How to become your boss?

Ahhh, discipline—that cherished employee virtue, the aspiration of management gurus and trainees alike. Discipline is the current Mom and Apple Pie of the workplace. But, like everything else, it has a dark side.

Bright side up, you're aspiring to the focus and productivity that can come only from a reverence for and practice of discipline—in all its structured glory. Face down, though, the choke chain pulls you away from desire, from risk, from creativity and back, back, back, to the tedious duty that's always calling.
Anything two-sided is tricky to negotiate, especially at the office. You know that from experience. Like every other uneasy office truce, the grail of discipline is most likely achieved by understanding what it is—and what it is not.

At heart, discipline is an internal state. It is a kind of self-management. The grim-faced snitch, who rats you out because you are always 20 minutes late while she is always on time, is merely an enforcer. If she's your team leader, she may succeed in whipping you back into line. But she is not promoting discipline, the frame of mind that gets you out of bed early because you no longer allow yourself to be late. Impulse control, exercised from within, is discipline's hallmark.

But impulse control exercised by your boss works too. "Conscience," said Voltaire, "is not the fear of God but the fear of the police." And a boss who cares what time you arrive, how scrupulously you meet your deadlines or how assiduously you respond to your customers certainly makes it more likely that you will struggle to achieve that disciplined internal drive. If the workplace value system rewards self-management, then we're much more apt to develop and practice it.

Managers who create an environment where people manage themselves are most likely to maximize productivity and job satisfaction. But how do you get employees not only to drive themselves but also to end up together at the same destination? You do it by recognizing that the absence of discipline is chaos and laziness, but discipline overdone is dictatorship. Discipline may make the trains run on time, but it will never get them someplace more interesting.

As Americans, we tend to believe that if something is good, more of it is better. But in this instance, the core elements of discipline are good, but more of it tends to make things worse. So every manager, and every employee, needs to find that delicate balance. After all, just one neighborhood over from discipline lies the sterile, gated community of workaholism, perfectionism and punishment. It's easy to get confused and wind up there.

A focused and energetic employee is apt to be delightfully productive, but a workaholic tends to be a rigid judge of others. The internal standard that drives you to polish the proposal to a high shine contributes to an atmosphere of excellence. But the perfectionist eye that scrutinizes and worries over every tiny detail creates an atmosphere of paralysis.

Clear objectives and regular evaluations inspire self-management, because people know what needs to be done and whether they are doing it well. But pushed to an extreme, evaluation can become criticism and punishment, which—no matter how justified—only builds anxiety and resentment.