Life, Liberty, and Equal Treatment?

Before we turn the corner and begin working through some skills we can each hone to lead our teams more effectively, and in turn yield higher engagement and stronger profit margins, let’s circle back to where I left off last time after my time on the ole soap box about being countable… 

Just outside my office, we have a really big copy of the Declaration of Independence hanging on the wall. If memory serves, it’s one like Nicholas Cage got from the Smithsonian gift shop in National Treasure, and I think having it matted and framed was far more costly than the actual copy. So be it, I still place huge value on all it represents!

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson opened the preamble of that great document by stating, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

As much as I’d really like to go off on a rabbit trail about his intentional use of the capital C in Creator and the sentence that immediately follows the one I just shared, defining the very limited purpose and scope of government, that’s not where I want to go (for now) with regards to the importance of team leadership… That said, let’s consider those certain unalienable rights - Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness - as it relates to earning the kind of influence we’ll need in order to create a sense of teamwork in the organizations we lead.

Having just emphasized how critical it is that you and I be extremely consistent, being countable when it counts, I need to hit on what often becomes a really tough topic; a topic that can ruffle a lot of feathers in one way or another.

What’s that topic? Equality, often referred to as fairness…

Think back to that comment I made before about even the most consistent treatment not always being viewed as fair. And if you have kids, I’d challenge you to think about how many times they’ve told you something wasn’t fair. Gosh, I even heard a 50 year old male make a comment recently that someone else had responsibility for feeding his kids - and tied it to fairness…

Let’s be honest, what any given person considers as fairness or equality can be very closely tied to their perception. As leaders, there’s no way that we’ll ever be able to effectively serve the perception of everyone on our teams at all times. Jefferson did claim that happiness was an unalienable right, he said the pursuit of happiness was!

So how can we possibly approach this in a way that shows effective team leadership? In my experience, our only real option is to be as consistent as we possibly can AND in a way that’s just (the adverb, not the adjective, which means “based on or behaving according to what’s morally right). 

During the years I worked in a safety role, part of my responsibility was to help lead every incident investigation. In many organizations, the general perception is that you get written up if you’re injured in an accident. And unfortunately, that perception is far too often based on fact. Quite frankly, there were indeed times when we issued disciplinary action to an individual who was injured in a workplace incident, but it was tied directly to whether or not they violated a work rule or safety rule. If no policy was violated, no disciplinary action was issued. While that wasn’t always how the scenario was perceived by the individual who was injured or the folks they worked beside and told afterward, there were still a few issues with that approach even when we followed it consistently.

Here’s the first issue… Just like we don’t get a ticket every time we exceed the speed limit, someone isn’t injured every time they do something that violates a work or safety rule. To that end, I can point to far too many occasions where supervisors and managers were right beside an employee violating a rule but didn’t so much as comment on the behavior since nothing went wrong! Both consequences, not getting injured each time and the observed policy violation not being addressed, only reinforced that the policy violation was acceptable - at least as long as nothing bad happened…

The second issue ties directly to the reactive nature of issuing discipline after the injury; rubbing salt in the wound so to speak. That ultimately sent a message tying the punishment to reporting the incident rather than the actual behavior that caused it.

While it was never popular, I frequently challenged management team members when they pushed to issue disciplinary action to someone who was injured. I asked for examples of when they had applied similar disciplinary action to someone they witnessed using the same behaviors without being injured. When they couldn’t, which was nearly every time, I asked them to clarify what the discipline was really for - violating the policy or getting hurt. Again, that was never a popular question but it certainly drove home the point that our responsibility as leaders is to provide our team with just treatment! Not necessarily always fair, but definitely morally right…

If we’re not willing to do the work to be consistent in our actions and build a just and equitable environment, the team leadership skills we’ll be working through next will be of little value!