THREE GOOD REASONS FOR BEING UTTERLY MISERABLE AT WORK



Every unhappy family is unhappy in a different way. Every unhappy worker is unhappy in much the same way.

The first is a dubious generalisation made by the greatest of novelists, Leo Tolstoy. The second is a slightly less dubious one made by a novelist who isn't great at all. Indeed Patrick Lencioni is a management consultant who has just written a business parable, The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, which, though of no literary merit, is outselling Anna Karenina on Amazon by about 100 to one.

According to this book, we are miserable at work for three reasons. The first is anonymity – we feel no one cares that we are there. The second is immeasurability – we don't know if we are doing a good job or not, and the third is irrelevance – we feel that our work doesn't matter much one way or another.

Mr Lencioni argues that all three causes are on the rampage and that we are in the middle of a “misery epidemic” in which three-quarters of all workers hate their jobs. All is not lost, however. Misery, he says, is largely the fault of line managers, and if only they could remember what it felt like to be miserable as a worker they could fix it.

For a start, I don't accept that we are facing misery on this scale. As a business agony aunt I actively go out touting for misery and so the people who come to me are a skewed sample. But even of these only about half seem genuinely miserable at work.

Even if he were right about the extent of the misery he isn't quite right about the causes. Last week I had supper with an old friend of mine and we spent a nice hour or two discussing misery. He has done all sorts of jobs and has been miserable in quite a few. I have also had various spells at work where I have felt less happy than Pollyanna, say. We both agreed that our own agony levels peaked long before we ever set foot in an office.

For pure misery, being a first-year undergraduate takes some beating. All three of Mr Lencioni's conditions were writ large in Oxford in 1978. We were miserable because we were anonymous – nobody cared where we were. We were miserable because we had no way of knowing if we were doing well: we read out our essays to bored dons who would yawn while fellow students fidgeted. And we were miserable because, freed from the compulsion of school, we looked for purpose in our studies and found none. (I think I was also miserable because I had split up with my boyfriend but that was another matter.)

But then we grew up. We no longer really expected meaning and measurement, or at least made do with them in very small doses. We found, when we got our first office jobs, that they had a lot to be said for them. For a start you get paid. This is not only nice in itself, but it does give work a purpose, and one not to be sneezed at.

To search for a deeper meaning beyond this is a dangerous thing. The harder one looks for meaning at work the less likely one is to find it. Is there meaning in writing columns? No, of course there isn't. But if people quite like reading them and I quite like writing them, that seems reason enough to do it.

As for anonymity, the simple fact of getting paid shows that someone does care you are there. If they didn't, they wouldn't pay you to show up. And, as for not knowing how you are doing, this isn't a problem in most offices. Thanks to endless assessments people are told how they are doing rather too often if anything.

Instead I think the three things that make workers miserable are rather more basic. They are the work, the people and the general environment. The work can be misery-inducing by being too much or too little, too boring, too difficult or too easy.

The people can be wrong in an assortment of ways: lazy, spiteful, bullying or just dull and too depressed themselves to spread much cheer. The environment can be stultifying, unhealthy, too political and so on.

Mr Lencioni reckons one reason managers are bad at making their workers feel better is that they have forgotten what it felt like to be starting out.

I think there is a better reason. Management is one of the most intrinsically miserable jobs there is. Managers find it hard to make the lives of their underlings any better because they are too miserable themselves.

Management is all about getting people to do things that they don't want to do. So it is difficult, if not well nigh impossible. It is about coming in early and leaving late. The work of a manager is never done. It is one thing after another and another. Being a manager means not minding about being disliked. It means being lonely and having no one inside the company to moan to.

Only on the broadest thesis is Mr Lencioni right: the answer to misery may well be better management. Stated thus it is pretty obvious. The hard bit is how to make managers better at managing. If I knew the answer to that I wouldn't be writing columns like this. I would be out there with my sleeves rolled up making the world happy for office workers.

