Disciplinary Leadership

I started working in paper routes in the 80's and have had dozens of employers since then, in addition to getting a bachelor's degree in Human Services and a Master's Degree in Management. The least competent leadership style I have ever encountered is where Human Resources requirements for firing personnel are mistaken for being a leadership strategy. I call this "Disciplinary Leadership."

According to the theory called French and Raven's Power Bases, "coercive power" is the least effective type of power to wield. Threatening to fire someone is clearly coercive power:

So IF someone understands and is competent at using bases of power, they will avoid using coercive power when possible. In the case of today's workplaces, this Disciplinary Leadership style takes the form of jumping straight to the company policy on how many verbal or written warnings are required to terminate an employee. A typical policy would be:

1. Informal verbal warning - without documenting anything, if an employee needs correction, a supervisor should ask the employee to correct what they are doing.
2. Formal verbal warning - when the informal verbal warning has not worked, speak to the wayward employee and ask them again, and this time document in their employee file that you have been talking to them about this issue.
3. Written warning - after the formal verbal warning has not worked, write up the employee's sin in a document that lets the employee know they will be terminated if the sin continues, and put that document in the employee's employee file.
4. Termination - after the written warning has failed, fire the employee if the unwanted performance continues.

But these policies are for the express purpose of meeting government regulations and avoiding lawsuits. These policies are NOT a leadership system or adult education method promoted by any competent or qualified experts! Think about it: you need the employee to do a certain job, right? So why then are you going to take steps to FIRE them? That is the very worst route you can take in order to get them to do the job you hired them to do in the first place! Whenever this disciplinary leadership style is used as one of the main ways to train or motivate employees at an organization, that organization is having a leadership crisis. I have seen it before.

I was in a supervisory position over more than a dozen employees, with a manager who had much less training in leadership than I did ruling over me. My team did our job and did our job well, as I used a dialogue-based strategy to negotiate workloads, interpersonal disputes and schedules. My manager had a military background and believed strongly in a more disciplinary approach. Over a year later when I was discussing with an employee a serious problem that she needed to correct, my manager barged in with this angry Disciplinary Leadership "you will get a write up!" nonsense.

His Disciplinary Leadership, which I had resisted for months, backfired. Within six months I was no longer working there. About a year later he was no longer working there. A few years after that, the company was put out of business by a competitor and bought out. What was going on at this doomed business was that the business owner had delegated literally all of his leadership responsibilities to the HR department, who was led by an HR person with a 1 year HR certification, and no other formal training in leadership.

WHY this happens is simple. Instead of using a democratic process for determining who a team WANTS to have as a leader, we tend to instead depend on the Peter Principle for deciding who should lead a team. Without formal leadership training, all we have to go with is life experience, personal leadership talent, and the company policies around how many warnings are required in order to fire someone: