The Truth About Employee Engagement

A Fable About Addressing the Three Root Causes of Job Misery

Patrick M. Lencioni

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781119237990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Persönliche Entwicklung
• Subtopic: Karriere

The Truth About Employee Engagement was originally published as The Three Signs of a Miserable Job. A bestselling author and business guru tells how to improve job satisfaction and performance.

In his sixth fable, bestselling author Patrick Lencioni takes on a topic that almost everyone can relate to: job misery. Millions of workers, even those who have carefully chosen careers based on true passions and interests, dread going to work, suffering each day as they trudge to jobs that make them cynical, weary, and frustrated. It is a simple fact of business life that any job, from investment banker to dishwasher, can become miserable. Through the story of a CEO turned pizzeria manager, Lencioni reveals the three elements that make work miserable -- irrelevance, immeasurability, and anonymity -- and gives managers and their employees the keys to make any job more engaging.

As with all of Lencioni's books, this one is filled with actionable advice you can put into effect immediately. In addition to the fable, the book includes a detailed model examining the three root causes of job misery and how they can be remedied. It covers the benefits of managing for job engagement within organizations -- increased productivity, greater retention, and competitive advantage -- and offers examples of how managers can use the applications in the book to deal with specific jobs and situations.

Patrick Lencioni is President of The Table Group, a management consulting firm specializing in executive team development and organizational health. As a consultant and keynote speaker, he has worked with thousands of senior executives and executive teams in organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to high-tech startups to universities and nonprofits. His clients include. AT&T, Direct TV, JCPenney, Microsoft, Nestle, Northwestern Mutual, Southwest Airlines and St. Jude Chilren's Research Hospital. Lencioni is the author of ten bestselling books, including The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and The Advantage. He previously worked for Oracle, Sybase, and the management consulting firm Bain & Company.

The Fable

Shock

Brian Bailey never saw it coming.

After seventeen years of serving as CEO of JMJ Fitness Machines, he could not have guessed that it could all be over, without warning, in just nineteen days. Nineteen days!

But over it was. And though he was better off financially than he had been at any time in his life, he suddenly felt as aimless as he had when he dropped out of college.

What he didn't know was that it was going to get a lot worse before it got better.

Part One

The Manager

Brian

Early in his career, Brian Bailey came to an inescapable conclusion: he loved being a manager.

Every aspect of it fascinated him. Whether he was doing strategic planning and budgeting or counseling and performance appraisals, Brian felt like he had been created to manage. And as he experienced more and more success as a relatively young leader, he quickly came to the realization that his decision to forgo college made him no less qualified than his peers who had been to business school.

But then again, he hadn't had much choice about leaving school. Brian's family, being lower middle class to begin with, fell on particularly hard times when the Bailey walnut orchards in northern California were hit two years in a row by crippling frosts.

Being the oldest of five kids and the only one out of the house, Brian felt a sense of responsibility not to drain the family resources. Even with the financial aid programs offered at St. Mary's College, keeping him in school would have been a serious burden for the Baileys. And Brian's academic focus on theology and psychology didn't make the economic justification for staying in school any easier.

So, answering an ad in the newspaper, Brian took a line manager position in a Del Monte packing plant, and spent the next two years on a factory floor, ensuring that tomatoes and green beans and fruit cocktail were stuffed into cans as efficiently as possible. Brian liked to joke with his employees that he had always wanted to visit a “fruit cocktail farm.”

As his father's orchard rebounded and the family's financial situation improved, Brian had a decision to make. He could go back to school and finish his degree—or continue to work at Del Monte, where he was on a fast-track to promotion and a possible shot at running his own plant one day. To the chagrin of his parents, he opted for neither.

Instead, Brian indulged his curiosity and took a job with the only automobile manufacturing plant in the San Francisco Bay Area. For the next fifteen years, he blissfully moved up various corporate ladders at the plant, spending equal time in manufacturing, finance, and operations.

