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Leadership Assessment #8 – Firm but Fair

Guest post by: Robert Whipple

Article Overview: There are hundreds of assessments for leaders. The content and quality of these assessments vary greatly. You can spend a lot of time and money taking surveys to tell you the quality of your leadership. There are a few leading indicators that can be used to give a pretty good picture of the overall quality of your leadership. These are not good for diagnosing problems or specifying corrective action, but they can tell you where you stand quickly. Here is one of my favorite measures. It is being firm but fair.

Leadership Assessment #8 – Firm but Fair



Firm but Fair

Great leaders know how to navigate the minefield of being compassionate buthave a sense of discipline within the organization. It really is a delicate balance. You need to make accommodations in some circumstances and draw a firm line on others.

We have all seen leaders who are too eager to please. They bend over backwards to be accommodating to the outside needs of people in the organization. In return, people take advantage of the leader and make more requests for special consideration. Also, since people can observe the concessions made by the leader with other people, a sense of equity demands that when a similar situation comes up the same concession is extended to others. Before long, the leader has lost all sense of control. In a desperate attempt to regain order, the leader tries to draw lines on the sand. This is annoying to people who have become accustom to a more lax interpretation of the rules. So, being too accommodating is dangerous.

On the flip side, going too much "by the book" gains one a reputation for being a hard ass. That reputation limits the amount of discretionary effort people are willing to expend. If a leader shows little compassion for the typical tight spots people find themselves in, he becomes an ogre that demands respect through command and control. Scrooge, before his transformation, was a good example of this kind of leader.

Neither of these extremes is desirable. The "sweet spot" is to have a reputation for being firm with application of the rules, but compassionate as well and willing to be flexible in extreme cases. Also, be cognizant of the need for fairness. This implies putting a damper on the issue of playing favorites. I have written elsewhere on the issue of favorites. Briefly, we need to recognize that we cannot avoid having favorites within any population. We are human beings. What the great leader does is show in many ways that, even though there are favorites, he does not "play favorites." To avoid this, the leader tries to treat each person as a favorite and operates outside his comfort zone for some small percentage of the time.

One obvious thing that some leaders miss is that being firm implies having standards. Neither of the extremes in this dimension is advisable. On the one hand, you can have a burdensome employee manual with thousands of rules that people find hard to remember. If you find yourself "hiding behind" the employee manual when making decisions on personal requests, you may be in danger of over doing the bureaucratic mumbo jumbo. On the other extreme is the office where there are no formal rules, and we just try to always do what is right. That is a slippery slope because without some form of standards people don't know what to expect.

The optimum position is to have a crisp and concise set of expectations, and everyone should know they are enforced. People should also be aware that there are emergency situations where a rule can be waived, but those situations are rare. Knowing when to grant an exception is what puts the art in leadership. In general it is best to lean toward the formal side.

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Article Tags: Fair, Firm, Leadership, standards, Trust



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