Welcome to Tony Richards Messages

23 Discipline of Employees

Welcome to this week’s message on leadership, self-confidence, and how to feel good about yourself everyday as you interact with people, in safety and comfort, at home and work.

Last week’s message was all about Critical Step 5 Application and how to best utilise it.
If you wish to be reminded of that message, it is also available back on the message page.

This week’s message is a Special Interest Item based on an often-asked question about a particular business situation. The question is often asked about how to discipline employees and leave them not feeling disgruntled or angry at the same time.

How you administer discipline can vary, based on the size of the business you are part of and how familiar you have become with your employees. As an example, if you know your employee well you should have discovered why they work at your business and what motivates them to turn up each day.

If you understand their 'currency' you have a tool that you can use to your advantage with whatever you see as the failing you want to correct. However if the business is large you may have never met the employee you are expected to discipline. Therefore the options provided here are, as with many of my messages, more generic in nature, although I would be happy to assist with any specific problems you wish to discuss privately.

You usually choose to discipline an employee because you want them to correct some behaviour that YOU or your company consider was not right. That emphasise on YOUR perceptions is because it is not uncommon to get a surprised response from the employee that you choose to discipline. They may believe they have done nothing wrong.

The best way to solve a corrective action of an employee involves a six step process:

1. Maintain the self-esteem of the person whose behaviour you want corrected.
2. Accept your own responsibility for whatever has gone wrong.
3. Explain the situation that requires correction.
4. Ask for assistance in finding solutions to correct the situation.
5. Get a commitment for the solutions agreed on in step 4 and
6. Set a follow up date for a review of the agreed solutions.

The first message to receive is that you must maintain the self-esteem of the person you're disciplining. Come up with a positive about that person's work or abilities to begin the discussion. It could be as simple as, “We decided originally to employ you because we believed we saw you had a great ability to...”

Whatever you start with must not make the employee defensive, or they will be listening with the intent of responding, rather than listening to you with the intent of understanding your issues. Watch out for that during your discussion. Next step is to accept your or your company’s role for the responsibility of what went wrong. You need to focus on the issue, not the employee.

For example it may be appropriate to say, “During induction (or training) we may not have put enough emphasise on the importance of making sure that you...and we have to accept responsibility for not pointing that out” This way the employee does not feel as uncomfortable and may be more inclined to listen to what you need to get across.

The third step is to explain the situation that you want to change, or prevent from happening again and genuinely listen to the explanation, apology or defensive statement from the employee. Remember they may not even believe they have made a mistake. As part of that third step you must also listen carefully and respond with empathy to their explanation.

Unless this is a dismissal (and the steps still apply if it is), you want to maintain the motivation and good work you expect from every employee. Even an employee being dismissed has a need to accept the issues are about their actions. You don't need to destroy their self-esteem.

During this third step don't be afraid to back track as required to once again remind the employee of their good points so they are less likely to become defensive. You must avoid the temptation to criticize your employee; because once you do that the emphasis is no longer on the issue you need to deal with. The issue then becomes a discussion about their personality.
Your role must always be to maintain focus on the issue you want corrected.

The fourth step is to ask for assistance to come up with the actions that are required to correct whatever you wanted changed or prevented. This step allows you to gain consensus for the next step. The question may be something like, “I do need your assistance to solve this matter, so what solutions, or suggestions, can you come up with that will assist us to solve this?”

Having completed the fourth step you are now well placed to exercise the fifth step which is to ask for a commitment in the agreed procedure that you have decided together will solve the issue. This is a straight forward question such as, “So, can I now get a commitment from you to follow the process (or steps) we have agreed on to fix this?”

If you have utilised the fourth step correctly you will always get a “yes” response to this question. This leads to the sixth, and last, step which is to set a follow up date to satisfy both of you that the process for correction is appropriate and working. This is as simple as, “Can we meet up again next week at... so we can both be satisfied that this solution will work?”

Please take the opportunity this week to think about the variations that you can, or need to use, so that all of those steps can be utilised to your advantage. I would love to hear of those variations as they would assist me and all my readers with any of their discipline problems.

Please email me on any items of special interest you may have. If I don’t have the answer to any queries you raise myself, I would be certain that the people who email me on their special interest subjects would have. And if no one else had already provided an answer, which was lost in my poor memory, I would be happy to research the query and find the answer.

Your stories – even short comments – are of great value to inspire others, and I would like to take the opportunity to include your stories, or comments, in upcoming episodes of ‘Special Interest Items’. They will be included as they fit into the theme of the message for that week.

Do you know anyone you can help with leadership issues, or just feeling good about themselves? Forward this message to friends and work colleagues; print it out and place it on notice boards, and give copies to those without computer access. Printing out, and compiling each weekly message in a folder, is a good way to build a total knowledge of self-confidence and leadership. It will provide certainty in dealing with every aspect of your life.

Next week’s message is an explanation of Stage 3 of ‘The Cycle of Confidence and Leadership’ that you were born with.

It will be followed in coming weeks by messages on the Five Critical Steps to Confidence and Leadership, and, in turn, by another Special Messages in response to often asked questions.

Until then, please continue to see yourself as a unique and remarkable person, who deserves to feel good about yourself every day.

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