Discipline Without Punishment

The Proven Strategy That Turns Problem Employees into Superior Performers

By: Dick Grote

Narrated by: Steven Roy Grimsley

The original edition of Discipline Without Punishment introduced a positive approach for getting problem employees to meet - and often even exceed - job requirements. The book still delivers on that promise, and in this revised edition, Dick Grote provides new insights, along with sample dialogues, memos, and worksheets. Grote's revolutionary method helps listeners:

• Avoid confrontational, anger-provoking sessions
• Prepare for and conduct performance improvement discussions that enhance relationships and emphasize problem-solving
• Create and administer the entire disciplinary process, including a paid leave of absence as a final chance to commit to better performance

This proven guidebook, from one of the country's leading experts on performance management, will help any organization get potentially great employees back on track.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2006 Dick Grote (P)2014 Audible, Inc.

Good Approach to Discipline

Based on the Title I though this is another Liberal BS. But I was pleasantly surprised with the overall approach to Discipline without Punishment. The emphasis on making the people personally responsible is a better approach to Punishment with unpaid offs. It always helps make people take responsibility for their actions. It is good to get rid of bad apples that spoil the entire organization. I recommend this book to managers who supervise a small group of employees.

The only outside of approach to discipline

If you could sum up Discipline Without Punishment in three words, what would they be?

Change how you discipline your employees!

What did you like best about this story?

It's a different approach to operating a business.

Any additional comments?

Anyone who is looking for a different approach to handling disciplinary actions needs to read this book.

Good book.

Found the idea to be very innovative. lots of useful information even if you can't change the current program you can still use the ideas on how to deal with employees.

perfect approch to adressing concerns/problems.

perfect approch to adressing concerns/problems.
word for word tracks on how to have a proffesional polite and firm discussion on correct behavior and correct performance.

AWESOME!

I can't say enough good things about this book, but if you're serious about creating a positive and lasting change in your company there are few more effective practices you could adopt than the ideas this book introduces you to.

Practical Advice

This book would be a great read for any employee that wants to be a manager or for one that has been a manager!

Mixed Feelings ...

this book started off really interesting and with a really solid psychologically backed framework; but then it totally went off the rails and started going against several sociological and psychological theories, severely diminishing the usefulness of the framework described in the beginning of the book.

Just enough truth to garner results, and then it stops. So frustrating...

corporate crap

This system is about putting the responsibility on the employee, with little discussion of the legitimate reasons employees fail to meet expectations. He actually supports the idea of employees working when they are sick. This book is just one more example of corporations expecting reverence and compliance from their under compensated work forces.

Not recommended

I had mixed feelings about this book right from the first few minutes.

The book starts by sharing a story about a Frito-Lay plant in which morale had gotten so bad that multiple employees were writing profanity on potato chips on the assembly line using permanent markers. But the author swooped in and single-handedly turned the plant around - from nearly a hundred people fired in one year to eventually only two people fired in a different year. Morale was much higher.

That's odd, I thought. Why have I never heard of that before? I paused the book and went to fact check. Surely such a sensational story would have been all over the newspapers. Can you imagine opening a bag of potato chips and finding one with a rude word written in permanent marker? That would definitely garner national attention and would be a story repeated for decades.

Maybe it did happen. Maybe there are news stories. But the only other mention I could find was a Harvard Business Review article - in which the author of this book shared the same anecdote again, but with fewer details.

It's also odd that, if this method has produced such astounding results, that there isn't more talk of it. Maybe it would appear in business management or human resources management textbooks. Maybe it would at least be discussed in several business magazines as a key tool every business should adopt. Maybe it is, but I haven't seen it.

Ok, I thought, maybe I'm being too harsh. Maybe the author neglected to mention that all of the marked potato chips were caught by an inspector and none left the plant. Maybe they managed to keep a tight lid on the story for decades, so it never leaked out to the press. Maybe it's hard to get much publicity, even for effective business techniques. It could all be real.

I continued to listen. I kept hearing some things I didn't agree with. But on the whole, it seemed harmless enough. Certainly some structure, even if not perfect, would be better than how many managers approach discipline and firing. The author does make some good points.

I'll also note that the book is mainly geared towards managers of unskilled labor. It would seem more appropriate to factories, fast food, retail and similar jobs. Although such managers generally don't have the latitude to institute a new program like "discipline without punishment". Perhaps this book is for higher-level managers to convince them to adopt the system. Or perhaps, once a company has bought into the system, this book is an instructional manual for line managers to use to be complaint. I could see that.

I do have to give props to the author for providing specific instructions in many cases.

I suppose I should say what "discipline without punishment" is. It's essentially like many concepts of multiple warnings leading up to a termination. It's more structured than what many companies do. It focuses on getting the employee to verbally agree to solve the problem, and the final step is a day off WITH pay, in which the employee has time to serioulsy consider how they can turn things around.

I felt a little uncomfortable as I got deeper into the book. The author is definitely much more focused on the well-being of the company over the well-being of the individual. Some of his beliefs seem more old fashioned and conservative. He does seem to feel strongly that women and racial minorities are likely to make unjustified complaints about harassment or being unfairly disciplined, seeming to not care about movements like "Black Lives Matter" or "#metoo". But then again, the original book was written in 2006, before such movements became widespread. Can we cut the author slack for being a product of the time? Perhaps I was being too harsh.

However, I became more and more concerned as I got closer to the end of the book.

There was a moment where the author suggested that only in 0.5% of cases was a doctor's note useful to prove the employee was not contagious and would not put other workers at risk. You can definitely tell this is a pre-pandemic book.

Then the author maintained that employees should always have perfect attendance, that sick leave should never be used AND that employees should come in EVEN WHEN THEY ARE SICK.

That's when I stopped.

I had the distinct feeling through much of the book that the author had little compassion for the employees and their struggles, and felt the company had little responsibility for them - and didn't even owe them any degree of flexibility. I thought maybe I was being a bit harsh. But this was completely overboard. The idea that human workers are machines that can be expected to show up every single work day of every year and never, ever need to miss work for any reason... they they should show up to work sick, when they feel terrible and are unlikely to be productive... that they should be encouraged to spread disease in crowded work environments and possibly in public transit on the way to work and the way back... madness! I would have said the same even before COVID-19 (I have strong feelings about how office environments tend to spread colds and flus), but now that we've experienced a pandemic, I hope most readers can agree this is absolutely unacceptable.

There MUST be better books on management and managing employee discipline out there. Avoid this book... like the plague.

Tactics to forcefully lead

There is a theme throughout this book that speaks to the importance of inspiring company commitment in employees. However, the tactics that are taught in this book inspires solely a higher percentage of employee compliance and NOT commitment. These teaching do not address the underlying motives for most employee misconduct and relies almost entirely on using key phrases in disciplinary meeting to get the employee to vocally commit to fixing their problems despite whether they actually plan to or not.
If you are looking for a book regarding good management practice and leadership, this is not it.
If you work in HR and need a good script to follow that will get people out the door and cover yourself legally, this might be a good pick. I hope I save someone some money.