The final job misery factor, according to Patrick Lencioni (see part 1 and part 2), is immeasurement. Team members need to gauge their progress and level of contribution for themselves. Question/discovery No. 1 in the book First, Break All the Rules, by Marcus Buckingham, is: Do I know what is expected of me at work? This one is somewhat counterintuitive. It seems like accountability has become a bad/evil word. But the truth is, people want to be held accountable.

Another one of our all-time favorite books is Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?, written by Louis Gerstner. It is the story of how he and his team saved IBM in the early 1990s. In his concluding comments, Gerstner speaks about measurement. He says, “People do what you inspect, not what you expect.”

Do you measure what is important to your business success? Do all of your team members have clear goals? We can’t tell you how many times we’ve heard stories about team members who were demotivated because they did not receive any specific — or even any fuzzy — goals. They did their best, only to be criticized by their supervisor, who would say, “That’s not what I want or what we need.”

The cool thing about attacking these three traits — anonymity, irrelevance and immeasurement — is that they are not rocket science or proprietary, and they do not cost any extra money. As a well-known advertisement proclaims, “Just Do It!”