In a previous blog, I wrote about Ideological Necrophilia, the continued love of ideas that have been tried repeatedly and proved (again and again) not to work.  One failed idea that I wrote about is that we need to treat everyone equally. 

In this blog, I want to flush out the mistake of treating everyone equally.

This idea of treating people equally comes in three separate areas:

• Managing people equally
• Applying rules and procedures equally across the company
• Paying people equally based on job position

Each one of these ideas has failed and will continue to fail – from a leadership perspective, for the benefit of the company, and in terms of fairness.

Managing People Equally:  The saying goes that we should manage everyone by the Golden Rule.

Manage People as You Yourself Would Want to Be Managed

This idea does a disservice to us as managers and to the people who work for us.  We need to realize that we are not managing ourselves, we are managing other people who have different capabilities, personalities, and goals.  Taking that into consideration, we need to manage each of our direct reports by the Platinum Rule:

Manage Your People as They Need to Be Managed

Applying Rules and Procedures Equally Across the Company: Yes, we want to be reasonably consistent and fair in applying company rules and procedures. But we cannot be ironclad.  We need to make exceptions for different people’s situations and capabilities.  The relevant example in today’s age is work from home.  Certain individuals may be allowed to work from home, while others cannot.  Much of this depends upon the performance of the person and their capability to be productive working from home. Work from home is a privilege that needs to be earned every day.

Paying People Equally Based on Job Position:  Equality in pay is a nice sentiment that fails every test of fairness and business sense.  We need to pay people (without discriminating based on race, sex, religion, etc.) based on their performance level and their contribution to the company.  Two people in the same role may need to be paid significantly differently.  Equality in pay leads to poor performers being overpaid and top performers being underpaid.  Over the long term, the poor performers will stay, and the top performers will leave, significantly hurting the business.

Conclusion

We cannot manage our business based on equality.  Instead, we should focus on being fair.  People are different and should be treated differently in how they are managed and how they are paid. Life may not be fair.  But our business should be.