Outside work, he married a woman he had briefly dated in high school, and who, ironically, attended St. Mary's after Brian had left. They moved to a small but growing community appropriately named Pleasanton, and raised a family of two boys and a little girl.

By the time Brian was thirty-five, he was vice president of manufacturing for the plant, working for a dynamic COO named Kathryn Petersen.

A few years after joining the plant, Kathryn had taken a personal interest in Brian because of his modest educational background, his work ethic, and his desire to learn. She kept Brian at one job or another in her part of the organization for as long as she could. But Kathryn knew it couldn't last forever.

The Break

When a headhunter friend of Kathryn's called and asked if she would be interested in interviewing for the CEO position at a relatively small exercise equipment manufacturer in the central valley, she declined. But she insisted that her friend recommend Brian as a candidate for the job.

Looking at his résumé—and his lack of a college degree—the headhunter decided there was no way Brian would be hired, but—as a favor to Kathryn—agreed to let him interview. He was shocked when his client called two weeks later to say that Brian had been “the best candidate by far,” and that he was being hired as CEO of JMJ Fitness Machines.

What impressed his interviewers at JMJ, and would continue to impress them on the job, was Brian's ability to communicate with and understand people at every part of the social spectrum. He seemed no more or less comfortable on the floor of the factory than he did in the boardroom, demonstrating a combination of competence and unpretentiousness that was rare among executives, even in the world of manufacturing.

As for Brian, he felt like a kid in a candy store, blessed to have the opportunity to do something he enjoyed. JMJ would benefit from that blessing.

JMJ

Located in Manteca, California, a small bedroom and agricultural town sixty miles east of San Francisco, JMJ was a relatively young company that, for most of its first decade in existence, had merely survived. It did so largely by tapping into the relatively cheap labor in the area and mimicking its more innovative competitors. Though the company had managed to turn a modest profit, it was a minor player in a relatively fragmented industry, garnering less than 4 percent of the market and a position no higher than twelfth in terms of market share.

And then the company's founder and original CEO decided he'd had enough, prompting the call to the headhunter who ended up finding Brian.

The first year of Brian's tenure was no picnic as JMJ found itself enmeshed in a frivolous but distracting lawsuit. Ironically, that situation provided Brian with his first opportunity to prove himself as a leader, and provoke him to make some strategic changes.

For the next couple of years, Brian repositioned JMJ in every way possible. Most visibly to the outside world, he shifted the company's strategic focus almost exclusively toward institutional customers, which included hospitals, hotels, colleges, and health clubs.

Brian also injected a sense of inventiveness into the company by bringing in a few creative engineers and exercise physiologists from other industries. The net result of both these moves was a higher selling price for JMJ products, and unbelievably, higher demand for them too.

But as important as these changes were, nothing had a greater impact on JMJ's long-term success than what Brian did to its culture.

Like most other manufacturers in the area, the company had been plagued by relatively high turnover, low morale, and unpredictable productivity, living under the subtle but constant threat of unionization. Brian knew that turning around the organization would require him to change all that.

Over the course of just two years, Brian and his team managed to raise employee engagement and morale to unthinkably high levels, allowing the relatively obscure company in the Central Valley to establish a reputation for workforce satisfaction and retention. As a result, JMJ wound up winning more industry awards for being “A Great Place to Work” than it could cram into the glass trophy case in its lobby.

When reporters asked Brian for his secret to accomplishing this, he usually downplayed his role and told them that he simply treated people the way he would like to be treated. Which was mostly true, given that he had never really developed a specific methodology.

And as much as Brian publicly deflected credit for the cultural turnaround at his company, he quietly took great pride in the fact that he had given his people, especially the less privileged ones, more rewarding and fulfilling jobs than they would have found elsewhere in the area. More than any revenue goal or product innovation the company had achieved, this made Brian feel like his own job was meaningful.

Which is why selling the company would be so painful for him.

Tremors

From a financial standpoint, JMJ was as solid as any medium-sized company could be. Under Brian's leadership, the firm had generated fifteen years of solid results, leapfrogging to become t...