About professional punishments of subordinates in the intellectual IT environment

The text was written based on the speech of the head of the studio " Sibiriks " Vladimir Zavertaylov at the summer partner conference "1C-Bitrix" BitrixSummerFest and represents the personal opinion of the speaker.

The full performance of Vladimir can be viewed at the link .
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The topic is painful, and they do not like to talk about it openly. Of course, everyone would like to work in a team where no one punishes anyone. Alas, but management theory does not yet give us recipes for building conflict-free teams in which everyone works responsibly and with full dedication, showing no flaws during working hours, where bosses are tactful and wise. For the first time I thought about the problem of punishment several years ago, sitting in the office at about 12 at night. At that moment I, being the director of the company, was performing the duties of a programmer. I debugged the code written by the employee who dropped everything, did not finish it, and went home. The customer is knocking on Skype, writes terrible words, “urgently, everything is lost”, presses and hurries me. And in such situations my back starts to hurt. And I sat and thought, but what does it mean for a programmer to be responsible for the project?

Say, I, as a director, for the disruption of the project, I scrape up on the full, first of all - financially. After all, the responsibility for the work of the company lies with the director. And what about a programmer or designer?

According to the Labor Code, it cannot be fined, it is also impossible to punish during off-hours. Tie to the battery and make it work, beat - also impossible. what can we do with him? In fact, it can only be fired, and I already sit at midnight and debug someone else's code, where should I fire it? Then I will not sit until 12, but up to 2 hours. What to do?

And I began to analyze the situation in the company. It turned out that from time to time I break people down, start shouting at them, and this happens systematically. If I were a girl, then once a month I would be forgiven. But when a bearded, intelligent, grown man behaves this way, this is not very good. I began to forgive the staff some small shoals, talk calmly with them. Although sometimes my patience ended, and I broke down, which was very ugly.

What can be done to not yell at anyone?

How can you influence an employee without creating a conflict, without screams and other unpleasant things? You can write a detailed message on Skype, tell him about the mistake he made, write down what exactly he was wrong, what consequences it led to. In general, to make a long message, where to explain who he is in life and why. A very effective method that works flawlessly.



Do you know what he mumbles? “The boss is a goat, the office is shit,” and you can’t hear it, and this is well spread across the labor market. A bruise means that you did not punish him, but offended by such behavior. There is a very subtle, but important difference - you punish a person or offend him. When you punish, he feels guilty, and when you offend, he is full of negativity towards you.

I understood that I would not think of myself how to punish subordinates correctly. I had to turn to literature. Probably, you also read Western books about motivation. They say that it is necessary to create a system of values, employees need to be motivated, describe a corporate goal, etc. Such books are full, but they do not say a word about how to punish people.

It turns out that I have to create a motivating installation within the company, sit quietly and exude grace, and when the staff go awry, they will come to recharge from me and will behave more badly. Let us suppose. And how to punish? Not written. Maybe you should not punish people? Or is it necessary? Personally, I think it is necessary.

I have never studied management, I am a programmer to the bone. And in this sense, I am not unique, in IT it is not uncommon when a programmer or designer has to manage people, but he has not been taught this. And because of this there is a lot of trouble.

And then I came across a very interesting book by a domestic author, in which it was written that a person should be punished not only depending on his misconduct, but also depending on the operating system of management implemented in your organization.

The author describes in some detail these operating systems. If you have a company, for example, a dictatorship, then you should punish a person only when he contradicts the dictator. And if you have a regular management, everything is fine, competently and arranged according to the rules, then it is necessary to punish completely in other situations. It is believed that if you use mixed management styles, then you have all the drawbacks of each of the systems without receiving any benefits.

For obvious reasons, I will not consider the option of a dictatorship. In addition, in our company we try to adhere to a regular management system. What does he tell us about punishment?

Punishments under regular management

The head is obliged to punish the subordinate if he violates the rules established and brought to his notice.

This is very bad. That is, I walk around the office, in my right mind and in a solid memory, I am in a good mood, the birds are singing, summer, and suddenly I see that someone is mowing. And here I am obliged to punish a person without a swing. I will give an example so that you understand how bad it is.

Suppose you give a task to a young programmer Vasya, who has a curator, Helen: “Vasya, go, please design a database. But since you are still learning, ask Lena to sit with you, and together you designed the base correctly. ”
Vasya comes to Lena: “Len, there the boss said, help, let's sit down”.
Lena thought about her, about the woman, and said: "Not now, leave."
Vasya looked for books, read forums, spent a couple of evenings and really drew a normal, good base.
Question: should Vasya be punished or rewarded?

In the system of regular management, we must punish both. Lena is clear for what; and Vasya for taking the initiative and going where he was not asked. Maybe, under the dictatorship, he is a good fellow, he has shown superheroic abilities and solved a task that demanded super efforts from him, but in the regular management system we are obliged to punish him.

The following rule, in my opinion, is even worse.

The head has no right to punish the subordinate if he acted without exceeding his authority.

