What to Watch Out For

• When you say you want people to be treated fairly, what exactly do you mean? We, your colleagues, need to know. Do you mean that everyone should be treated exactly the same? Or do you mean that each person should be treated as they deserve to be treated, bearing in mind who they are and what they have accomplished for the organization? Clearly, these are very different definitions of fairness. Which is yours?

• Be sure to apply your methodical approach to your own physical space. You tend to think best when you have some order around you. Take this seriously. You will have better ideas and be more productive and resilient when you sense that your world—and the stuff in your world—is in its rightful place.

• Keep your focus on performance. Occasionally your sense of fairness might lead you to overemphasize how someone gets work done and to ignore what he or she gets done.

• Make a list of the rules of fairness by which you can live. These rules might be based upon certain values that you have or upon certain policies that you consider non-negotiables within your organization. Counterintuitively, the clearer you are about these rules, the more comfortable you will be with granting exceptions within these boundaries. If these rules or values are not explicit, people are left having to infer the grid you are using to make your judgments. This can make you appear arbitrary in your judgments—even if you aren’t.