Speaker Christine Quinn is employing a technique used by countless elementary school teachers to keep her City Council colleagues in line: She’s handing out stickers.

For the first time, council members this year have been given stickers the size of name tags bearing their signatures, printed names, and the city seal. In a move many say highlights Ms. Quinn’s tendency to micromanage, the stickers are not to be worn, but are designed to be stuck on applications for council projects seeking funding in lieu of a signature.

Council members, Ms. Quinn seems to be saying, cannot be trusted to sign their own names.

Ms. Quinn is considered a likely candidate for mayor.

The stickers are the latest example of the no-nonsense, tight-ship environment Ms. Quinn strives to achieve in her wing of City Hall. Last month, she shored up her already solid reputation as a detail-obsessed manager though a memo sent to council employees clarifying the staff dress code, which she tightened after being elected speaker in 2006.

The memo from a top council official reminds employees that flip-flops, jeans, hats, team jerseys, sweatpants, T-shirts, and sneakers “are NOT considered appropriate business attire.”

The memo says the council “has recognized the merits of allowing for a more relaxed dress policy” on Fridays, but says “all employees are expected to be in appropriate business attire during business hours regardless of the day.”

Ms. Quinn has her supporters and, by way of explaining the signature stickers, some in the council noted the measure would not have been necessary had council members followed new rules established by the speaker last year.

Ms. Quinn overhauled the usual procedure council members had to follow to secure funding for special projects by requiring all submitted applications to include supportive signatures from at least 10 council members representing at least three boroughs. She restricted members from signing more than seven proposals.

Some followed the new rules. Others flouted them, caving to pressure from colleagues and scrawling their names far more than the allotted seven times. By giving each member only seven stickers, Ms. Quinn is making sure that doesn’t happen again.

“Council members couldn’t abide by the original rules,” the council minority leader of Staten Island, James Oddo, said yesterday during a vigorous defense of Ms. Quinn.

He had a tough message for colleagues who might be complaining or rolling their eyes at the sticker system: “If you feel like you’re being treated like a fifth-grader, it’s because you acted like a fifth-grader last year,” he said.

A council member of Queens and mayoral candidate, Tony Avella, said the stickers are childish, plucked from an elementary school.

He’s opposed to the new rules to apply for funding, including the sticker signatures, saying they are a waste of time because Ms. Quinn will decide to fund whichever projects she wants.

“Why are we playing this little game?” he said. “At the end of the day, it still comes down to the speaker making the decision, which it shouldn’t be.”

A council member of the Upper West Side, Gale Brewer, admitted she signed her name a few too many times in 2006, but said her colleagues were “begging” her to do it. She defended the signature stickers, saying that although they appear designed for a kindergarten class, they do work.

A spokeswoman for Ms. Quinn, Maria Alvarado, said the decision to issue stickers came from the council’s 26-member budget negotiating team. One member of team said Ms. Quinn proposed the idea and the negotiating team agreed to support it. The stickers were issued to ensure all council members’ signatures would be legible, Ms. Alvarado said. She said the cost of producing them was nominal.

“This way it’s a uniform process that everyone follow,” she said. “This way we know that all signatures will be identifiable.”

A council member of Brooklyn, Lewis Fidler, disputed the contention that Ms. Quinn is a micromanager, saying her overhaul of the budget application process has democratized the system. He also said the perception the stickers were issued to prevent members from signing their name more than seven times is wrong.

“The speaker specifically said some of the signatures were unintelligible,” Mr. Fidler said. “It was really designed to make things easier, not to treat people like they were going to cheat.”