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What Makes a Job Miserable?

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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

Why the Pursuit of Buy-In Can Kill Innovation

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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?

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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

No "Theys" Allowed

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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.”

What is a Miserable Job?

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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

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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

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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

Is Your Organization Developing Leaders?

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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 Necessity of Effective Management for the Functioning of a Free Society

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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: