Discipline is important, but only when it helps achieve an outcome.
Making the best decisions is important too.
Making decisions is a key responsibility of leadership.
Using rules to enforce compliance can be a way of avoiding hard decisions.
Your decision to go against the “rules” can define your leadership.
Also when you favor compliance.
How do effective leaders make decisions?
Not a binary decision maker but also not a free-wheeling hippie.
One answer is in how we play an important leadership game.
That game is between Compliance and Balance.
Police play an important role, to enforce rules.
For minor things they get to decide and give out punishment.
You were speeding, or you ran a red light.
For important or complex things humans invented systems of judgment.
Juries, lawyers, judges.
Because simple compliance isn’t enough to run a society.
Good leaders use judgment.
They don’t hide behind rules, or targets, or dates.
Because simple compliance isn’t enough to run an organization.
The greatest challenge is not deciding whether to enforce some random distant rule set by someone far away or far in the past.
The greatest challenge is deciding whether to enforce a target you set.
When you want to set targets you normally measure against an absolute. A time, a place, a cost, profit.
When it comes time to judge performance, you can treat these as rules, with punishment for breaching them.
Or you can make a judgment based on circumstances.
The answer maybe to treat the target as a rule – this is important.
Or no, something else was more important.
But it should never be automatic.
“..simple compliance isn’t enough to run an organization…”
Do you have rules you didn’t set and don’t agree with?
How do you treat them?
Do you actively try to limit how many rules you have?
Do you set targets?
Do you measure performance against targets?
When you do, is judgment based just on achievement, black and white?
Or do you balance outcomes with circumstances?
Do you have the courage to sometimes relax rules or targets?
Do you hide behind rules?
.
.
“I might be wrong, but at least I’ve thought about it…”