The Three Signs of a Miserable Job
written by Patrick Lencioni

Over the past ten years, Patrick Lencioni has been a prolific writer on a number of business topics near and dear to the hearts of small business owners. His past books have included "Five Dysfunctions of a Team", "Death by Meeting", and "Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars". Each book tells a fable with a critical business prescription embedded into the story.

His newest book, "The Three Signs of a Miserable Job" follows this same model. It tells a story of a successful CEO struggling to determine how to prevent his employees from being miserable. The CEO goes from running a large equipment manufacturing company to a small pizza restaurant and than back to a large regional chain of retail sporting goods stores. In each case, he faces a dysfunctional, demotivated, miserable work force. As expected, in each situation he is able to turn around the employees using a relatively simple set of three human capital strategies.

The strategies Lencioni prescribes are not new. In fact he shares the following with the reader, "The remedy I propose here is going to seem ridiculously simple and obvious at first glance." He goes on to say that the challenge for managers today is not the ability to understand these basic principles of people management, but to put these ideas into practice. The evidence of this exists in nearly every business in America. There are millions of employees who are absolutely miserable in their work. The cost of this collective malaise is billions of dollars to companies in lost productivity and under-performance.

I won’t give away Lencioni’s "Three Signs". I highly recommend this book to every small business owner. It is an easy read with a powerful set of employee-friendly strategies. I believe that if you begin practicing these strategies, the impact on your workforce will be quick and most significant. There may even be an application of these practices beyond your employees with your customers, your vendors, and maybe even family members.