工作郁闷的三座大山



不幸的家庭各有各的不幸。不幸的工作者有着相似的不幸。

第一句是伟大的小说家列夫•托尔斯泰(Leo Tolstoy)做出的让人半信半疑的概括。第二句可信度稍高一些，出自一名与伟大无缘的作家。事实上，帕特里克•伦乔尼(Patrick Lencioni)是一名管理咨询师，刚刚完成了一部名为《悲惨工作三征兆》(The Three Signs of a Miserable Job)的商业著作。这本著作虽然没有什么文学价值，在亚马逊(Amazon)的销量却远远超过《安娜·卡列尼娜》(Anna Karenina)，比例约为100比1。

按照这本书的说法，我们在工作时感到痛苦有三个原因。第一个原因是默默无闻性——我们感到没有人在乎我们是否在那儿。第二个原因是不可测量性——我们不知道自己的工作干得好不好。而第三个原因是不相关性——我们感觉自己的工作不管怎样都无所谓。

伦乔尼提出，所有这三个原因都在泛滥，我们正处于一个“痛苦流行期”，四分之三的工作者都痛恨自己的工作。不过，并不是没有指望了。他表示，大部分痛苦都是部门经理的错，只要他们能想起自己作为职员时是何等痛苦，问题就可能得到解决。

首先，我不认为我们的痛苦有这么大。作为一个商业知心大姐，我积极地去招徕痛苦，所以到我这里的人并不具备代表性。但即使是在这些人中，只有大约一半在工作时是真的痛苦。

即便他说对了痛苦的程度，他的原因也不太正确。上周，我和一位老朋友共进晚餐，我们花了一两个小时的时间讨论痛苦的话题。他做过各种各样的工作，在很多工作中都感到痛苦。有些时候，我在工作上比波丽安娜（Pollyanna,《波丽安娜》的女主人公）还要悲惨。我们都同意，自己的苦恼程度早在踏足办公室之前就已达到了顶峰。

谈到纯粹的痛苦，你很难和大一的学生相比拟。伦乔尼提到的所有三种情况在1978年的牛津都是显而易见的。我们痛苦，因为我们默默无闻——没有人在意我们在哪儿。我们痛苦，因为我们无法知道自己做得好不好：我们把论文读给百无聊赖的导师，他们打着哈欠，而同学们则坐立不安。我们痛苦，因为在从被逼学习中解放出来后，我们寻找自己的学习目标，却一个也没找到。（我认为我的痛苦还有另外一个原因，即我和男友分手了，不过这是另外一回事了。）

然后我们长大了。我们不再真正期待意义和标准，或至少是用很少量的这两者凑合着。我们发现，当我们拿到第一份办公室工作时，有很多话题可谈，首先，你有了报酬。这不仅本身是一件好事，而且让工作有了一个目标，一个不可以嗤之以鼻的目标。

除此之外，寻找更为深刻的意义是一件危险的事。一个人越是努力地寻找工作的意义，就越是找不到。撰写专栏有什么意义吗？没有，当然没有。但是如果人们相当喜欢读的话，我也就相当喜欢写，这个原因似乎就足够了。

至于默默无闻，拿到报酬这个简单的事实就证明，真的有人在乎你在这里。如果他们不在乎，就不会付钱让你来上班。至于不知道你干的如何，这在大多数办公室中都不是一个问题。由于没完没了的评估，人们被过多地告知自己做得如何，而不是太少。

我个人认为，让工作者痛苦的三样东西更为简单，那就是工作、人和大环境。工作如果太多、太少、太无聊、太难或太容易都会带来痛苦。

人则会以很多方式出现问题：懒惰的、怀有恶意的、咄咄逼人的、乏味的，以及情绪过于低落而让人高兴不起来的。环境的问题可能在于让人感觉徒劳无功、不健康或是太勾心斗角等等。

伦乔尼猜认为，管理者不善于让员工感觉良好的一个原因，是他们忘了开始工作时是什么样子。

我认为还有一个更好的原因。管理层是本质上最为痛苦的工作之一。管理者难以让下属的生活变得更好是因为他们自己太痛苦了。

管理层的本质就是让人们去做自己不愿意做的事情。所以改善下属的生活即使不是完全不可能，也是相当困难的。管理层还要早出晚归。管理者的工作是永远做不完的。一件事接着另一件再接着又一件。成为管理者意味着不在意被人讨厌。它意味着成为孤家寡人，在公司里没有可以倾诉的对象。

伦乔尼只有在最为宽泛的论题上是正确的：痛苦的答案可能就是更好的管理。这么说是很明显的。难处在于如何让管理者更好地管理。如果我知道答案，就不在这里写这种专栏了。我会到外面去放手大干，使这个世界成为一个让办公室工作者开心的世界。

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