Tag Archives: Center for Creative Leadership

Do you think that you have a miserable job?

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Many years ago I attended the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina. There I was introduced to a series of books by Patrick Lencioni.  I use one of them, ‘The Five Dysfunctions of a Team‘, regularly as part of module that I teach on Science Leadership and Ethics which is in turn part of a Continuous Professional Development (CPD) programme [see ‘On being a leader‘ on October 13th, 2021].  I pulled the book off my shelf a few weeks ago in preparation for delivering the class and next to it was first one I read and enjoyed, called ‘The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for Managers‘.  If you are only reading this post to find out if your job qualifies as miserable, then the three signs are anonymity (you see yourself as being invisible), irrelevance (your work does not matter to anyone, not even the boss) and immeasurement (you have no tangible means of assessing success or failure in your job).  The message of the book is that a manager has a responsibility to ensure none of their team suffers any of these basic signs of a miserable job.

Advice to abbots and other leaders

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For some years I have been practising and teaching the principles of ‘Procedural Justice’ and ‘Fair Process’ in leadership. For me, it is an intuitive approach that involves listening to people, making a decision, then explaining the decision and resultant expectations to everyone concerned. It was given a name and attributed to two researchers at INSEAD Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne when I attended the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina in 2008. However, last weekend, I  discovered that it is much older because it forms part of the advice to abbots in ‘The Rule of St Benedict‘ written around 540. In chapter 3, entitled ‘Summoning the brothers for consultation’, Benedict says ‘whenever any important matters need to be dealt with in the monastery, the abbot should gather the whole community together and set out the agenda in person. When he has listened to the brothers’ advice, he should consider it carefully and then do what he decides is best.’  So long before Kim and Mauborgne discovered the effectiveness of this approach, Benedictine abbots were using it to run hugely successful abbeys, such as Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire where I came across a copy of  ‘The Rule of St Benedict’.

Sources:

The Rule of St Benedict, translated by Carolinne White, London: Penguin Books, 2008.

W.Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, Fair Process: Managing in theKnowledge Economy, Harvard Business Review, 81(1), pp.127-136, 2003.