No need for misery at work, author says

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote that every unhappy family was unhappy in its own way, but best-selling author and management consultant Patrick Lencioni maintains that all miserable jobs are pretty similar.

While long commutes, low pay and menial work can make a job difficult, it is the boss who determines whether employees are suffering or fulfilled, Lencioni says in his new book.

"The Three Signs of a Miserable Job" (Jossey-Bass, $24.95) uses the fictional story of retired chief executive Brian Bailey to show the consequences of bad management and what companies can do to turn morale around.

After selling his company, Bailey is appalled by the indifferent and inefficient service he encounters at a local pizza parlor. Looking for something to do, he invests in the business, takes the weekend manager job and tries to motivate the staff.

That's how he discovers the three signs of a miserable job, which are:

-- Anonymity. Management has shown little interest in their employees, their backgrounds or their lives.

-- Irrelevance. The employees have no idea that their work matters to anyone, including management.

-- "Immeasurement." The workers have no objective way to gauge their performance. Their success, such as it is, depends on the opinions and whims of someone else.

The restaurant's atmosphere -- and fortunes -- improve considerably after Bailey gets to know his staff, suggests ways they can measure their effectiveness, and helps them see how important their work is to him, their co-workers and the customers.

Eventually Bailey goes on to apply the same principles at a sporting goods chain and a hotel company.

As at the restaurant, initial reactions to his concepts range from cautious optimism to outright skepticism. Ultimately, however, most of the executives and employees embrace the new ideas, and the businesses improve.

The book ends with examples of how the symptoms of a miserable job can crop up everywhere from routine secretarial work to the glamorous world of professional football.

"I wanted to make it clear that the same thing that a bus boy needs at a restaurant is needed by the VP of marketing at a high-tech firm," Lencioni told Reuters.

DEATH BY MEETING

The author himself worked in a restaurant when he was a teenager, but it was seeing the frustration his father experienced in his job as a salesman that inspired the latest book.

"I remember thinking at a very early age that this was wrong," Lencioni said. "He succeeded in spite of his managers, not because of them, and that's crazy."

Lencioni has used fictional situations, which he calls fables, to illustrate the themes of his five other business books including "Death by Meeting" and "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team."

In a world of layoffs, outsourcing and offshoring, some readers of "The Three Signs of a Miserable Job" may question whether companies care about making their workers happy.

While Lencioni acknowledged that companies are under pressure to cut costs, he said the biggest competitive challenge they face is keeping good employees.

"I work with CEOs and their executive teams ... and very few of these people are really indifferent about their employees or their customers," said Lencioni, who is the founder and president of the Lafayette, California-based Table Group management consulting firm. "They want to do the right thing."

In fact, he said, many managers say they would love to retire and do "meaningful" work, like teach children to read.

What they need to realize, he added, is that their current jobs already provide an opportunity to influence people's lives.