gravel” out of the way to make room. The notion that you have to clear out the smaller stuff first, in order to make room for the larger stuff, almost always ends up back firing (one reason being that there is always more small stuff ready to come in).
Stephen Covey explains this better than anyone I’ve read in his book First Things First. I blogged on this a few months ago, and you can read his description of the analogy in that post.
Today on Michael Hyatt’s blog I came across this video where you can see Covey illustrates this principle visually:
(HT: Michael Hyatt)
Great Leaders Build People, Not Just Results
Henry Cloud, from his foreword to Bill Hybel’s very helpful book Axiom: Powerful Leadership Proverbs:
A leader is also responsible for the experience of his or her followers. If your leadership is sound, not only are you hitting the numbers, but you are also lifting the people to experience more health, more growth, more success, and an upswing in fulfillment as a result of being on the journey with you.
Great leaders cultivate an environment where instead of people getting injured, discouraged, and burned out, they are equipped to become what they never thought they could be and achieve things they never thought they could achieve. Great leaders grow not just results, but people too.
Send me your questions on productivity
One of the things I’m doing for my book is interviewing as many people as I can about their productivity habits and insights. Some of the best insights and practices will likely be incorporated into the book. I might also include short excerpts from some of these interviews as call-outs in the book.
I’ve already interviewed several people, but am refining my questions a bit before doing another round. I’m focusing on Christian leaders, business and non-profit leaders, and anyone who just plain gets a lot done. (One highlight so far, among many others, was interviewing one of the President’s former schedulers — that was very helpful and very interesting!)
So I wanted to ask you: What are some of the questions you’d like me to ask in these interviews? What types of things are you most interested in learning and improving when it comes to your own productivity? And what theological questions about the foundations of productivity would you like to see me ask?
Feel free to email me any questions you’d like me to consider including, or leave them in the comments.
What Makes a Job Miserable?
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
Why the Pursuit of Buy-In Can Kill Innovation
From Larry Osborne’s excellent book Sticky Teams: Keeping Your Leadership Team and Staff on the Same Page:
Leaders and leadership teams can easily get sidetracked by the endless pursuit of buy-in. The reason for this is also one reason we overuse surveys and polls: we’re looking for a way to get everyone aboard.
Certainly, leaders and leadership teams need broad buy-in for their current mission and methods of ministry. But when it comes to setting a new direction or starting new initiatives, it’s seldom needed.
Buy-in is overrated. Most of the time, we don’t need buy-in as much as we need permission.
Buy-in is usually defined as having the support of most, if not all, of the key stakeholders (and virtually all of the congregation). It takes a ton of time to get. It’s incredibly elusive.Permission, on the other hand, is relatively easy to acquire, even from those who think your idea is loony and bound to fail. That’s because permission simply means “I’ll let you try it,” as opposed to buy-in, which means, “I’ll back your play.”
I’ve found that most people will grant the pastor, board, or staff permission to try something new as long as they don’t have to make personal changes or express agreement with the idea.
For instance, when we started our first video-venue worship service in 1998, most of the staff and the congregation thought it was a nutty idea. They’d never seen one before, and no one else in the country had yet started one. All they could imagine was a glorified overflow room, and we all know what an overflow room is: it’s punishment for being late. They couldn’t imagine anyone choosing to go to one.
Frankly, if I had believed the buy-in myth (or if our board had), I’d still be trying to convince everyone that video cafes can work. And they’d still think I’m nuts. But since all I asked for was permission to try it, I got the okay; as long as their names weren’t on it, they didn’t have to sell it or go to it, and it didn’t cost too much money.
Needless to say, on this side of the multi-site revolution, video venues proved to be a good idea. But the key to getting it off the ground was my willingness (and that of our board and staff) to settle for permission rather than buy-in.
What are the Effects of a Miserable Job?
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
No “Theys” Allowed
A good point from Sticky Teams: Keeping Your Leadership Team and Staff on the Same Page:
Leadership-oriented teams don’t succumb to the tyranny of the “theys.”
When I came to North Coast, our board leaned heavily to the representative side of the scale. As a result, whenever we dealt with a controversial issue, we spent a great deal of time discussing an apparently large and influential group of people known as “they.”
No one seemed to know who they were, and those who did seem to know weren’t too keen on identifying them. But boy, did they have clout. It seemed to me that they were the largest power block in the church.
