Unfair

Reframe your narratives about fairness and safety

We often carry things from our past into our work. It might be dynamics in our family, or early, formative work experiences. Sometimes I feel like I can almost hear it, the echo of a child’s rage or demand or fear.

Since I’m an executive coach and not a therapist, I don’t spend much time on those echoes. But that doesn’t mean I don’t hear them.

“That’s not fair.”

This one comes in often, an almost constant background noise. If Jane gets a raise, Anna should get a raise as well. If Bill gets to work from home, Joe should also get to work from home.

There’s a surface logic to that. One of the arguments against gender and race pay disparities is that two people who do the same work should be paid the same. That’s compelling because it is fair.

But what if someone came to you and said, hey, my co-worker got two weeks more of paid vacation this year than I did, that’s not fair. But if the two weeks were actually bereavement leaves because the co-worker’s mother and father died within a few months of one another, that’s a different story. The first co-worker is creating a false fairness narrative.

Different people need different things. While that’s plainly obvious, in practice, this truth can bump up against the false fairness narratives, often ones that we can’t combat because to do so would be to break confidentiality. If we go back to the example of Joe complaining that Bill gets to work from home and he cannot, the reality may be that Bill is in a wheelchair and getting to the office is a different experience for Bill than it is for Joe.

What if Bill is the better worker, or the better negotiator, who had it written into his job offer that he got to be permanently remote, and the organization agreed because his skill set and experience was so valuable and in high demand?

If the person saying “this isn’t fair” has lots of energy in that statement, if they make it personal or get very hurt and emotional, it might be that they are conflating something from their past around fairness and this particular event. When the reaction is not congruent with the circumstances, it's usually because there’s an echo of old experiences or expectations.

What can you do in those circumstance?

First, ground the conversation in reality. Validate Joe’s experience, but talk about your approach to leadership. “I can see that you’re concerned about what you perceive to be unequal treatment. But I focus on meeting the needs of the individual, and less about making everything match equally. We’re not cutting cake and making one slice larger than the other. We are acknowledging that different people have different needs. For example, Bill has no children. You have three, and got 6 weeks of paternity leave for each child. It’s not a slight to Bill that you, as a father, have access to benefits that Bill does not. It’s just that you and Bill are different.”

Second, work on your own self-regulation and be clear about your own narratives. If you are troubled by someone on your team thinking you are unfair, or disliking you, then it might be difficult for you not to get defensive or reactive. Every leader needs to navigate people disliking them or projecting motives onto their actions that aren’t accurate.

Third, be intentional about the narratives you use for work. It used to be fashionable to talk about a workplace as a family, which wasn’t helpful, because then people expected it to be like their family, which might be a good thing or a bad thing. The current fashion in workplace narratives is that we are building workplaces where people can show up authentically as their real selves and there is psychological safety.

Really?

It sounds great. It’s a good goal to have. And for some organizations that is a valid aspiration; I’m thinking of social service organizations or some non-profits where people from marginalized communities want to build a culture that is more equitable or just or accepting than the culture at large.

But if you work for a corporation, the chances are that people won’t be able to show up authentically unless they are part of the dominant group – which is most likely cis, straight, white men. There can’t be real psychological safety when your employment can be terminated at will – the waves of layoffs attest to that.

One of my pet peeves is when people say phrases like “frankly” or “to tell you the truth,” or “honestly.” Because, what, the rest of what you’re saying is a lie? I feel that way about organizations that pay lots of lip service to “authenticity” and “psychological safety.”

Here’s my narrative. Capitalism is a system that works against authenticity at work as well as real psychological safety, especially for anyone from a marginalized community. It doesn’t mean that individuals or leaders can’t try to create those qualities within the limitations of the system. But it doesn’t help us to pretend that the system doesn’t have limitations.

An individual teacher can create an environment of calm and safety in her classroom. But in a system without effective gun regulations, in which the majority of deaths of children are from gun violence, her ability to keep the children from being shot is really luck or chance, because we live in a system that does not value the actual safety of children. Pretending otherwise, holding onto an old narrative, is certainly more comforting. But it’s not actually true.

Corporate America is not safe. It is not fair. It is not equitable. It is a deeply flawed system. That does not mean we cannot work to create pockets of connectedness, equity and safety. But let’s not delude ourselves. The system is built to maximize profit, not fairness, not personal well-being, not emotional or psychological safety. Profit and power are the sole objectives. Any other story is a fairy tale.