No one likes to hurt someone else’s feelings, but that doesn’t justify providing feedback that’s so fluffy you never actually state the main point.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not asking you to be ruthless. Use positives, but don’t smother the message with them. The challenge is to make sure the constructive part of your feedback is clear, or else there’s no sense giving feedback!
 

I recently heard a client say, ” I have never seen an employee stick around after having been through a performance improvement process.”

The challenge in many organizations is that they view discipline the wrong way. The process is filled with warnings, threats, and ultimatums, and as a result good people leave bad managers.

On the other hand, when discipline is done correctly, it can be a process that helps an employee and team be successful.

In Part 1 of this blog series, I wrote about the underlying assumptions that makeup the positive discipline process. Part 2 was focused on overcoming some of the common and costly mistakes leaders make that derail behavioral change. Part 3 was about the scaling levels of the Discipline Continuum. Today's post is focused on having the actual discipline conversation.

In Part 1 of this blog series, I wrote about the underlying assumptions that makeup the positive discipline process. Part 2 was focused on overcoming some of the common and costly mistakes leaders make that derail behavioral change.

Today's post is focused on what I call the Discipline Continuum.

In part 1 of this series, I presented some assumptions about how the positive discipline process should work. With this new set of assumptions, you'll replace your out-dated, old-school policies of "threats," "warnings," and "ultimatims" that create compliance instead of commitment.

I recently heard a client say, " I have never seen an employee stick around after having been through a performance improvement process."

The challenge in many organizations is that they view discipline the wrong way. The process is filled with warnings, threats, and ultimatums, and as a result good people leave bad managers.

On the other hand, when discipline is done correctly, it can be a process that helps an employee and team be successful.

It's really about building commitment instead of compliance.

One of the critical communication breakdowns I see teams make is not providing others with feedback.

For some reason, this is one of the hardest things for people to do in the work place. I am not entirely sure why, except to say that people either don't know how to provide feedback to others, it can be very uncomfortable, or both.

Team members want feedback - both positive and constructive. But it has to be delivered in a timely manner and in a way that is specific enough so that people understand the behaviors that need to be changed.

I have spoken a lot in recent blog posts about courage and how it is such an important leadership characteristic. But courage is also an important team member characteristic.

Earl Nightengale once said that, "The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice...it's conformity."