Fair Isn’t Equal and Equal Isn’t Fair

How do you treat people differently while ensuring you aren’t discriminating?

If you treat everyone the same, you’ll fail as a leader. If you treat people differently, you risk getting into trouble. How do you bridge this gap?

This was one of the biggest struggles I faced as a leader and manager. You want your employees to be treated equally. You want to ensure there isn’t even a hint of discrimination of any kind. I always wanted to be sure that every type of person, of every gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, political perspective, etc. felt at home after they entered the doors of my building.

That’s perhaps the most important part of managing a team of people, full stop. There is no excuse otherwise.

But you’re not managing a group, you’re managing individuals. And individuals don’t respond the same way. This is where it gets tricky. No two people are alike. Everyone needs a different recipe of management style. It’s your job to provide that without crossing over into the danger zone of something illegal.

Sports has always been an excellent way of illustrating this. The best coaches all understand one thing: performance isn’t one-size-fits-all. All they want to know is if you can play well enough to help the team win.¹ And if so, then a coach will want to figure out the best way to get the highest level of performance from an athlete.

Scotty Bowman, one of the best coaches in NHL history, once said, “A big thing is to know your players. Some guys come to play under all circumstances. Others have to have somebody prodding them all the time. Yelling at them does not work. Instead, make them miss a shift. Put them out under a tough situation. Or put them into an easy situation if you think they need to regain their confidence. You’ve got to know how to motivate them. Some guys respond to the whip. Others don’t.”

Scotty Bowman is known as one of the best coaches in hockey history. Source: BalleCourbe.ca

College football coach Tom Martinez put it a bit more bluntly: “Everybody’s life is a bowl of whipped cream and shit, and my job is to even things out. If a kid’s got a lot of shit in his life, I’m going to stir in some whipped cream. If a kid’s life is pure whipped cream, then I’m going to stir in some shit.”

And perhaps the greatest coach of all-time in any sport, John Wooden, once told his players, “I’m not going to treat you players all the same. Giving you the same treatment doesn’t make sense, because you’re all different…you are different from each other in height, weight, background, intelligence, talent, and many other ways. For that reason, each one of you deserves individual treatment that is best for you. I will decide what that treatment will be.”

These are three coaches who achieved incredible success in their lives. But of course, sports is not the same as small business. That doesn’t mean that we can’t take a few lessons from them, though.

For example, if I have two employees who continuously make the same mistake, but employee A is being hard on himself and employee B is acting like it’s no big deal, you can’t treat them the same and expect a great result. Like Coach Martinez, I’m going to put my arm around employee A and lift their spirits up, then work with them to figure out why they keep making the mistake. Employee B, however, is going to need some tough love until they realize why it is a problem in the first place. Then we’ll work on fixing the mistake. The end result is the same for each, but the process is different.

What about the simple task of showing up on time? We’ve all had staff members who call out or come in late on a regular basis. But if one employee is coming in late because they’re having trouble getting their kid out of bed, dressed, and to school, while the other just keeps hitting snooze on their alarm because they’re choosing not to take their job seriously, you have to handle those differently. Again, the end goal is the same – both of these employees need to figure out their personal life to get to work on time. But the first employee will certainly need some tenderness from you, since they’re already having a difficult time.

I always erred on the side of caution when dealing with staff issues. Everyone needed to feel welcome, but I also needed to manage people as individuals without crossing a legal line. There’s no question that it’s not easy. How do you ensure it doesn’t cross that line? The difference in how you treat people should always be tied to performance and business needs, not personal characteristics or policy.

When your management of someone becomes problematic is when you are not applying company policy equally to different people. If you don’t have a written policy or handbook, you should. If you do, make sure you are sticking to it and not brushing things under the rug. If one employee gets an extra vacation day and another doesn’t, that’s a huge red flag. That’s not treating people as individuals. If one employee is allowed to join the healthcare plan 15 days earlier than your policies allow, that’s potentially discrimination against someone who wasn’t offered the same luxury.

With everyone a single email or phone call away from a lawsuit in today’s day and age, it’s an extremely tricky tightrope to walk. But if you can find a way to do so without crossing that line, you will find your staff much happier, tighter-knit, and efficient. Fairness doesn’t mean treating everyone the same. It means holding everyone to the same standard, and then giving them what they need to meet it.

1. I’m not going to pretend there isn’t still discrimination in the sporting world, but for the sake of simplicity, let’s not touch that one right now.