Discipline. What is it?
Certainly it’s something we’re all chasing. We want to be more disciplined in our workouts, or our range time, or maybe we are trying to be more disciplined with our meditation or mindfulness.
But when you think about it in the context of your job, I bet the word “discipline” kind of makes your skin crawl.
Internal Affairs, Write Ups, Counseling Sessions – those are just some of the things we think about when it comes to discipline at work.
And unfortunately, for many of us, we’ve worked for some people who don’t know how to lead unless it’s all about the mistakes.
How many of you have had a salty old sergeant who’s only two modes of communication were screaming at you or shutting you out?
If you’re a leader in your organization, it’s absolutely crucial that you learn how to integrate POSITIVE discipline into your communications with your staff.
So what is positive discipline?
Well if negative discipline is intended to change behavior through the threat of some sort of punishment, positive discipline is really just the opposite.
With positive discipline, you’re trying to reinforce the good behavior you’re seeing.
Positive discipline encourages individuals to behave in a consistent and constructive manner. Discipline as a whole, is really not a punishment, but rather a system of guidelines and expectations that help create an environment where organizational goals are achieved.
Leaders must be able to set boundaries, provide structure, and enforce consequences and affirm positive actions in order to achieve organizational objectives.
Positive discipline focuses on creating an environment in which employees feel appreciated and motivated to do their best work. It can be used to reward good behavior and discourage bad behavior, providing context for employees as they make decisions about how to behave.
Maybe you’ve heard the saying that you get more bees with honey than vinegar, and it’s as true with humans as it is with bees. When you learn that discipline is really a spectrum, and not just something done to address bad behavior but also something that can be done to reinforce good behavior, then you develop a leadership superpower.
So, to get you started on your superpower journey, here are 9 ways to use positive discipline as a leader to get results from your people.
- Document Good Work
To effectively give feedback and help you employees grow, leaders need to document good work. This helps employees understand the expectations that have been set and allows them to see their progress over time. You should also provide feedback in a timely manner.
If you’re in a formal leadership position, you probably have to write annual employee performance reviews.
Here’s my general rule, and I think its an important one to share: don’t wait until their annual review to recognize their good work. Most agencies have some system for supervisors to maintain a log or folder of the work an employee has done throughout the year.
Too often, those files are only stuffed full of honest mistakes or bad decisions. You should aim to include at least as much positive stuff in an employee’s file as the bad stuff.
I understand that for some employees – the organizational terrorists out there – this might be difficult. Nonetheless, I’ve seen some very toxic people change and become high performers when paired with the right boss who recognized their efforts.
- Acknowledge Effort
I was recently having a conversation with a sergeant from a nearby agency who was frustrated in dealing with the new generation of officers coming onto the job.
This sergeant is about ready to retire and is very set in their ways and he admitted that he has a hard time praising his employees. “I get thanked every two weeks when the check hits my bank account,” he said.
Ugh. Does that sound like the makings of a motivated and inspiring leader? Now, here’s the thing. This sergeant is a fantastic cop, still very active and nowhere near retired on duty as you might expect. It’s not that they are disinterested in their people, they’re just not comfortable giving out praise.
But it’s not a surprise as the older generations were groomed on “suck it up” and other toxic mentalities.
When leaders acknowledge the effort their team is putting in, it gives them some powerful motivation. Simply being recognized for the effort is often all people want.
The key to your people is really not a secret – they want to know that their work means something. That the time away from family and friends is for a cause that they are a part of.
Policing is in a serious state of decay at the moment, you might have noticed, and many of your people are probably shuffling around like an extra on Walking Dead. Bring them back to life by acknowledging effort. Here are some simple ideas:
- Thank someone for a job well done. This simple gesture goes a long way in building trust and morale among team members.
- Listen attentively when others speak. When leaders are attentive and listen carefully, they build trust and rapport with their team members.
- Praise specific actions or behaviors instead of general comments or critiques. Praising specific actions rather than making general comments shows that you value the individual work done by your team members, rather than just the whole ensemble and that you’re paying attention to them.
- Praise efforts even if they don’t meet expectations. This is extra important when it comes to new cops. Leaders should continue to praise efforts even if they don’t meet initial expectations; this builds respect for individual work ethic and it builds the confidence in your people. A dirty secret in policing is that we all make mistakes, but most of us work as if mistakes are indicators of poor character, bad training, or ill-intent. If the performance didn’t quite stand up, but the officer was making an honest effort, make sure to recognize that.
3. Say “Thank You” Often
This one is really not that complicated, and perhaps the easiest one to implement. Say “thank you” and do it often. Thank them for holding over, covering an overtime shift, doing extra work on a case, handling the stinky dead-guy, running the possessed car to the garage – whatever it is, just say thank you.
- Praise in Public, Critique in Private
Praising someone in public can show that you respect them and appreciate their work, and it makes them feel appreciated too!
When a boss openly applauds good work, it has the added benefit of reinforcing for everyone else within earshot that that is the kind of behavior you want to see more of.
Your people naturally want to please you, and praising them openly is one of the fastest ways to get buy-in towards your goals.
But don’t ever intentionally critique an employee in front of others. Critiquing someone in private allows you to give constructive feedback without embarrassing them or making them feel like they are incapable of performing their job.
Having a private conversation allows you to provide accurate and constructive feedback without putting the person on the spot, which can help them improve their performance and keeps them from getting defensive.
