The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want, Second Edition

8. Job Enablement

“Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.”

—Peter F. Drucker

We discussed in the previous chapter the purpose of work (doing something that matters), and in this chapter we focus on the business practices that enable workers to actually perform on their jobs and do so at a high level.

At the end of a day’s work, workers want to feel that something was accomplished by virtue of their efforts. A factory employee becomes disheartened when he produces little during the day because of time spent struggling with faulty equipment and waiting for the maintenance person to arrive. An executive feels equally frustrated when she spends her day in endless departmental meetings with ...