Picture this. Monday morning, incident retro. On Friday, someone pushed a config change and production went down for forty minutes. The first question in the room: “Okay, who did it?”
Nobody answers. The retro ends with a new approval step and a lot of crossed arms.
Three months later, nobody touches that config file. Nobody volunteers for the risky migration. And the next time something looks a bit off in production, nobody says a word until it’s on fire.
You wanted accountability. What you built is a shock collar.
In episode #180 of the podcast, Craig Taylor (Co-Founder of CyberHoot, a psychology graduate with 35 years in cybersecurity) used exactly this analogy. For 25 years, his industry has trained people the way some people train dogs: with a shock collar. Make a mistake, get zapped. Then build a bigger zapper. And eventually, as Craig put it, the dog goes into the corner and stops participating.
He was talking about phishing tests. I heard a leadership story.
The Zap Doesn’t Teach. It Teaches Hiding.
Craig told me about a PhD he spoke with who kept failing fake phishing emails. His conclusion? “Nobody has taught me how to spot these, they only punish me. So I forward everything to IT.” Smart person, zero learning, full abdication of responsibility.
That’s what punishment really produces. Not better behaviour. Less participation.
And the research backs him up. In a 15-month ETH Zurich study with more than 14,000 employees, training pushed at people right after they “failed” a simulated phishing email didn’t make them more resilient, and it could even make them more susceptible. In the UC San Diego Health study of over 19,000 employees, most people spent a minute or less on the training they got after clicking, and many closed it immediately.
Engineering learned this lesson a long time ago, at least on paper. Google’s SRE book on postmortem culture says it plainly: when people fear blame, problems get swept under the rug, and the whole organization becomes riskier. The question is whether your team lives it, or just has a template for it.
Why Feedback Feels Like a Punishment
Half an hour before recording with Craig, I finished a session with a group of leaders about why their people hate feedback. Not constructive feedback. Feedback, period. Because in many brains, feedback equals “I screwed something up”. One shock collar too many in the past, and even “great job” sounds suspicious.
This isn’t just a feeling. Kluger and DeNisi’s classic meta-analysis of feedback interventions found that in over a third of cases, feedback actually made performance worse. The more the feedback pointed at the person instead of the task, the worse it worked. That’s the zap: feedback about you, not about the work. (If you want to check your own habits, here are the 5 biggest leadership feedback mistakes I see most often.)
Craig added one more side effect I loved: resentment. Your IT team is supposed to help people succeed. Then they send a fake “your Christmas bonus is here” email to trick them. Replace IT with “my manager”, and you know exactly how that feels.
What Works Instead
- Reward the report, not only the result. Craig’s whole culture is built on this: it’s safe, and even rewarded, to say “I clicked something I shouldn’t have”, fast. In your team, the engineer who writes “I think I just broke staging” five minutes after it happened is your hero. Thank them, in public. Then fix the system, not the person. More on this in Breaking the Code: Myths About Mistakes in Tech World.
- Make learning small and frequent. A one-hour session once a year is like going to the gym once and coming back on January 1 the next year; you hurt yourself and never come back. Craig recommends two-minute exercises every month instead. The science agrees: a meta-analysis of 317 experiments by Cepeda and colleagues shows that spaced learning beats cramming for long-term retention. And as James Clear writes in Atomic Habits, if you want a behaviour to stick, make it easy. I wrote about the same mechanism in It’s Not About One Big Boundary. It’s About a Few Small Habits.
- Use the competitiveness you already have. The single best thing CyberHoot did for leadership engagement wasn’t a reminder or an escalation. It was an anonymous leaderboard. Busy leaders who kept skipping their training suddenly saw themselves at the bottom, and caught up fast. Nobody becomes a leader by enjoying last place. Notice the word anonymous, though. Public ranking is just another zap.
- Say the expectation out loud. A leader recently told me, frustrated, that their direct report “doesn’t keep up with the product”. So I asked: “Have you ever actually talked about it as part of the job?” Silence. Never. It was so obvious to them that it never got said. That’s why I keep coming back to contracting: you can’t punish someone for breaking an agreement they never made (well, you can, but it won’t make any sense at all). And check what you actually reward. As Charlie Munger said in his famous talk on the psychology of human misjudgment, ” Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome”.
- Frame it as a benefit, and tell stories. Craig doesn’t sell cyber literacy as compliance. He sells it as something that protects you at home, too (like spotting the overpayment scam when you sell something online). Real stories of close calls do more than any policy document. People don’t resist learning. They resist learning that feels pointless.
Make It Play, Not Work
Craig hates the gym. But he gets up at 5 AM to play hockey, and he loves it. Same workout, different frame.
And here’s my favourite part of his analogy. Train a dog with treats instead of a shock collar, and the dog might bring you the leash and ask to go to the park. That’s the difference between a team that complies and a team that wants to learn.
Remember, it’s never about the time. When people say they’re too busy to learn, it’s usually about priorities, and priorities follow what’s rewarded. This is what I mean by Communication Intelligence in the CQ Leadership Method: understanding that every reaction you have to a mistake sends a message about what’s safe here.
The Bottom Line
Punishment feels like accountability. In reality, it buys you silence, workarounds and people who forward everything to someone else.
So, here’s my question for you: what happened the last time someone on your team admitted a mistake out loud?
If the honest answer is “nothing good”, you know where the shock collar is.
Want the full conversation with Craig? Listen to episode #180 of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, and check out what he’s building at CyberHoot. If your team says they “don’t need to learn”, read Why Leaders Quit Learning and How to Overcome It. For tools like this every week, join the free Leadership Pulse. And if you want the whole toolbox in one place, grab my book From Code to People.
Until next time, lead without burnout.
