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
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
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
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
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
Managers: You Need to Give People More Freedom Than You Might Think
Jack Welch:
The old organization was built on control, but the world has changed. The world is moving at such a pace that control has become a limitation. It slows you down. You’ve got to balance freedom with some control, but you’ve got to have more freedom than you ever dreamed of.
Management in Light of the Supremacy of God
How Should Christians Think About Management?
Christians should care about whether the organizations they work in are managed well and, if they are managers themselves, they should manage well.[1] This is first of all because, as Patrick Lencioni points out, management is a form of ministry. Lencioni writes:
I have always thought it was a shame that more people don’t go into “giving” professions. In fact, I have occasionally felt pangs of guilt that I didn’t choose a career that was completely focused on serving others. I have deep admiration for dedicated and hard-working clergy, social workers, or missionaries, and I wonder why I haven’t abandoned my career and moved into one of those kinds of jobs.
While I have not completely abandoned the idea of one day doing that, I have come to the realization that all managers can — and really should — view their work as a ministry. A service to others.
By helping people find fulfillment in their work, and helping them succeed in whatever they’re doing, a manager can have a profound impact on the emotional, financial, physical, and spiritual health of workers and their families. They can also create an environment where employees do the same for their peers, giving them a sort of ministry all their own. All of which is nothing short of a gift from God.
And, second of all, this is because an organization will be exponentially more effective in accomplishing its mission if it is well managed.
But what does it mean to manage well? Interestingly, effective management is not first about the nuts and bolts, or the details that most people would find un-interesting. Effective management, above all, means managing from a well thought point of view that is based upon how humans are created and has the supremacy of God as its ultimate aim. This kind of management is anything but boring.
What are the components of an effective management philosophy that is based upon the fact that humans are in the image of God and that the glory of God is the goal of all things? I am going to outline eleven.
What Makes a Place the Right Place to Work?
Well said by Jim Collins, from the Christianity Today interview I linked to a few days ago:
So, what really makes a place the right place to work? First, the values. Second, the people who connect with those values, and then third—that the model and system and all the work produce real results.
Drucker: Management is a Liberal Art, Directed Toward Effectiveness
This is a very good insight, from The Essential Drucker:
Management is deeply involved in moral concerns—the nature of man, good and evil. Management is thus what tradition used to call a liberal art. Managers draw on all the knowledge and insights of the humanities and the social sciences—on psychology and philosophy, on economics and history, on ethics—as well as on the physical sciences. But they have to focus this knowledge on effectiveness and results—on healing a sick patient, teaching a student, building a bridge, designing and selling a user friendly software program. For these reasons, management will increasingly be the discipline and the practice through which the humanities will again acquire recognition, impact, and relevance.
What Do Great Managers Need?
Great managers.
It is wrong to think that great management is important for front-line employees, but that managers themselves can have bad managers and get along just fine.
Maybe this is an overstatement, but I think it would be better to have no manager at all than a bad manager. Actually, that’s probably true.
Regardless, great managers perform better when their manager is also a great manager, providing just a bit of outside perspective to help them make sure that they are doing what they do best every day, that the expectations of their role are clear, and that they are on track to being as effective as they can be.
Here’s how Rodd Wagner and James Harter put it in the book 12: The Elements of Great Managing:
We are often asked what makes great managers perform so well.
Some of it is pure talent — a natural ability to discern an employee’s mindset, a persistent optimism, or a strategic acumen difficult to duplicate. Some of it is a deeply held personal mission to change the world for the better.
Much of it also requires that a front-line supervisor have the same experience with the 12 Elements as those he directs. One of the most fundamental needs of a great manager is . . . a great manager.
As obvious as that statement may be, there is an undercurrent running through many organizations that assumes recognition and praise, a mentor, clear expectations, and the rest of the 12 are required only for the front lines. The best managers, so this line of thinking goes, are more self-aware and self-contained, impervious to such forces, and able to maintain a steady course without much regard for the circumstances.
The evidence is just the opposite. The engagement of managers ebbs and flows just as much as it does for anyone else. Moreover, the engagement level of a manager correlates strongly with the attitudes of her team. No one is an island.
. . . The anecdotes and, more important, analyses of manager performance point out that one of the best things a senior executive can do to motivate the entire population in a company is to first look out for the enterprise’s supervisors. Before a person can deliver what he should as a manager, he must first receive what he needs as an employee.
