I love reading this genre of book, so I thought I’d try a new style of blog post and do a book review…
Writing Style…
This was the third of Lencioni’s books that I’ve read, his style of writing makes them easy to devour, and I’m keen to read more of his books. He writes about topics which could so easily be full of jargon but instead he uses digestible everyday language. Those vomit inducing business vernacular phrases and overly complicated sentences are nowhere to be seen, instead he breaks down meaty topics into really accessible literature, and guides the reader through with lots of short chapters and storytelling.
The majority of the book is told through the story of Brian, a big time CEO turned local restaurant manager who has expert communication and management skills. The storytelling nature of the book makes the whole thing feel much more lighthearted. After all we’re talking about the job misery suffered by millions of people, so quite heavy when you think about it.
So what is the truth about employee engagement?
According to Lencioni there are 3 signs of disengagement at work – irrelevance, anonymity and immeasurement. Or described the other way around that would be that there are 3 ingredients to engagement which are relevance, personal relationships, and measurement.
The 3 are intrinsically linked and affect jobs of all shapes and sizes, as demonstrated through the core story of the book in the pizza restaurant, but also affects professional sports players, athletes, rock stars, actors and musicians.
The book gives real life examples and practical tips for overcoming these three causes of job misery, my synopsis being;
Overcoming irrelevance is about creating a feeling of being needed, a fundamental trait of human beings. According to the book it’s down to the line manager to ensure an employee knows exactly how and where they are needed within the organisation.
Overcoming anonymity is down to the individual’s line manager taking a genuine personal interest in them. Genuine being the key word to stress here.
Overcoming immeasurement is about providing workers with the ability to measure their own progress or performance. So this one is about managers developing one or more things that each individual can realistically measure and impact, i.e. not always the macro objectives of revenue and company profit. It could be as simple as the number of times they make a customer smile per day.
Who should read this book?
I think this book is a helpful read for anyone that manages people, from those brand new to it to those old hats that need reminding of some of the fundamentals.
By Lencioni’s own admission his theory is very simple; “people need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.” It’s true that the theory is indeed a simple one and might feel like common sense, but in my view his 3 factors are so often overlooked.
This book focuses on 3 factors about the job role itself that the direct line manager can influence, but do you think there is more to employee engagement than that.
What do
Strive think?
At Strive we know that employee engagement is affected by every touch point an employee has with an organisation, including the onboarding process, the office environment and so so much more.
We have our own 6 pillars of engagement:
- Communication
- Recognition
- Leadership
- Culture
- Celebration
- Connection
You can read more about these on our ‘What We Do’ page here.
