Tips for Discipline and Performance Success

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How Are Discipline and Performance Related at the Workplace?

There is an always interesting and fascinating correlation between discipline and performance in the workplace, on athletic teams, in the military, and in school situations. The best managers, coaches, officers, and teachers seem to be expert at understanding and controlling this delicate balance.

The situations, conditions, and goals are always the same. The manager must attempt to balance a high level of discipline and decorum while also creating an atmosphere of high performance. This requirement is very difficult and astoundingly delicate to fulfill. Unless your team is dedicated to high level self-discipline – a rare commodity – managers must exercise disciplinary actions at regular intervals.

While discipline is necessary in many occasions, managers must dispense discipline carefully to avoid the employees involved from “giving up” on an attitude of high performance. Sadly, the imposition of discipline often results in reduced performance of individuals, teams, departments, and, sometimes, companies. Obviously, management always wants to avoid this result, yet it often occurs because of the “method” of discipline used.

In extreme cases, the goal of achieving a high discipline level directly results in a disastrously low performance level. While few companies would want to choose between these two, depending on their situations or quality of employees or management, this choice must be made. Regardless of the choice, the end result is seldom satisfactory to either staff or management.

Tips to Manage Discipline and Performance Successfully

Successfully managing this apparent conflict of discipline and high performance is a combination of manager and employee personalities, workplace situations and pressures, and effective management techniques and strategies. Here are a few tips to manage this volatile combination of necessity for discipline and high performance.

• Learn how to use progressive discipline effectively. Only management newbies might believe that classic, “in your face” discipline will result in higher performance. Using progressive discipline, however, may change a problem employee into a high performer. Progressive discipline involves assisting – not punishing – an employee to understand why his/her performance or actions are unacceptable in the workplace. You then extend this assistance to helping the employee to overcome the behavior that is causing disruption and lower performance. Even in worst case situations, this policy should provide the company with proper documentation and evidence of their support to try to help the employee become a productive staff member should they need to terminate the person’s employment. In many cases, this discipline strategy achieves its intended result: Developing a high-performing employee.
  
  
• Initial reprimands and discipline should be oral and private. Resisting the temptation to reduce early discipline activities to writing gives the problem employee the opportunity to correct unacceptable behavior without suffering any permanent damage to his/her career. Since the overwhelming majority of employees are not long-term problem cases, using pure oral, low key reprimands delivered privately (to avoid public embarrassment) gives this majority of people the opportunity to adjust their behavior and become productive members of your team without the necessity of formal entries of negatives to their personnel file.
  
  
• Privately discuss the employee’s discipline issues to learn if there are other, outside, or personal issues that are causing the behavioral problems. As a manager, you spend approximately one-half of your waking days with your employees and yet, you often know little about their personal and outside lives. Many times, their behavior – particularly when it’s inappropriate – is a mystery to you. Outside the workplace pressures, including spouses, children, finances, family member illness or turbulence, or education issues, may prey upon their psyche to a level that leads to discipline issues at work. Having a private personal discussion with your employee to give him/her the opportunity to verbalize these issues may give both you and him/her the opportunity to overcome the negatives, at least, at the workplace.
  
  

There is no silver bullet to solve the discipline versus performance dilemma. Effective managers must develop their own style and "feel" for situations, few of which will be duplicates of others. As always, the goal is to generate high performance from all team members. Using one or all of these tips should help create a bridge to span the discipline/performance gap. Managers, however, must accept the fact that they cannot mandate, demand, or coerce employees to become model team members. You can only give your troubled employees the opportunity to eliminate discipline problems and become high performers. If you commit to do this, you will have achieved the delicate balance between discipline and performance. If an employee chooses not to take advantage of the opportunity you give them, you need feel no guilt or inadequacy as a good manager. You can take pride in the fact that you did your best.