Skip to content People don’t leave hard jobs. They leave miserable ones.
Patrick Lencioni’s The Truth About Employee Engagement points to three quiet forces behind disengagement: feeling unseen, believing your work doesn’t matter, and not knowing if you’re succeeding.
These same forces still surface in engagement surveys today. They rarely appear as “anonymity,” “irrelevance,” or “ immeasurability.” Instead, they sound like:
“My manager doesn’t really know me.”
“I don’t see how my work makes a difference.”
“I never know if I’m doing a good job.”
When these feelings build, people start questioning the purpose of their role and may eventually walk out.
Everyday Moves
Learn one new thing about each person on your team this week, something that helps you see them as more than their role.
Connect each person’s work to a real outcome, customer, or teammate it impacts.
Help your people define what progress looks like together by asking, “How will you know you’ve had a great week?”
The people–manager relationship determines whether work feels meaningful or mechanical. Managers who make people feel known, needed, and capable of measuring progress create an experience that turns motivation into momentum.
But accountability doesn’t stop with the manager. Senior managers shape the systems that either support or strain those relationships. When organizations prioritize developing managers, they strengthen the single greatest lever of engagement.
Which of these three, being known, needed, or clear on impact, deserves the most attention where you work?
