Necessity of Punishment

 You have two levers. Two levers for your sub-ordinates, and for you.

 

These levers are: (1) Punishment (2) Rewards.

 

Giving punishments is more important than giving rewards. This is the point of this article.

 

 

To understand the world you have to understand that everything bifurcates at the top. There is no exception to this. 

 

This is not aristotelian existence/non-existence pair. Its something else. Its two counterparts.

 

The counterparts are opposites, in a sense; as they perform different functions. The counterparts are same, in another sense; they are after all branches of the same node and thus can substitute each other in some functions and to some degree. They ofcourse cannot fully or even sufficiently substitute each other. We need both.

 

We don't need a third one. We are the third one. We have the controls. We boost or we slow down, or we do neither but please don't ever do both. 

 

You need to give rewards, not just the final reward but also many small rewards along the way, in order to have somebody do something you want. Note that somebody can be yourself, it not always have to be a sub-ordinate. Rules are same. You give rewards if you want something that happened to continue happening, you punish if you want something that has happened to not happen again.

 

Pleasure and pain are even more basic to rewards and punishments.  You give reward after something good happen, but you do have to provide some pleasure even before the good thing happened. You have to give a feel of the reward, you have to show a picture and make a promise, that itself is a pleasure. Likewise, your subject must understand what punishment will feel like, for that they have to go through some pain imagining or seeing the punishment even before they do anything, good or bad.

 

As your rewards have to be numerous, not just one big final one, your punishments also have to be numerous and many of them have to be along the way, to keep your subject on the right path. 

 

The punishments and rewards that are along the way, that is, not the final end result one, need not always be material or physical. They can just be an approval, a smile, a verbal encouragement etc on the reward side; and a no-reply, a brow-beat, a scolding etc on the punishment side.

 

Finally, back to the main point of this article, punishments are more important  than rewards. In absence of any reward just the sheer boredom of doing nothing would motivate a person to do something. You just have to remove or atleast reduce what else they can do other than what you want them to do. Then there is desire to achieve, material wealth, fame and personal fulfillment. In short, you don't have to worry about rewards that much as you think. Its the punishments that you should prioritize.

 

That not to say that you go cheap and cut down on rewards if you can afford to give them. Be generous, it get you loyalty.

 

Just don't be that much quick in giving rewards and that much intense in them than you should in giving punishments. There is a baseline that covers for this deficit. Its their expenses that you are paying for. If you are not giving them a salary or an allowance you are atleast taking care of their many expenses.  That do the balancing.

 

There is one last point to note here. People have either responsibility mindset or they need a push. If they are not working when you are not seeing them, or are doing wrongs intentionally when you are not punishing them for a while, then they don't have responsibility mindset, instead they need push. They are like animals who needs to be periodically whipped to make them go where you want them to go. Also, they cannot handle big things like whole projects. They are bound to work under a supervisor, as long as they don't change their attitude.

 

On the other hand you have people who don't need to be periodically monitored. You can and should assign them whole projects and sit back while they make all the tactical decisions and come back to you only when done or when some obstacle hinder them that they cannot remove on their own. These people are the easiest to manage.