Retention Hot Tip #5: Read Patrick Lencioni's Book - The Truth About Employee Engagement

Do you consider this an extreme picture? Does it visually capture how your employees feel about their managers? How many of your managers lose their tempers, scream at their employees, and pound the table. How many are lacking in gratitude, empathy, and sensitivity. How many are horrible coaches?

One of the most powerful books I’ve read about retention and employee engagement is the book Patrick Lencioni wrote about why workers are miserable in their jobs and how to fix it. He’s one of my favorite authors, best known for his book “The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team”.

He defines what it means to be miserable in your job. He talks about how the manager-worker relationship is the most important element of fixing this common misery. Finally, he talks about 3 tactics to help workers move beyond feeling miserable in their job. Perhaps, we’ll examine each of these 3 tactics in this Retention Hot Tip Series. I recommend you read this book right now. It’s an easy read of a few hours written in his usual story format.

Lencioni’s work correlates very closely with the work Gallup has done on employee engagement and the three categories of people: Engaged, Disengaged, and Actively Disengaged.

The question I am constantly raising in my Hiring and Retention workshops is whether you have the right managers leading teams. I realize you love these people, they’ve been with you for decades, and they are sacred cows. The question is whether you’re accepting “good enough” because these managers do not have the ability to hire and retain high performing teams.

When was the last time you did a manager assessment to determine if your management team members need remedial training in how to be a manager, or whether you need to move them aside to move the organization forward? This gap of managerial excellence is only going to get worse as the job market continues to tighten up over the next decade, and as younger generations enter the workforce with a lower tolerance for managerial misbehavior in creating misery for their teams.