This situation is violated all the time. Recently, we have a system administrator changing disks on the internal server. The procedure is simple: one disk is pulled out of the RAID, another is inserted, they are synchronized, the system administrator changes the size of the partition. This is done according to the regulations every six months. Suddenly, during the resizing, there was some kind of failure, and all the data on the disk fell off.

In this situation, we lose four hours of company work. The man did not violate the instructions; I have no right to punish him with a glance, an action, or a facial expression — nothing, because he acted in proportion to the instructions. Although I really want to - four hours of work of 42 people.

Sometimes there are employees who cannot be punished because they themselves will punish themselves much more for their mistakes. As a rule, these are very responsible people, it is pleasant to work with them. They are very worried about their mistakes, are corrected and grow rapidly. There is no need to punish them.



After a while, I caught the eye of a series of books by Vladimir Konstantinovich Tarasov. For me, life was divided into “before” and “after” Tarasov. I learned a lot of clever ideas from him, the information is very concentrated. For example: “A leader is like a fire. Unable to get close. Heat is close, but unbearably hot, if you try to get even closer . ”

It is thanks to Tarasov that I understood for myself how to punish correctly:

• or you take a person closer to yourself and do something with yourself, and then it hurts him,
• or you remove him from yourself as much as possible, to the extent that you are expelled from the company and then he also feels bad and sick.

Actually, the overwhelming majority of punishments are carried out according to one of these scenarios.

If the problem of correct punishment is also relevant for you, then let me recommend that you do the following exercises with you.

Formulate for yourself exactly how you are ready to punish employees. Paint the entire spectrum, starting with the smallest offense and until the very last fur-bearing animal. I believe that the most terrible punishment will be dismissal. Having compiled a similar “ranking of grades”, you will clearly understand how to deal with a person better depending on the situation. With regard to IT, most of the punishments will relate to the moral sphere. Unfortunately, few people can do this normally.



No need to punish with money, forget about them, this is a very bad story. You can only be fined with money if you and a person have agreed that you have the right to fine for something. In all other cases it will be an extremely demotivating measure, it is a bad way. Speaking of programmers and designers, you can not tie the punishment to the criteria of quality work. You always lose. What can be attached to? To the number of lines of code per day? Then you will get this one. To the number of bugs? You will have ping-pong between the programming department and the testing department.

Rarely, but there are situations when we are talking about a unique specialist who cannot be replaced and who is not able or willing to work in accordance with the rules adopted in your company. In this case, you have no choice but to endure it. But then you must separate him from the rest of the collective: "This is our sacred cow, for it has different rules." Explain to everyone why such rules are specific to him. For example: “He can bring $ 100,000 for our company in half an hour, but you can't. Until you learn so, you will not have such concessions. " Try to isolate him as much as possible from other employees so that he does not have a negative impact on them. And look for a replacement for him, because you should not depend on one person, especially on such an uncontrollable one.

Delegating the opportunity to punish

If you give someone the right to punish employees, then you should teach him this. If you do not know how to do this, then teaching someone else is a dead number. If you have enough considerations, skills, patience to teach someone how to punish, praise you, as a manager. If not, do it yourself.

Useful algorithm

Suppose you decide to punish someone in full, but the project depends on this person. If you go too far, he may be offended and quit. As part of regular management, it is not necessary to punish immediately. You can choose a more convenient time and place.

Small algorithm:

1. Be sure to punish in private, in any case not with people or in an environment that can push a person to show aggression in response.
2. Start talking to the person, ask questions. Many make a mistake, immediately after asking a question, starting to read morality. First, be sure to pause and wait for an answer.
3. Here at this moment a person begins to experience some kind of conscience. It will spin like in a griddle, trying not to answer directly to your correctly posed question. Your task is to put him "face to the mirror" so that he understands what offense he committed and how. It is necessary to get to the bottom of the moral reason so that he confesses that the reason was his laziness or something else.
4. I recommend that you sit in a room in such a way that it cannot just slip past you, run away. For example, lightly block the legs out. This is a method of psychological impact: when a person realizes that he is trapped, that he does not jump off, does not break, then he really tries to understand the reasons, in himself, and speaks to you more or less honestly and openly.

What is not in regular management?

There is no forgiveness procedure. You cannot forgive a person for his cant; you must respond to it proportionately. But there is an amnesty procedure, when a person regrets his act, and you no longer accuse him. These two situations need to be distinguished.

Who do you train on?

Probably, many in their heads had a bright thought: "I will come home today and there I will try to work out all these techniques." No, please do not do this. Your family is not to blame for all that you read. Therefore, if there are any people in your company whom you don’t feel sorry for, then it’s better to work out this method on them.

Your task is to bring the person to white heat in this way. Then you will be able to act measuredly, but while you learn this, you will be carried. You will start reading morality, and the person will think: “When will this reptile shut up?”.

How to conduct a debriefing?

Always emotional, constructive and to the point. This is exactly what you should strive for. You must carry out the punishment and give feedback very emotionally, constructively and in the case - it is very well read.