Why Companies Should be Generous in Their Pay
This is explained very well in the Gallup book 12: The Elements of Great Managing, by Rodd Wagner and James Harter. The book is “based on Gallup’s ten million workplace interviews–the largerst worldwide study of employee engagement.”
They make the point — rightly, I believe — that “most employees who feel generously compensated repay the gesture.” For this reason, companies that pay with a generosity of spirit are likely to perform better financially than those that don’t. The reason is that when employees feel that they are being treated well with their pay (rather than the minimum the company could get by with paying them), they tend to match the gesture with more effort. It also tends to result in higher engagement (because of the thought behind their pay — not because of being driven by money), which also results in greater performance for the organization.
Here is what they have to say in their own words:
Most employees who feel generously compensated repay the gesture
One truth reemerges in various permutations throughout this book. It is that human behavior usually doesn’t conform to the logical or mathematical assumptions behind many personnel strategies. This certainly holds true of the tug-of-war over an employee’s salary.
The traditional view assumes that a company should pay as little as possible to secure someone’s services, whether that amount is just a little more than a competitor would pay or the lowest amount for which the worker will settle in his salary negotiations.
The often-overlooked flip-side of that strategy holds that the employee will do the minimum required to make his salary and his bonus. The company wants maximum work for minimum pay, while the employee wants just the reverse. Between these competing forces, the wage is settled, giving both sides a tolerable, antagonistic compromise.
But a funny thing happens in experiments where one person offers a wage and another person decides what level of effort to give in return. If the “employer” offers an above-market wage, the “employee” usually matches it with more effort, even when the worker can get away with doing less. “This suggests that on average people are willing to put forward extra effort above what is implied by purely pecuniary considerations,” wrote researchers Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter. With conscientious, engaged employees, generosity of pay begets generosity of effort.
While money itself does not buy engagement, it appears an employee’s perception that the company is aggressively looking out for his financial interest leads to productive reciprocation. More than just the money, the thought counts.
The research points to a choice that executives must make. Do they want a workforce that thinks, “I have to fight for every extra dollar they begrudgingly pay me,” or one that feels, “If I look out for my company, they will look out for me”?
Simple questions reveal where a company stands. If a talented employee does something extraordinary or repeatedly distinguishes herself, will it be her manager or the employee herself who initiates discussion of a raise? Does the company spend more to attract outside stars than to cultivate internal ones? Does the company realize its talent is underpaid only after a competitor woos them away?
In matters of pay, as with the 12 Elements, what employees enthusiastically do for the company depends heavily on what the company eagerly does for them.
Management as Ministry
Patrick Lencioni:
I have always thought it was a shame that more people don’t go into “giving” professions. In fact, I have occasionally felt pangs of guilt that I didn’t choose a career that was completely focused on serving others. I have deep admiration for dedicated and hard-working clergy, social workers, or missionaries, and I wonder why I haven’t abandoned my career and moved into one of those kinds of jobs.
While I have not completely abandoned the idea of one day doing that, I have come to the realization that all managers can–and really should–view their work as a ministry. A service to others.
By helping people find fulfillment in their work, and helping them succeed in whatever they’re doing, a manager can have a profound impact on the emotional, financial, physical, and spiritual health of workers and their families. They can also create an environment where employees do the same for their peers, giving them a sort of ministry all their own. All of which is nothing short of a gift from God.
(From The Three Signs of a Miserable Job.)
The Strictness Error
There is a class I know of (elementary school) where the teacher gives out hardly any top grades (it’s a complex system–it’s not just a matter of As, Bs, etc., or even just 1, 2, 3). The thinking, it is said, is that no one is perfect, and there always needs to be room to improve.
I’m sure there is more to the rationale, but is this a good idea? No. This is called the strictness error and it is demotivating. Managers can hold to the same error when it comes to performance reviews. Hence, the problems of the strictness error for both contexts is well explained by these comments in the book Management Skills:
The strictness error is the flip side of leniency. You rate everyone very strictly. While it is acceptable to maintain high standards, performance appraisals should be an accurate reflection of performance. Appraisals that are too strict will de-motivate employees and frustrate them. They will begin to think that no matter what they do, it will never enable them to achieve the rewards that they value. [I would restate the last part of the sentence, because it sounds too extrinsically motivated, but you get the point.]
The strictness error, as mentioned, is the opposite of the leniency error. You don’t want to error on that side, either, whether in education or management. The lenience error
provides employees with high performance appraisal ratings for mediocre or marginal performance. This marginal performer is then ‘rewarded’ in organizational terms. This will increase the likelihood that his or her marginal performance will continue–because they have no incentive to improve.
