Today, let's look at the first of Patrick Lencioni's 3 signs of a miserable job.

PL feels that a job is bound to be miserable if it doesn't involve measurement, so his first sign is "Immeasurability." He feels (and I agree) that if you can't measure what you're doing, you'll lose interest. Look at any recreational activity we do, especially sports. Golfers keep a handicap (and keep track of number of putts, number of fairways hit, number of greens in regulation, etc., etc., etc. Golfers are nuts!). Cyclists carry computers on their bike to compare today's pace with yesterday's. Bowlers get averages. It is just as important in our jobs, though. We need to measure to understand if we are doing a good job and/or improving. While we're learning a new job, the excitement is mastering tasks. After that period, though, if we don't measure ourselves in some way, we find ourselves in an endless, meaningless cycle without a sense of progress. And it needs to be in real time, immediate, or as nearly so as we can make it. Lencioni gives the example of actors and others in Hollywood. They get some degree of measurement in the form of box office receipts, but it takes place so distant in time from when they are doing the work, that it isn't useful.

I can relate. In my orthopaedic career, we used to keep very close track of our group and individual charges and receipts on a day to day basis. So closely, in fact, that the previous day's numbers for me were available the next morning. It created a sense of excitement and anticipation, to see what the previous day's numbers were. And a bit of competition with the other docs in the practice. Currently, we don't do this in quite the same way and I feel a difference. There isn't the immediacy of seeing those numbers. I know this seems silly and shallow, but it is true nonetheless.

Another personal experience was the summer I worked for the Milwaukee Sentinal as a box carrier. That meant I drove a big Suburban to each paperbox on my route and filled the box between 1 and 4 in the morning. The measurable, like it or not, was how fast we could do the job (because the faster we finished, the faster we could go home to sleep). We all got pretty good at counting out the number of papers for the upcoming box with one hand while we drove with the other. Then, we slammed the truck to a stop by the box and ran to the box, put the papers in, jumped back in and screamed off to the next box. The guys in the inner city had it easier - less time between boxes. My route was in the burbs and I really had to cruise between boxes. (Note to all of you - be wary of newspaper trucks very late at night!) We were marked for time when we got back to the garage at the Sentinal garage. Nice! Each night was a personal challenge to beat the previous night's time and to get back in front of the goobers who had the downtown routes.

The challenge is to find measurables for every job. Lencioni's example in the book is a pizza place. Waitresses measured tips, the drive-thru guy measured smiles and correct orders. What about a housewife? A radiology tech? A garbage collector? I don't know off the top of my head, but a manager and the employee need to sit down to come up with these (or a housewife and her family). With a little thought and imagination, immediate, meaningful measurements can be devised for any job.

2nd sign tomorrow!