As a result, before making decisions, we spent hours worrying how “they” might respond. And afterward, we second-guessed ourselves whenever someone reported, “I’ve been talking to some people about this, and they have some real concerns.”
To make matters worse, I could never find out who “they” were, or how many of them there were. It was strange. For a group as large and powerful as they appeared to be, they sure valued their anonymity.
Finally, I’d had enough. I told the board that as far as I was concerned, the “theys” no longer existed. I’d happily listen to comments and critiques from people with real names and faces. But nebulous theys who didn’t want their identity known and hypothetical theys we couldn’t identify would no longer have any sway.
The board agreed. So we instituted a “no theys” rule. It immediately pulled the rug out from underneath the biggest group of resisters we had and eventually exposed them to be a tiny minority (and at times, a mere figment of our imagination).
Our “no theys” rule applies not only to the board; it also applies to every staff meeting and to all of my dealings with the congregation. Now whenever someone says that they’ve been talking to some people who have a concern, I always ask, “Who are they?”
If I’m told that they wouldn’t be comfortable having their names mentioned, I respond, “That’s too bad, because I’m not comfortable listening to anonymous sources. Let me know when they’re willing to be identified. I’ll be happy to listen.”
Pastoral Ministry and Strengths-Based Leadership
Eric McKiddie has a good article on what pastors can do about the aspects of their role where they may be weak (which is all pastors in some areas). He hits a good middle ground between completely avoiding those areas and just gutting through it.
What is a Miserable Job?
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
Keller: Both Spiritual and Secular Jobs are God’s Work
Here is an article giving a brief summary of a message on work that Tim Keller recently gave.
A few highlights (from the summary — so a summary of a summary!):
Pastor Tim Keller challenged a crowd of New York City professionals Sunday to rethink how they view work and to debunk the notion that spiritual vocations matter more to God than secular work.
. . .
The Medieval Church took a “triumphalism” approach to society that attempted to dominate and make all things Christian where as those in the Radical Reformation encouraged “withdrawal” from society, which they believed to be “Satan’s world.”
Both approaches, according to Keller, had a tendency to look down on the work out in the world and only consider work in the church as God’s work.
He explained that Luther’s theology offered a “middle way” and a biblical approach to work, in which there was no dividing Christian work between “spiritual estate” and the “temporal estate.”
“He says, hey, do not say only people inside the church are doing God’s work. Oh no. We are all priests. Therefore, every Christian is doing God’s work,” said Keller, citing Luther’s reference to the passage in 1 Peter 2:9.
Keller said that God could easily give us His gifts without our help but it is through our works that He wishes to involve, train and include us as part of the family. Quoting Luther, he went on to point out that although man’s work is “child’s performance,” they are the “masks of God” by which He works.
“God doesn’t have to do it that way but He is. He’s loving you through other people’s work. He goes as far as to say that the baker and the farmer in work is God in disguise. These are the masks of God. God is loving you and distributing His gifts through work,” said Keller.
. . .
Belief in the Gospel, according to Keller, should impact one’s motivation of work, work ethic and treatment of others around them in work. He urged listeners to continually gather together and through talks and prayer, accumulate wisdom on how God can have a greater impact in their field.
“You are in a very big city, New York. It is an exhausting city. It’s a very hard place to work. It’s a secular city so it’s very hard to bring your values onto the way you work,” said Keller. “Therefore, because of the power of the Gospel, I call you to think like a prophet, serve like a priest, and plan like a king. It means getting together to think, think, how does the preeminence of God reign in my field. It means serving each other and serving people around you in the city.”
The 3 Signs of a Miserable Job: An Introduction
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
Is Your Organization Developing Leaders?
Two key points from John Kotter’s classic article “What Leaders Really Do“:
Successful organizations don’t wait for leaders to come along. They actively seek out people with leadership potential and expose them to career experiences designed to develop that potential.
And:
Organizations that do a better-than-average job of developing leaders put an emphasis on creating challenging opportunities for relatively young employees. In many organizations, decentralization is the key.
In other words: Be intentional about identifying and developing leaders. And you need to do this with young people, rather than thinking that nobody can do anything significant until they’re 40.
One more point from the article:
Institutionalizing a leadership-centered culture is the ultimate act of leadership.