Of course, the one other issue raised here for the arena of management is whether the traditional concept of a performance appraisal is a good idea at all. It is, and should, seem a bit odd that I am able to make a comparison between how we treat elementary students and how we treat adults on the job.
It is critical that people receive feedback on results and are held accountable for meeting the defined outcomes they are responsible to produce, and that this be done through a regular routine of meetings and conversations. But whether this should include or be wrapped in with a detailed performance appraisal that effectively ranks or grades people is an open question, in my view.
On Multiplying Rules
Well said by Marcus Buckingham in First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently:
“Some managers are hamstrung by their fundamental mistrust of people. A mistrustful manager’s only recourse is to impose rules. For a mistrustful person, the managerial role is very stressful.
The rules rarely succeed in anything but creating a culture of compliance that slowly strangles the organization of flexibility, responsiveness, and perhaps more important, good will.”
That is a key point: multiplying rules strangles good will. And if you strangle good will, you eliminate the motivation for people to do very much beyond mere compliance. In other words, you will have ripped the heart out of the organization.
Beautiful…Systems?
Tom Peters is right in Re-Imagine! when he writes:
We avoid words like “beauty” — and the concept of beauty — between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. (Especially if we work in the likes of HR or IS or Logistics.) But as part of the urgent process of re-imagining organizations, we must embrace both the word and the concept — and make beauty the primary attribute not only of product design but also of process design.
In short, we must create an enterprise environment in which enterprise systems are no less than … Beautiful Systems.
Keeping the Monkeys Off
Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey? is a classic Harvard Business Review article on time management for managers. I can’t find it online for free, but here is a summary that is so good that you probably don’t even need to read the full article:
You’re racing down the hall. An employee stops you and says, “We’ve got a problem.” You assume you should get involved but can’t make an on-the-spot decision. You say, “Let me think about it.”
You’ve just allowed a “monkey” to leap from your subordinate’s back to yours. You’re now working for your subordinate. Take on enough monkeys, and you won’t have time to handle your real job: fulfilling your own boss’s mandates and helping peers generate business results.
How to avoid accumulating monkeys? Develop your subordinates’ initiative, say Oncken and Wass. For example, when an employee tries to hand you a problem, clarify whether he should: recommend and implement a solution, take action then brief you immediately, or act and report the outcome at a regular update.
When you encourage employees to handle their own monkeys, they acquire new skills—and you liberate time to do your own job.
5 Reasons Companies Should Not Block Access to Social Networks
A good, brief article in Advertising Age that argues that “collaboration can increase productivity and resistance is futile.” The five points are:
- Resistance is futile
- Don’t assume people won’t find other ways to waste time
- Social networks can actually make workers more productive
- You’ll miss great ideas
- Employees are much more trustworthy than companies think
Point five is absolutely critical — employees can be trusted. And trusting employees leads to higher performance. She adds: “If you can’t trust your employees, you have one of two problems: You are hiring the wrong people or you are not properly training the people you hire.”
Also, I think that point five overcomes point two — if you hire good people, they won’t waste time. Or, perhaps better, they will only waste time when doing so will lead to greater productivity overall.
Is Attending Conferences an Unnecessary Expense?
Keith Ferrazzi makes a good case that the answer is no, in Never Eat Alone.
The reason that conferences are not unnecessary expenses is because it is actually revenue generating to attend. But this is often overlooked because only the cost is tied to the conference in an organization’s budget, but the productive outcomes from the conference are not.
First, here’s how Ferrazzi decides whether to attend a conference:
“Conferences are good for mainly one thing. They provide a forum to meet the kind of like-minded people who can help you fulfill your mission and goals. Before deciding to attend a conference, I sometimes informally go so far as using a simple return-on-investment thought process. Is the likely return I’ll get from the relationships I establish and build equal to or greater than the price of the conference and the time I spend there? If so, I attend. If not, I don’t.”
Second, here is Ferrazzi’s very good case on why cutting out conferences is a bad way to cut costs:
“Right after we sold YaYa, the new owners instituted a set of cost-cutting policies relative to travel and conferences. I thought the policies were fundamentally off the mark. The owners saw conferences as boondoggles–pleasant affairs for indulgent executives rather than as revenue generators. To our new parent company, the costs of sending people to a few events each year seemed like an unnecessary expense on the start-up company’s balance sheet.
