Online Reporter
Employee Relations-Dr Request Machimbira
Walk into most organisations today and you will find thick policy manuals, laminated codes of conduct and human resource calendars full of disciplinary hearings.
We have become very good at policing people. What we have become very bad at is leading them.
Somewhere along the way, we began to believe that mastery of the disciplinary code was the same as mastery of management.
We confused the ambulance for healthcare.
The result is workplaces that are not governed; they are policed. Not developed, but documented.
Not enabled, but warned. A disciplinary process is meant to be a last line of defence, not a first line of leadership.
When we allow it to replace daily management, we do not create order.
We create fear. And fear, no matter how compliant it looks on paper, never builds excellence.
The metrics by which we judge managers must be revolutionised.
For too long we have applauded the manager who can quote every clause and issue a charge letter within 24 hours.
But that is not leadership. That is the administration of punishment.
Real management is measured in quieter, harder places.
It is measured in the recruitment boardroom where the right person is chosen, not the convenient one.
It is measured in how many people a manager develops in a quarter, not how many they charge.
It is measured in the problems that never escalated because expectations were clear, feedback was early and resources were fought for.
A manager who cannot build a team, but a case file has mastered the wrong craft.
The growing appetite for the code of conduct is itself a symptom.
Codes become busy when management becomes absent.
When managers do not coach, do not plan work, do not give feedback and do not set clear standards, they reach for the only tool left in the drawer: discipline.
But the code was never meant to do the work of a manager. It was meant to protect the organisation when management has failed.
If your code of conduct is the most used document in the company, the question is not about employee behaviour.
The question is about leadership behaviour. Good management begins long before any problem arises. It begins with the courage to hire right.
A good manager knows who the cap fits. Yet too often we see managers complicit in bringing the wrong people through the door, out of friendship, fear or a desire to hire someone who will not expose their own deficiencies.
Six months later, those same managers sit in disciplinary hearings for the very people they endorsed.
You cannot recruit dysfunction and then discipline it into performance.
Some managers themselves are products of recruitment malpractices and now they are trying to hire their own competence by proxy.
Paper qualifications will not save you from this. In an age where CV fraud is as real as tax risk, a manager must know the work, do the work and be able to teach the work.
You cannot lead people through terrain you have never walked.
And that is the heart of it: You cannot give what you do not have. Good management demands self-mastery first.
Technical competence. Emotional maturity.
The discipline to set clear expectations and then to enable people to meet them. Codes tell people what not to do.
Managers show people what to do. We need more managers in the field and fewer posters on the wall.
This is where the real work lives. Good management creates clarity and then removes the obstacles to delivery.
It says, here is the goal, here is why it matters, here are the resources and I will stand with you to get it done.
A good manager is an employee champion and a business champion at the same time, because the two are not in conflict.
Employees are not a cost to be controlled. They are the business’ most unique asset.
They think, they feel, they carry anxiety, ambition and ideas. When you injure them, you injure your product, your service and your reputation.
Yet we continue to ask the wrong question in boardrooms: “Whose side are you on?” As if a manager must choose between the company and its people.
That question breeds clans, spies and a nervous breakdown in the organisational system.
The truth is simpler and harder. Being on the side of employees is being on the side of the business. But we have made it career-limiting to say so.
Before we ever reach for the code, we must ask if we have done the work of management.
Have we set clear key performance indicators (KPIs)? Have we trained? Have we mentored? Have we checked for blockers?
If the answer is no, then a disciplinary hearing is not about the employee.
It is an indictment of management.
The rule must be this: If you have never put someone on a performance support plan, you have no business putting them in a disciplinary chair.
Enable first. Correct with dignity.
Good management does not bruise egos. It builds people.
The modern workplace is full of emotional injuries that were never caused by bad employees, but by bad management.
Public shaming, blame and threats do not produce performance.
They produce silence, withdrawal and a culture where people do the minimum to survive.
People do their best work where they feel safe, respected and equipped. What we need now is not another policy. It is more management development.
More coaching.
More technical depth.
More leaders who understand that the law cannot supersede the culture we have nurtured.
If the culture is fearful, no manual will fix it. If the culture is enabled, you will rarely need the manual.
A code of conduct is a fence.
It has its place.
But management is the garden.
You can build the highest fence in the world, but if nothing grows inside, you have achieved nothing.
The choice before us is clear.
We can continue to manage by punishment, or we can return to managing by purpose.
One builds compliance. The other builds organisations that last.
Dr Request Machimbira is the executive director of Proficiency Consulting Group and the International Wellness Institute. For feedback, email request @proficiencyinternational.com or phone +263772693404.