The Cape Town Committment on the Need for Developing Godly Leaders
As you know, I was in Cape Town for the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization last fall. The statement working group from the congress has recently released the Cape Town Commitment: A Confession of Faith and a Call to Action. Here’s the section on leadership, especially as it pertains to the church in the developing world:
The rapid growth of the Church in so many places remains shallow and vulnerable, partly because of the lack of discipled leaders, and partly because so many use their positions for worldly power, arrogant status or personal enrichment. As a result, God’s people suffer, Christ is dishonoured, and gospel mission is undermined. ‘Leadership training’ is the commonly-proposed priority solution. Indeed, leadership training programmes of all kinds have multiplied, but the problem remains, for two probable reasons.
First, training leaders to be godly and Christlike is the wrong way round. Biblically, only those whose lives already display basic qualities of mature discipleship should be appointed to leadership in the first place.[80] If, today, we are faced with many people in leadership who have scarcely been discipled, then there is no option but to include such basic discipling in their leadership development. Arguably the scale of un-Christlike and worldly leadership in the global Church today is glaring evidence of generations of reductionist evangelism, neglected discipling and shallow growth. The answer to leadership failure is not just more leadership training but better discipleship training. Leaders must first be disciples of Christ himself.
Second, some leadership training programmes focus on packaged knowledge, techniques and skills to the neglect of godly character. By contrast, authentic Christian leaders must be like Christ in having a servant heart, humility, integrity, purity, lack of greed, prayerfulness, dependence on God’s Spirit, and a deep love for people. Furthermore, some leadership training programmes lack specific training in the one key skill that Paul includes in his list of qualifications – ability to teach God’s Word to God’s people. Yet Bible teaching is the paramount means of disciple-making and the most serious deficiency in contemporary Church leaders.
A) We long to see greatly intensified efforts in disciple-making, through the long-term work of teaching and nurturing new believers, so that those whom God calls and gives to the Church as leaders are qualified according to biblical criteria of maturity and servanthood.
B) We renew our commitment to pray for our leaders. We long that God would multiply, protect and encourage leaders who are biblically faithful and obedient. We pray that God would rebuke, remove, or bring to repentance leaders who dishonour his name and discredit the gospel. And we pray that God would raise up a new generation of discipled servant-leaders whose passion is above all else to know Christ and be like him.
C) Those of us who are in Christian leadership need to recognize our vulnerability and accept the gift of accountability within the body of Christ. We commend the practice of submitting to an accountability group.
D) We strongly encourage seminaries, and all those who deliver leadership training programmes, to focus more on spiritual and character formation, not only on imparting knowledge or grading performance, and we heartily rejoice in those that already do so as part of comprehensive ‘whole person’ leadership development.
The Necessity of Effective Management for the Functioning of a Free Society
Jim Collins:
Business and social entrepreneur Bob Buford once observed that Drucker contributed as much to the triumph of free society as any other individual. I agree. For free society to function we must have high-performing, self-governed institutions in every sector, not just in business, but equally in the social sectors. Without that, as Drucker himself pointed out, the only workable alternative is totalitarian tyranny. Strong institutions, in turn, depend directly on excellent management…
From his introduction to the revised edition of Peter Drucker’s classic Management.
And well managed institutions, in turn, depend upon a right understanding of management. Hence, Collins ends the above paragraph like this: “… and no individual had a greater impact on the practice of management and no single book captures its essence better than his seminal text, Management.”
Other helpful books on management include:
- The Practice of Management, Drucker
- First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman
- Managing the Nonprofit Organization, Drucker
- Principle-Centered Leadership, Stephen Covey
The Value of a Wondering Mind
A good post by Justin Buzzard from a couple of years ago, but still very relevant. He quotes Clive Thompson, who postulates that it may be a good and productive thing for our minds to wander.
Great Leaders are Strengths-Based
The Gallup Management Journal has a good interview with Tom Rath and Barry Conchie, authors of Strengths-Based Leadership, about some of their key findings from the book. Here’s one that stands out and should be encouraging: effective leaders don’t try to be someone else or even become well-rounded; instead, they know their strengths and focus on leading from those — which means that there are all sorts of different ways to lead. (Note: That doesn’t mean you can just do anything and be effective; the key point is that your particular style emerges from your strengths, not from a random or uninformed decision.)
It looks like you have to register to read the whole thing, but here are a few key highlights.
1. Concentrate on developing your talents into strengths, not fixing weaknesses or imitating others:
Here are some questions that leaders often ask themselves: How can I fix my weaknesses to be a more complete leader? How can I emulate the traits of the great leaders who preceded me? What should I focus on – vision or strategy? Here is the answer to all those questions: Don’t bother.
