By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to more fully engage your staff. Reading time: 2:56

Singing the Monday Morning Blues. We’ve all been there. At least Ogden Nash unleashed his sense of poetic injustice when the comic poet and a Broadway lyricist observed:

“Monday
is the day
when life becomes
grotesque again
because you have to
face your
desk again.”

The leader read that ditty in jest as if it were a Dilbert redux at one of his Monday morning staff meetings.

Everyone laughed. Then the leader paused and pensively challenged his staff:

What could they do
as leaders to convert
Mondays
from the grotesque
to something
out of burlesque?

Burlesque? Well at least work should fun, entertaining and even amusing if not challenging and rewarding.

Yet job satisfaction surveys consistently show most employees are disengaged, unsatisfied, unfulfilled in the 9-to-5 world.

So unfulfilled that job dissatisfaction today has become the prime predictor of heart attacks—more so than smoking, more so than high cholesterol and more so than a lack of exercise.

But wait. It gets worse: Monday morning is quite literally a killer. More people die on Monday mornings between 8 and 9 than any other time of the week. Continue reading “Brightening the Monday Morning Blues” →