The truth about employee engagement, Patrick Lencioni

This not the usual non-fiction business book, because most of it is… fiction. By far the largest part of the book tells the story of a retired CEO of a midsize company who promises his wife the good life at Lake Tahoe after haing sold the company he has been CEO of for a long time. But doing nothing is not his thing so pretty soon he finds himself taking a part ownership in a local restuarant mostly because he wants to figure out how to help the employees be more engaged.

Slowly he discovers a model consisting of three major obstacles to employee engagement: anonymity, irrelevance, and immeasurement. He tests it at the restaurant and later during a interim CEO job.

The three root causes of job misery

Lencioni defines three root causes of job misery:

• Anonymity: everyone feels the need to be known and appreciated for who they are.
• Irrelevance: Everyone want to feel that their contribution matters to others.
• Immeasurement: Everyone wants to be able to gauge their own progress and level of contribution.

Lencioni provides some insight in how to prevent these obstacles from happening, like the need for managers to show a genuine intrest in their employees, defining who is affected by your job and how, and finding metrics to measure yourself.

The real value of the book

At first I found the book to be somewhat light of both theory behind the model and practical use. Most of the pages of the book are spend on telling the story and most of those pages don’t add anything to understanding employee engagement. They just make the book nicer to read. And to be honest, I still think the model is lacking and there is more to employee engagement than is covered in this book.

But something happened to me when I was trying to write down concrete practices for a manager to take: it triggered a discovery and thinking process how to use the model in real life or in one of my courses which led to an enriching of my already existing set of practices for building an engaging workplace. And there lies the real value I think: the book makes you think and come up with next steps yourself, if you take the time, rather then just consuming knowledge.