When it comes to dissuading negative behaviors, penalties (losing something you already have) are better than punishments (requiring people to do something they don’t want to). This works because penalties remind people what the standards and rules are and why they can’t be violated.
Nonetheless, there are times when people must be punished because no pre-established penalty exists or the situation calls for teaching people an important lesson.
Good leaders rely on punishments only when the infraction is a one-off, unusual, or totally unexpected. It goes without saying that punishments must be fair, reasonable, and proportional to the infraction involved. When punishments don’t match the bad behavior in magnitude, those on the receiving end perceive an injustice and react accordingly. They will often become sour, resistant, and negative as a result of a punishment they deem is more about retribution than about teaching discipline.
Creating an appropriate punishment that is equivalent to the transgression is never easy. Nor is deciding the duration or intensity of the punishment. As any good parent can tell you, designing punishments is a creative act that requires a lot of thought and consideration.
The wrong punishment can do more harm than the lesson it carries. Punishments must teach people they were wrong and that actions have consequences without doing long-term harm to trust in the relationship.
Far too often, leaders, coaches, and parents borrow punishments from what they have learned others do or from their own experience when they have been punished. While occasionally these punishments might have been spot-on, they too often fail to create the teaching moment leaders hope for.
As a good rule of thumb, the best leaders consider one important quality as they design punishments they deem necessary. They insist that the punishment must make the person more skillful or add value to their pre-existing talents. This is an important twist that defies conventional practice. Punishments that make people better both teach a lesson and offer a long-term reward.
Consider the difference between punishing a student who has grossly misbehaved by requiring a public apology, running laps around the track, or writing an essay regarding their breach of common etiquette.
While the first two punishments are common and make the point, they don’t enhance the talents of the student. By asking the transgressor to compose an essay, the student improves their writing and thinking skills, while also learning that actions have consequences.
The same is true in the workplace. Rather than requiring people to engage in onerous acts to teach them a lesson (giving them cleanup duty or demanding that they summarize the meeting notes for the entire team), consider having them coach, tutor, or teach others after work, explore an important topic on their own time and report about it, or attend a training session connected to their infraction.
Punishments that make people more skillful are superior to those that don’t. The best leaders do their best to teach others a lesson and make them better in the process. Sounds like leadership in action — because it is.
A Daily Dispatch from the Front Lines of Leadership.