Plus, it gives you time to collect yourself and your thoughts to maintain control of the conversation and your own emotions.
- Pay Their Psychological Salary
In this job, we have two salaries. We have our financial salary and our psychological salary.
Our financial salary is what appears in our bank account every two weeks. It’s the payment for our work. As cops, we’re literally trading time for money, and that is our salary – along with our medical benefits and pension.
Your financial salary is set. There aren’t going to be any surprises and aside from working overtime, you know exactly what you’re going to get.
I have some partners who have it down to the calendar day they have to work ten years from now in order to maximize their benefits. They are focused on the financial salary.
The other salary is far more powerful and its the one that keeps most of us in this job. Its the psychological salary.
The psychological salary is what gets us up every morning excited to come to work. It’s the belief that what we’re doing matters – and it does matter!
In my 17 years as a cop, I have never once had to wonder if I did anything good for the world during my shift. I’ve always been able to point to something in the day where I helped someone, got a bad guy off the street, or contributed in some way to my community.
Most of us have lost the ability to see the good things we do every day but fight to keep it front of your mind.
Now here’s the great news. The psychological salary of your employees comes at no cost to you, other than a little effort.
Learn your people and learn what motivates them to come to work every day. It could be dope, traffic, gang enforcement, mentoring youth – whatever it is – find it, tap into it and find ways to help them engage in that work.
- Make Your Employees Your Clients
Like it or not, as a leader, you are in the customer service business, only your customers aren’t just the public but even more important than them, your employees are your clients.
If you’re a supervisor, your leadership is far more impactful when you focus on creating positive attitudes and beliefs in your subordinates.
Think about it. There’s only one of you but you might supervise 5, 10, 15 or even more people. If you create a positive attitude in those people, them imagine the good work they go out and do.
As a supervisor, you might only have a few public contacts a day but when you spread the customer service mindset to your teams, you’ve just amplified the impact you’re able to have.
So, how can you best service your client/employees?
- Be clear about your expectations and set boundaries. Don’t make them guess about what you want.
- Be consistent with your standards.
- Accept feedback and input.
- Make sure that your employees understand the mission.
- Demonstrate empathy for your employee’s situation. Everyone is unique.
- Treat Honest Mistakes as Training Opportunities
It’s been 35 years since Robo-Cop came out in theaters and here we are still all running around as human cops like a bunch of suckers.
Well, I don’t think that’s going to change soon so we better get used to the idea that cops are human and that humans make mistakes. Like, a lot of them…and often. Multiple times a day even.
It can be infuriating! I get it.
There’s probably nothing more stressful for a supervisor mitigating and fixing the mistakes of subordinates.
But that’s where you have the opportunity to go from not just being a supervisor to being a LEADER as well.
You will never engender more loyalty or create more of a connection with your employees than when you are able to identify the difference between a mistake made out of malice and a mistake made out of an honest misunderstanding of tactics, policy, procedures or even common sense.
When an employee screws up – and trust me, it’s only a matter of time – try to identify how the agency might have failed the employee or contributed to this problem.
Now, the most important part, and the hardest part, is to drop your own ego and evaluate where you as the leader might have contributed to the mistake. There’s a good chance you played a part in it somehow.
Most honest mistakes deserve to be treated as a training opportunity, as a way to improve for the future and evaluate how you and the agency could do a better job of instilling the standards in your employees.
There’s a very good chance that part of that training opportunity includes a chance for you to get better as well.
Now, here’s the real secret about this rule. When you treat honest mistakes as training opportunities, you develop employees who aren’t afraid of you and aren’t afraid to bring issues to you early rather than try to cover them up and cover their ass. This alone solves so many problems for supervisors.
- Put Them In For Every Award or Recognition They’re Eligible For.
It’s really simple. Make the effort and make sure they get recognized. There are people in every agency walking around with chest decorations that make them look like a Central American dictator because their supervisors took the time to make sure they got recognized while others with equally miraculous and heroic deeds will go a whole career with formal recognition because they had lazy supervisors – even though they still did amazing things. You can’t be lazy when it comes to advocating for your people.
- Make Sure Your Supervisors Know About Their Good Work.
Very similar to number 8 above but it doesn’t have to be just about the formal awards and recognitions. Make sure your supervisors are routinely updated on the good work that your people are doing.
Whenever possible, give the praise in front of the employee. Simple comments letting your bosses know you’re proud of your team accomplish a few objectives.
First, it demonstrates the pride you have in your team – and you should be proud of them, if you’re not, that’s your fault.
Second, it lets people know you want to share credit. No one likes a ball hog – especially when it comes to a supervisor.
Third, when you shine the spotlight on others and lift them up, they will repay the favor ten-fold at some point in the future.
To Wrap Up
If you’re thinking that these tactics sound premeditated and calculated…well, you’re right! Treating people well and using positive discipline takes attention and intention in how we interact with others. In fact, all facets of leadership require a lot of premediated and calculated effort.
If you think you’re going to be a great leader just because of your stellar personality, well, good luck with that. It doesn’t work like that.
Leadership at any level requires you to be very aware of how you are interacting with others, and how your behavior has intended and unintended consequences.
Leading others is too important to be left to chance, and so, yeah, these ideas here are meant to create a very specific response in your people.
But trust me, it’s far better than any alternative of just winging it when you come to work. That’s how 99% of the supervisors out there do it. That doesn’t make a leader. Intentional effort is what makes the leader.