Punishment & Prevention

the big change:

During the time when command and control flourished, the median tenure of an employee in North America was 13 years. Today it’s less than 2. By the end of this year, 36% of the workforce will be freelancers, with this subset of the market essentially cutting leaders out of the equation altogether.

Employee mobility is at an all-time high and still climbing. Technology has decoupled work from location. People are not only free to do work where they choose, they have never been more free to do work how they choose.

I spoke in a previous tip of the week about autonomy, and how it is the largest psychological factor in both job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Autonomy is the feeling of operating from choice. Fail to provide your people with the feeling of choice inside your organization, they will try and find it elsewhere. Talent is no longer anchored to a company the way it was in the height of the command and control era. 

It’s also something you should want to do. Even before the pandemic, 80% of leaders felt their business model was at risk of being disrupted, and 96% of leaders felt that the long term success of their company was dependent upon their ability to innovate. 

Innovation requires free-thinking and collaboration, two things the brain simply cannot do when it is gripped with fear. Command and control breeds fear, killing teams' ability to innovate. 

The point is, if you want to keep your people, and you want the people you keep to be able to contribute to the future of your business, you need to fully embrace a new mindset.

The winners and the losers:

Throughout history, seismic shifts, such as the one described above, produce winners and losers. The winners are those who notice the shift and make the necessary changes. The losers are the ones who stubbornly cling to the status quo.

In this case, the status quo is something social psychology refers to as dominance while the necessary change is something referred to as prestige.

Within social psychology, ‘rank’ is a measure of social standing and influence. The more of it you have, the more influence over others you will receive. Rank is acquired in social groups through one of two methods; dominance or prestige.

Dominance is the use of force and intimidation to gain control, while prestige is the sharing of know-how and expertise to gain respect. Prestige techniques have been around as long as dominance techniques have. Every tribe has members that are the source of wisdom and knowledge. 

The shift that’s needed is not to something new, but rather to something that has been allowed to go dormant during the era of dominance-oriented leadership. You need to build prestige, not just in how others see you, but in how they see themselves. 

And that only happens if you are authentically committed to Growth.

the promised land:

As you have heard from me countless times before, Growth is a product of high levels of Safety mixed with low levels of Comfort.

Without discomfort, there is no catalyst for Growth, often resulting in Atrophy. Without Safety, people fear what will happen to them, often leading to Avoidance. 

Accidents happen when leaders get confused between these two concepts and increase Comfort instead of Safety when their people are under strain. This ranges from stepping in to do work for them to dialling back expectations to make them feel less stressed. All this does is fail to prepare someone for even larger challenges in the future, resulting in the aforementioned Accidents.

The simplicity of this framework makes it easy to understand. It’s that same simplicity that makes it easy to misunderstand. I still see far too many leaders using punishment and justifying it as a means of making their people uncomfortable. I see another subset of leaders still struggling to make their people uncomfortable, and passing that off as maintaining safety. 

Here I hope to clear up the confusion once and for all by connecting Safety and Comfort to two more general concepts: Punishment and Prevention.

Understanding punishment:

Safety is the difference between the belief I will learn from my mistakes, versus the belief I will be punished for my mistakes.

If your people fear their mistakes will be used against them, they aren’t going to get better at making fewer of them, they’re just going to get better at hiding them from you.

You have made them feel both Unsafe and Uncomfortable. They can’t fix Safety (how you react to them), but they can fix Comfort (hiding the mistake, thus taking away your opportunity to react). You can see where this is very much an Accident waiting to happen.

Growth requires Safety and Safety requires the removal of Punishment.

Understanding Prevention

Once you have created an environment where people will actually make you aware of their mistakes, you need to put them in a position to make more of them.

Comfort is the difference between preventing opportunities for mistakes versus promoting opportunities for mistakes.

Some of you are struggling to allow your people to make mistakes because you think it makes you look like a poor leader. Some of you are struggling because it feels like you are setting your people up to fail. In short, the presence of mistakes is uncomfortable to most leaders. Preventing opportunities for them to occur increases Comfort, eliminating Growth as an outcome.

You must be willing to become uncomfortable by allowing more mistakes to happen, in order for Growth to be possible.

I'd be remiss however if I failed to mention the most common reason leaders give me whether they are trying to rationalize punishing their people, or justify eliminating mistakes before they have a chance to happen.

"It's my job to protect the business."

First, let me say that I do agree with this. It's what you are protecting your business from that needs a reframing.

You should be playing the long game, meaning you are protecting the business from future uncertainty. You do that by building up your team to face bigger and bigger challenges, aka you Grow them.

If you are handing out punishment, and limiting people's exposure to tasks in order to prevent mistakes, you are essentially trying to protect the business from your people. If you need to do this, you have the wrong people. If you have the wrong people, get rid of them. Today.

If however you know you have the right people, yet you still feel the need to punish and prevent, you may be the one in need of some safe-yet-uncomfortable Growth.

Beware your blindspots:

When you punish someone, the gift you receive in return is immediate feedback. They react. And in that reaction, you gain just a tiny bit of control that makes your brain feel better about the world around you.

Think about situations when you feel the urge to punish. A rule has been violated or broken. This makes you feel as though chaos is on the doorstep. After all if this rule continues to be broken, how can you be sure of anything?

Well, your brain can’t handle that uncertainty. If you happen to be a Red or a Blue, which statistically most leaders are either primarily or secondarily, your brain really can’t handle it.

So, you punish, and in that punishment you regain a small measure of the control your brain feels as though it’s losing.

Well let’s look back at the Growth Grid. The violation of the rule makes you uncomfortable as you now feel things are suddenly unstable. The fact that it ‘happened on your watch’ also stirs up feelings that you may be the one judged for the rule being violated, making you also feel unsafe.

When you punish, you restore a measure of control, and therefore comfort. The problem is, you haven’t addressed the safety, for you or for your people. You have just primed the situation for future Accidents to happen.

Remember the story of my son I used as a primer for this week's post. He ensured his teammate would never wear cleats in the gym again, yet increased the odds the kid will make a far more meaningful error in a future game.

For those of you following along closely you no doubt see that when you punish, you will only ever inspire Accidents or Avoidance.

This means Punishment by its very nature is a Mistake.

Well, if using punishment is a mistake, then I, and any other person you are gaining leadership advice from, needs to make sure you learn from that mistake and that you are not punished for it.

Claiming you’re a ‘bad leader’ if you use punishment doesn’t help you. Educating you on why you feel compelled to use it does.

Which is why I encourage you to book a coaching call. With luck this post has shifted your perspective on Punishment and Prevention, but that won't be enough to fully educate you.

So, the next time you get the urge to punish, call me instead. The next time you feel compelled to step in and prevent a mistake instead of considering the educational benefit of allowing it to happen, call me instead.

With enough reps, your Growth as a leader, as well as that of your team, will be all but assured.

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