Three Things Leaders Can Do To Create A Just Work (Fair & Reasonable) Environment
For me, the chief joy in being a leader is creating an environment in which people on a team love their job and love working together. Leaders can create the conditions for each person to do the best work of their lives and to build the best relationships of their careers. Just Work enriches our personal lives, too, because everything gets better when we bring home joy instead of angst and when we are energized rather than depleted by our work. We start to take a step in the direction of our dreams. Just Work allows a team to achieve remarkable results collectively to be happy individually.
Too many leaders act as though creating a fair and equitable working environment is somehow separate and apart from their core job as a leader, as if their “real” job is achieving a particular metric. But more and more leaders are beginning to understand that they will have trouble getting shit done unless they first create a just working environment.
As Bill Walsh, the former head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, put it in the title of his book The Score Takes Care of Itself. Yes, his job was to win football games. But he couldn’t win games by focusing too much on the score. The score was a lagging indicator of what he was doing well or badly as a coach. He needed to back up and understand the leading indicators: behaving ethically, demanding high standards, holding people accountable, and teaching the players the right way to play.
The good news is that there are specific things you can do to stamp out bias, prejudice, and bullying on your team: you can create a norm of bias disruption, you can write a code of conduct to address prejudice, and you can create consequences for bullying. By doing these three things you can create a virtuous cycle, making them less likely to occur in the future. The bad news is that it’s only a virtuous cycle, not a perpetual motion machine: you have to tend to it daily.
If you think bias, prejudice, and bullying don’t exist on your team, you’re kidding yourself. No, it’s not your fault that these attitudes and behaviors are so common in every society on the planet. But you’re the boss and so it is your problem if you ignore them. To make things more challenging, you can’t take them on alone. You’re going to need your team’s help. And getting that will require you to make it safe for them to help you, because they are even more reluctant to address these issues than you are.
Get started! Don’t wait for reports of incidents and problems to come to you.
Read more in Chapter 5 of Just Work: https://www.justworktogether.com/the-book