Unfair treatment is poor management

Earlier today I posted a piece about how relationships change when you become the manager of people who were once your peers. This is a related problem that sometimes occurs: you inadvertently play favourites among your people.

When you give preferential treatment to one staff member over others, you lose credibility as a manager. When the preference is due to superior work, you may be able to get away with it, but when it's due to a previous friendship, common interests or other non-merit reasons, you are asking for trouble.

Take some time out and take a calm look at how you interact with all your people. Are you scrupulously fair? Do you give the benefit of the doubt to some, while assuming others are at fault, without careful analysis of the situation? Make a point of going through this exercise at the end of each day. Think of your interactions with each person during that day. Your management diary or notebook is a good tool for this—I'll talk about that in another post.

Could you reasonably be accused of favouritism? If so, make it a point to rid your management style of this insidious problem, which will set other employees against you and make it more difficult to manage effectively.

Effective managers are fair managers.