You Think You’re Being Understanding. Your Team Calls It Favouritism.

 You’ve heard it. You’ve probably said it.

“I’m meeting people where they are.”

It sounds like compassion. It sounds like the kind of leader you’re trying to be.

In this episode, I share what happened with a client who runs a plumbing and heating business with her husband. He pulled her aside one Tuesday afternoon and told her the team thought she was playing favourites. She thought she was meeting people where they were. The four people in her back office had been guessing for two years. The fix was a ten-minute conversation.

This episode names the pattern clearly: when standards live only in your head, your team can’t see them, and they reverse-engineer the rules from what they can see. What they see, when you push your strongest performer harder than the struggling one, is favouritism. Your intent doesn’t change what the patterns look like from where they’re sitting.

The leaders who do this are trying to be responsive to who each person is. They’ve confused fairness, which means applying the same standards consistently, with personality-based adjustments of the standards themselves. The cost lands on the strongest performer who feels used, the struggling performer who never finds out he’s underperforming until it’s too late, and everyone else who quietly concludes that accountability follows the person, not the work.

In this episode:

• The story of how a leader learned her team was calling her management style favouritism

• Why “meeting people where they are” can read as the opposite of fairness from where your team is sitting

• The trade-off between firm standards and flexible support, and what gets broken when you flip them

• The three-rung excuse ladder leaders climb when standards live only in their heads

• The ten-minute meeting that resets a team that’s been guessing for years

This week’s permission: You’re allowed to have standards that are clear and consistent. Ones that apply to everyone doing the same work. Naming them out loud, to everyone, at the same time, is finally being fair.