I admit it. I saw this book on my husband’s night stand and snapped it up. No, I’m not caught in a miserable job – although it was a particularly stressful week at work. I was caught by the title.

An hour and a half into the book (and about half-way through it), I was hooked – and excited about the positive approach to a negative subject. According to the author, Patrick Lencioni, miserable jobs aren’t about the work a person does. The summary – you can take three steps to ensure that all employees don’t suffer in misery.

Told as a fable, this book is a fast read. But, more importantly, it’s about change that each and everyone of us can achieve by valuing people. The three areas to evaluate yourself in:

• anonymity – do I know the people I work with? Their interests, what they do with their time, where they are at in their lives today.
• irrelevance – do people around me see their work as a series of self-involved activities? Or, do they have a vision beyond what they are doing to who is impacted and exactly how their work helps.
• immeasurement – do I help people assess their own success without me having to do it for them? Work at making sure they aren’t dependent on someone else to subjectively judge performance, but given solid goals and measurements to keep track of progress – in a way that is relevant to what they do.

Lencioni puts it bluntly: “No one gets out of bed in the morning to program software or assemble furniture or do whatever it is that accountants do. They get out of bed to live their lives, and their work tasks are only a part of their lives. People want to be managed as people, not as mere workers.”

The result, a workforce of self-motivated, self-directed employees who would never use the word “miserable” to describe their job.