“I strongly disagreed and promised to convince them otherwise. I set about recording the actual number of revenue-generating projects that came directly from people I had met at conferences. The owners were stunned when I presented a spreadsheet showing successive deals and how a significant chunk of revenue could be traced back to one conference or another.”
Third, here’s a good summary from Fast Company on the value of conferences and conventions: They enable you to (1) make contacts and (2) share ideas.
The Scarcity of Good Management
From an article in Fortune back in February of 2006; I don’t think things have changed much since, because the driving force of this problem is lack of training and skill:
“Talent of every sort is in short supply, but the greatest shortage of all is skilled, effective managers. Even [in China], where you can hire factory workers by the million, companies can’t find enough managers….Labor is abundant, but managers are scarce.”
More on the Importance of Beliefs in an Organization
“…truly great organizations think of themselves in a fundamentally different way than mediocre enterprises. They have a guiding philosophy or a spirit about them, a reason for being that goes far beyond the mundane or the mercenary.” — Built to Last
It is eye-opening to realize the critical role that beliefs play in organizations. For we typically think of beliefs mostly at the individual level. But it is the shared beliefs and values in an organization that play the biggest role in making the organization effective and meaningful, and a place where people want to contribute.
The Importance of a Basic Philosophy to Every Organization
“The basic philosophy of an organization has far more to do with its achievements than do technological or economic resources, organizational structure, innovation and timing.” — Thomas Watson, Jr.
Who was Thomas Watson, Jr.? From Wikipedia: “Thomas John Watson, Jr. (January 14, 1914 – December 31, 1993) was the president of IBM from 1952 to 1971 and the eldest son of Thomas J. Watson, IBM’s first president. He was listed as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people of the 20th century.”
Moving Upward in a Downturn
This is a good article from Harvard Business Review on how the conventional approach to handling recessions is often wrong, and what to do instead. (I apologize that the link is to the pdf — the article doesn’t seem to be available in html.)
I have also blogged on this in my series Managing in a Downturn.
The Six Major Factors that Determine Knowledge Worker Productivity
From Peter Drucker’s Management Challenges for the 21st Century:
- Knowledge worker productivity demands that we ask the question: “What is the task?”
- It demands that we impose the responsibility for their productivity on the individual knowledge workers themselves. Knowledge workers have to manage themselves. They have to have autonomy.
- Continuing innovation has to be part of the work, the task and the responsibility of the knowledge workers.
- Knowledge work requires continuous learning on the part of the knowledge worker, but equally continuous teaching on the part of the knowledge worker.
- Productivity of the knowledge worker is not — at least not primarily — a matter of the quantity of output. Quality is at least as important.
- Finally, knowledge-worker productivity requires that the knowledge worker is both seen and treated as an “asset” rather than a “cost.” It requires that knowledge workers want to work for the organization in preference to all other opportunities.
The Errors of Scientific Management
This is a good, short summary of the main thinking behind scientific management and its core flaws. Scientific management (treating people like robots rather than people) is relevant to us today because it shows exactly how not to treat people. From Treat People Right!: How Organizations and Employees Can Create a Win/Win Relationship to Achieve High Performance at All Levels:
Scientific management called for standardized, specialized, and machine-paced jobs in the name of efficiency and low labor costs. People were expected to add little value beyond their manual labor. Two carrots were used: financial incentives and the threat of being fired. A key assumption was that in return for having a job, people should be willing to act like machines for eight hours a day.
Scientific management has been shown to be highly flawed. Its use in large organizations for decades caused low intrinsic motivation on the part of employees and high rates of turnover and absenteeism, and a strong inclination to solve workplace problems through unionization. Sometimes employees would engage in counterproductive behaviors and even sabotage. Ultimately all of this opened the door to foreign competitors [note what happened to the American automobile manufacturers, beginning back in the 1970s].
Drucker: Do Not Cut Back on Expenditures for Success in Hard Times
From Management Challenges for the 21st Century:
The most common, but also the most damaging, practice is to cut back on expenditures for success, especially in poor times, so as to maintain expenditures for ongoing operations, and especially expenditures to maintain the past.
The argument is always: “This product, service or technology is a success anyhow; it doesn’t need to have more money put into it.”
But the right argument is: “This is a success, and therefore should be supported to the maximum possible.” And it should be supported especially in bad times when the competition is likely to cut spending and therefore likely to create an opening.
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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