In my first reaction to Patrick Lencioni’s The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, I mentioned that I’d have to let this one sit with me for a while because there was something about it that just didn’t feel right. The model is simple enough. The book was amazing. But it seemed too easy.
I was struggling at a crossroads between where the manager has the responsibility of making the job a good job for the employee, but what can the employee do when the manager isn’t living up to that responsibility (besides quitting of course)? I felt like something was missing in this equation that wasn’t fully addressed in the book and the author’s model felt incomplete.
Reflecting upon my prior experiences with some of my worst managers, I began to think about what bothered me the most in those experiences. Then, all of a sudden I had the vision of the pyramid that Lencioni created in his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. What is the bottom of the pyramid? The most crucial part of a functioning team? Trust. BINGO!
The Three Signs of a Miserable Job talks about Irrelevance, Immeasurability, and Anonymity. These are the three signs that, when present, create a miserable job for the employee. In my experience, even if one or two of these are present, it can lead to a miserable job. However, my biggest pet peeve as an employee has always been when my manager is a micromanager. Hell, you would have thought one of my managers wrote the book on micromanaging because she excelled so much at it.
Micromanaging is difficult to deal with as an employee. While it may be coming with all the best intentions, it signals to the employee that there is no trust. No trust in the employee doing their job correctly. No trust in the employee’s knowledge or experience. No trust that the employee will meet the requirements of the task.
The aforementioned manager tried to rationalize it by saying that it was a way to protect them from making mistakes and wasting their time. Instead of being skilled at providing direction for the task and trusting the employee, she was skilled at directing first, then watching (literally) over their shoulder while they did the work, and then following up with the employee if the email wasn’t sent as soon as she got back to her own computer. Honestly, this was top-tier micromanaging.
I use this as the example because in this model where managers address the relevance of the job, create measurements in the job, and address the anonymity so people see and know the person, trust is paramount to all of that working. Without trust as the foundation, the rest of this falls apart. The employees must know that the manager trusts them to do the job they are hired to do. If the character Brian had followed up with Migo and the team after every task was completed and kept checking to see when something would be done, the whole thing would fall apart and he’d have lost his entire restaurant staff the first night.
I’m sure I will touch on micromanaging and trust again in these management discussions, but I felt compelled to share this missing piece of the model. If you disagree with this concept or feel it is sufficiently covered by one of the three signs in Lencioni’s model, please leave a comment and let me know. I’d love to engage in productive dialogue to discuss where all of these pieces fit together.
