Among some of my colleagues, it became fashionable to poke fun at Patrick Lencioni, since at one point he was practically turned into a cult figure. Nevertheless, I “got hooked” on his books from the very first one I read — a book I’ve now gone through almost three times. And all the others consistently earn the highest praise from me as well. For me, he’s probably business author number one — the writer whose books every manager should have on their desk.
In his book The Truth About Employee Engagement: A Fable About Addressing the Three Root Causes of Job Misery, written in Lencioni’s signature genre of the business fable, Patrick touches on the topic of job satisfaction.
All of us work in one way or another. And those who don’t “go” to work are most likely doing work at home: taking care of children, feeding the family, keeping things in order. That’s work too.
And sometimes people don’t even realize how sick and tired they’ve grown of their daily routine, how reluctant they’ve become to deal with it. A lack of motivation leads to falling engagement, productivity, and proactivity. And it’s unlikely that any leader wants their team — and their product — to be, at best, mediocre, if not outright sliding into a hole.
Just think about it — who among you hasn’t caught yourself having thoughts like these at least once?
The Sunday Blues are those awful feelings of dread and depression that many people get toward the end of their weekend as they contemplate going back to work the next day. I must admit that there were times toward the beginning of my career when the Sunday Blues began to take hold of me as early as Saturday night.
…
However, everyone knows what a miserable job is.
It’s 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.
Then think about how often those thoughts might be crossing your subordinates’ minds.
These days it’s trendy to conduct so-called exit interviews, where a manager or an HR representative talks to an employee who has already resigned and asks them to share why they decided to leave the company. Some companies don’t do this at all, others do it just for the sake of appearances (“everyone does it — so we should too”), and some genuinely try to understand what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening with other employees. After all, employees are the most valuable resource of any company. But in practice, someone who is already leaving is unlikely to share the whole truth. And not because they’re bad or dishonest. They simply have no incentive to do so — and they may not even remember everything that built up over time and led to their final decision. And what’s far more important, as Lencioni says, is to ask employees a different question, long before they’ve already decided to leave: “What makes you even think about quitting?”
Trying to understand the nature of the problem, the author poses this question both to the main character — a formerly successful manager — and to his new subordinates.
And he arrives at some rather simple conclusions — ones that are at the very least worth reflecting on, if not adopting outright.
- People don’t always feel their connection to the bigger picture. They just do their work without ever asking themselves how their efforts influence the overall result. And without understanding outcomes, it’s very hard to recognize one’s own successes.
- Other employees, too, sometimes devalue the work of their colleagues, failing to see how even simple tasks can benefit them and everyone else. In the end, it’s not only the salesperson who brings in money — the office cleaner does as well, by creating comfortable working conditions for that very salesperson.
- Employees lack clear, measurable criteria for the quality of their work. In some places, tasks are simply handed out with a “do what you’re told,” while in others the goals are so vague that you can’t assess them at all in terms of “were they even accomplished?”
- And even when goals do exist — and are measurable — they may not align with how the employee themselves would evaluate the results of their work. In that case, these metrics turn into fiction for them, because they don’t follow them, and therefore don’t see any tangible outcome — meaning, they don’t experience any real satisfaction from their own work.
Some might say these are signs of young or unskilled employees. And that managers supposedly know perfectly well how to set goals for themselves and evaluate them. But Patrick Lencioni — and I myself — can both say that this is absolutely not the case. In fact, I’d argue that managers face these questions even more often. Why?
I think it’s partly because managers often operate with company-level and project-level goals that must be achieved with their involvement — yet they can’t build the bridge between those goals and their own contribution. Many think: “I didn’t really do anything special — I just have a great team. They did everything, and I simply didn’t get in their way.” In other words, they devalue their own achievements because they never set personal criteria for evaluating their own work.
And on top of that, there’s often a second problem — their own leaders don’t set those criteria either, brushing things off with “you’re the manager, you should set your own goals and tasks.”
As a result, the manager becomes a hostage to the same problem: their contribution is unclear. If everything works well — the success belongs to the whole team. If things go badly — there are many possible explanations, but none of them will boost motivation.
Throughout the book, through the eyes of the main character, the author takes us along his path of reflection — and his method of trial and error — to understand how to make even the most ordinary pizza delivery driver “connected to the company’s success.” And through this, he achieves significant business growth. Yes, some people have to be let go, but the others begin to work with joy — and spread that joy to everyone around them.
Of course, a “thought experiment” in the form of a fictional story is still just an experiment. But Patrick Lencioni’s books are built on real situations. He simply generalizes the experience in this form.
And he sums it up as follows: if you, as a manager, want to increase your employees’ satisfaction, focus on the three plagues of disengagement:
- Anonymity. You must not simply manage people — you must know them beyond working hours. Who their family is, what eats at them, what they strive for.
- Irrelevance. Do they understand who actually needs their work? Whose success in the team depends on them doing it well? (And you can talk about the flip side too — who will suffer if they don’t do their work properly.)
- Immeasurement. Can the employee measure the results of their own work — ideally almost on a daily basis? Not what a manager will tell them three months later, but what they can see themselves. Can they understand whether they did well today or not? This question, in fact, is best discussed with the employee from the very beginning, because their ideas about how to measure their work may be completely different from what you would come up with.
And here it’s important that the employee can control the evaluation process themselves:
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.
It may seem that this is already the whole brief retelling of the book. And in general — yes. But to really understand why all this matters, what pitfalls there may be, and simply to think it through more deeply, I strongly recommend reading the entire book. Fortunately, Patrick’s books are short and written in a light, engaging style.
For me, this is yet another essential desk book for any manager. No matter how many years I’ve worked with people, I still found myself thinking a lot while reading it — and made several notes on how to work more actively with my own team on the topic of job satisfaction.
My rating: 5/5
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