As we were making dinner one night, my husband complained, “I am so tired of the ‘just a sec’s.” I knew exactly what he meant. It had become the standard response that our 7-, 5- and 3-year-old daughters use when we ask them to do something.

“I swear I hear ‘just a sec’ fifty times every morning. I’m getting sick of it. Tomorrow, I’m not putting up with it.”

I wondered what he meant by that.  I know there are supposed to be consequences, but what can you do? Give them a time out? Ground them from TV? Spank them? When you are trying to get three kids out the door by 8, is there anything you can do but repeat your commands hundreds of times?

It’s embarrassing when you can’t think of adequate consequences for your kids when they misbehave. It’s doubly hard at the office when your employees don’t perform like you want them to.

I thought of the time I was doing a book signing in Wenatchee Washington and this topic came up. I admitted that even though I had written a management book with an entire chapter devoted to evangelizing the need for consequences for underperformance, I still struggled with good examples.

“Oh! I have one!” a woman in the audience said. “I work at a hotel and I insist that all of my staff wear name tags. But they used to forget them or lose them or refuse to wear them. So I order a few big, goofy looking nametags that were a hideous color and whenever I saw anyone without their own nametag, I wrote their name on one of these ugly nametags and made them wear that. It was long until nobody ever forgot their name tags!”

I marveled at the genius of that ‘punishment’ and envied her ability to find such a straightforward solution. As my husband and I were brainstorming on what we could do stop our children’s dawdling in the morning, I momentarily day dreamed about sending them to school with name tags that say, “I dilly-dally.”

The next morning, ten minutes after my husband woke the girls up, he came downstairs and said, “OK, that’s it, I told them three times to get up and get dressed. Today I am going to let them get a tardy at school.”

I immediately felt conflicted. A tardy? We hadn’t been tardy all year. Last quarter they both got an award for 100% on-time arrival from their elementary school.

But that’s the thing with consequences, they aren’t fun for the person who gets them and they aren’t easy for the person who has to dole them out. They are not supposed to be fun or easy. If they were, they would be rewards.

This is the reason parents and bosses are slow to initiate consequences. It doesn’t feel good. Human nature is to avoid things that are uncomfortable. But the short-term discomfort is worth the long-term gain. We all know this.

On the morning my husband walked out of the room, my 7-year-old noticed five minutes before they were supposed to leave that nobody had shoes on, hair brushed, teeth brushed or back pack in the car. They all started scrambling and the tears came when they realized they were not going to make it.

I’d love to say that my kids were magically transformed into focused, quick, obedient children. That would be a stretch. But after that experience, they do respond more quickly when we warn, “You are going to be tardy.” Because now it’s not just an empty threat.  Now they know there are consequences to unwanted behavior.

When your employees don’t perform as you want them to, what happens to them? Does it slide by time after time or do you have a plan to make sure the behavior is modified? A good boss, like a good parent, continually assesses the conduct of her employees and ensures that good behavior is repeated and bad behavior is not.