The Three Signs of a Miserable Job

Now that I got your attention with the Subject line :)

Wanted to pass along my views of a book I just finished reading. The book is called “The 3 signs of a miserable job”. It’s by Patrick Lencioni. The author uses a fable toidentify what makes employees unhappy or lukewarm about their jobs and provide fixes for those.

The 3 – in brief – are:

1. Anonymity: no one knows you
2. Irrelevance: you don’t know if your job matters and to who
3. Immeasurement: No way to measure progress

Even if your team seems happy, it helps to check if these 3 things are being addressed, for example via the annual Objectives.

Amazon link for "The three signs of a miserable job"

It’s an easy read and there is also a book by the same author on “The five dysfunctions of a team” which I used before.

PS: When I shared this with others before, I was asked why I was reading this book. I love my job, thank you :)

thanks, vishy

How can we run faster?

One of the interesting things in an organization: The Need for Higher Speed or Velocity.

(For those keen on definitions: Velocity = Speed in a certain Direction. And, let's use this informal measure of Speed = "how often do we meet or beat the aggressive deadline for a task")

Setting: Employees want to grow and have an impact, ASAP. Hence, we all want our projects to run FAST. But, some of them are not reaching fruition (e.g., an innovation reaching the market) as fast as we like them to.

Problem: Most of our initiatives need us to work with others - with our colleagues in the immediate org, other orgs in the company, and partners outside the company. The "others" may be either moving slower than us, OR moving fast but in a different direction that THEY care about. Either way, their velocity is not matching ours in reaching our goals; kind of like two wheels running at different speeds but connected by an axle. Let's see what can happen:

1. We slow down to their speed
2. They come up to our speed
3. We stop working with others (ok, let's rule this one out)

It's my conjecture that most people are more comfortable with #1, because we want to be "nice and accommodating of others". Hence, the project runs at the speed of the slowest player.

So, how do we speed it all up? We figure out ways to INFLUENCE others to move faster. Here are some techniques from the top of my mind:

1. We LEAD by example. So we run, and the world will catch up by inspiration. We have seen this happen, especially with the competition :)
2. We MOTIVATE others to run faster. Selling how running faster will help THEIR mission. Basically, create a Win-Win.
3. The least-preferred, but sometimes necessary, option is GREED & FEAR. E.g., "Do this and I'll send a nice mail to your boss", "Don't do this and I will escalate it to your boss". There should be no place for this tactic in a grown-up world, but oh well... Those with lil kids know this well :-)

Bottom line: We all know that doing something or not doing it at all is better than doing it slow.

So, let's pause and see if our projects are running fast enough, how to make them run faster... and if they can't be sped up, should we still be running that losing race?

Thoughts? Other techniques that have worked for you?

Thank you, Vishy