Concentrating on those issues will only distract you from the most important aspect of leadership: your natural talents, which can be developed into strengths. According to Tom Rath and Barry Conchie, coauthors of Strengths Based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow, strengths are what make leaders great.
We all have natural talents, of course, but the greatest leaders are highly aware of theirs. They know what they’re good at and spend countless hours making themselves better at what they do best. They don’t try to make themselves well-rounded or like some other leader. Nor do they devote their energies solely to the relentless pursuit of strategy, vision, or any other ideal. And what they don’t do well, they hire someone else to do.
2. If you’ve taken the “Strengths Finder” test to examine your talent themes, these themes don’t of themselves say anything about whether you can be an effective leader. You lead effectively by harnessing your unique talents, whatever they may be:
GMJ: Of the thirty-four talent themes that the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment identifies, which are the most common among great leaders?
Barry Conchie: I’ve got a problem with the question.
GMJ: Why?
Conchie: There is no single characteristic or set of characteristics that would enable us to determine an effective leader. The most effective leaders are the ones who figure out how best to use what they’ve got. So it matters less what the strengths are in terms of the themes; what’s key is that the leaders understand the strengths they have, how those strengths help them to be effective, and that they use strategies and methods to deploy their strengths to the greatest effect
Rath: I think that from all the research that Gallup’s done on leadership over the last three or four decades, the broadest discovery is that there is no universal set of talents that all leaders have in common. As we looked through these data and ran through hundreds of transcripts and individual interviews, we were struck by just how different all these leaders are.
If you were to sit down with each of the four leaders we featured in the book [Brad Anderson, vice chairman and CEO of Best Buy; Wendy Kopp, CEO and founder of Teach For America; Simon Cooper, president and CEO, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, LLC; and Mervyn Davies, chairman, Standard Chartered Bank], you’d notice that they do things very differently based on their strong awareness of their unique talents.
I expand about this a bit more in my post “Leading From Your Strengths May Look Unusual,” where I quote from their chapter on Brad Anderson’s unique leadership style at Best Buy.
I would want to qualify one thing from their point here, though. While you can lead effectively with any of the talent themes identified by the Strengths Finder test, there are two qualities (not measured by the test) which, following Marcus Buckingham (see his excellent discussion in The One Thing You Need to Know: … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success), I would argue are essential to leadership. The qualities are optimism and ego.
“Ego” doesn’t have to have the negative connotations we often associate with it; it simply means you believe that you are the one to lead and are fiercely committed to the task. Optimism is necessary because the essence of leadership is to rally people to a better future, and nobody will want to follow someone who doesn’t believe that they can make the future better. (Thinking that you can’t make a difference would be contrary to the nature of leadership altogether — where are you leading if not to someplace better?)
Understanding the nature of leadership as rallying people to a better future also enables you to focus on your strengths more effectively. For, as I talk about in my post “What Does a Leader Do?,” you don’t have to focus on developing long lists of recommended attributes for leaders when you know the core of the matter. Instead, focus on the core, and develop your own unique strengths.
3. Seeking to be well-rounded leads to mediocrity:
GMJ: You wrote: “If you spend your life trying to be good at everything, you will never be great at anything. While our society encourages us to be well-rounded, this approach inadvertently breeds mediocrity.” Why is that?
Conchie: The great leaders we’ve studied are not well-rounded individuals. They have not become world-class leaders by being average or above-average in different aspects of leadership. They’ve become world-class in a relatively limited number of areas of leadership. They’ve recognized not only their strengths but their deficiencies, and they’ve successfully identified others who compensate for those deficiencies.
The concept of well-roundedness is illusory. It might sound desirable from a developmental perspective, but really all that happens when people try to fix their weaknesses is that they spend inordinate amounts of time trying to become marginally better in an area that will never be particularly strong for them. So they’ll get far less of a return by trying to shore up relatively mediocre capabilities because they’ll probably always be below average in those areas. Leadership is not a construct of well-rounded attributes; it’s nearly always the consequence of some pretty incisive talents that are relatively specific and slightly narrow in focus being leveraged to the maximum.
About Matt Perman
Follower of Christ. Husband of one, father of three. Former director of strategy at Desiring God. This blog exists to help equip Christians in good works, because that's what productivity is really about.
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