“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
As performance and promotion reviews wrap up at this time of the year, the topic of fairness comes up quite a bit. Fairness is more than just an altruistic principle: It has real-world consequences when people perceive injustice! The “ultimatum game” demonstrates humans’ intrinsic desire for fairness really well. The basic rules are as follows:
- There is a pot of money. For example, $100.
- The proposer can make an offer to the responder on how to split the money. For example, a $50-$50 split or a $70-$30 split.
- The responder then chooses to accept or reject the offer on behalf of both people. If the responder accepts, the money is split according to the proposal; if the responder rejects, neither player receives anything.
From a purely utilitarian view, it is in the responder’s best interest to accept any offer — taking $10 is better than taking nothing. However, over the years, experiments have shown that the further the offer is from an even split, the higher the chance that the responder rejects the offer¹.
At first, researchers hypothesized that this might be due to the experiments being multi-round games. In other words, since there are many rounds, the responder is incentivized to reject the offer in the hope that in the next round, the proposer will provide a better offer. However, studies show that even in single-round games, the rejection rate increases rapidly the further the offer is from an even split. As such, many sociologists and behavioral psychologists argue that human beings have an intrinsic sense of fairness and distaste against injustice — even going so far as to punish injustice at their own expense.
That people might go so far as to punish injustice at their own expense is an incredibly powerful insight for those in leadership roles. As a leader, you have to ensure that the system is fair for everyone, partially because those that are wronged by the system might respond to the injustice by disrupting the system, which can happen at their own expense and have other unintended consequences.
A few years ago during performance review calibration, there was a relatively junior engineering manager (EM), “Zach²”, whose ratings and promotion proposals were wildly uncalibrated compared to the rest of the packets submitted by other EMs. In other words, after comparing each person’s calibration notes, most of the other EMs and senior individual contributors (ICs)³ in the room felt that Zach had overrated many of his reports and that his promotion proposals were not consistent with the bar that everyone else in the org had adhered to.
As discussions went on, however, another EM “Josh” switched his stance and started defending Zach’s ratings and promotions. Confused, I set up a one-on-one with Josh to better understand if there had been context I was unaware of that had prompted his changed stance.
Me: “Hey Josh, did you really feel that Zach’s ICs ratings matched the work they did last half?”
Josh: “No, it’s clear to me that Zach is wildly off in his calibration.”
Me: “Wait, I’m confused — then why are you backing Zach’s ratings? Is there some context that I’m not aware of?”
Josh: “Zach isn’t doing well. He feels cornered by all of us, and we cannot afford to have an engineering manager in our group feeling alone and helpless.”
Me: “I understand where you’re coming from, but how about the fairness of the system and all of the other 50+ ICs?”
Josh: “Why does it matter if a few junior ICs are overrated or promoted?⁴”
I struggled to eloquently answer what was intended to be a rhetorical question by Josh. Later on, I realized that although this particular situation did not raise concerns related to racism, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. captured the spirit succinctly: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
As calibration wrapped up, a few of the promotions were blocked and ratings adjusted, but others still went through as originally proposed. Unsurprisingly, during the next performance calibration cycle, bad decisions from the last cycle were repeatedly used as precedent to justify lower bars for ratings or promotions for the current cycle. For example, “Jared did more this cycle than what Zelda did last cycle, and Zelda got promoted from L3 to L4, so I think Jared should be promoted this cycle.” This put the director in the difficult position of defending why Jared should not be promoted while not wanting to let slip that the previous cycle Zelda’s situation was “special.”
This can also have a trickle-down effect, as employees tend to discuss ratings and promotions with each other. When employees perceive themselves as being treated unfairly by the performance review system, they might leave the team or company silently, or sometimes even express their views publicly on the way out, which can further disrupt morale.
I always coach my manager mentees and reports: “Your job in performance calibration is explicitly NOT to champion for your team, but to champion for fairness. By representing your team fairly, their work should shine through.” Most of us are conflict-averse — few like to get into disagreements with others. However, as a leader, it is your job to create and operate a fair system. If you give in and avoid conflict in the short term at the expense of a just outcome like the director above, while you gain short-term peace, it will harm you and your team in the long term by creating further conflict since humans have an innate desire to strive for fairness, or worse, avenge for injustice.
[1] Colin F. Camerer. Behavioral Game Theory: Experiments in Strategic Interaction.
[2] Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals.
[3] The company typically invited a few very senior ICs to join performance calibrations to provide further detail about the technical complexity of someone’s work.
[4] Ironically, a year later, when “Josh” was tasked with running calibrations for the org, he pushed really hard to downgrade other people’s ratings because he questioned other junior manager’s ratings. But that’s a story for another time.
If you enjoyed this article, check out the two previous articles in this series:
For more musings on tech culture, organization building, and management, follow me on Twitter @kenk616.
