I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership lately, as part of my professional work and my personal life. I find it’s easy to lose empathy for the demands of leaders when you are disappointed by them and it is equally easy to discount the opinions of those you lead as being shortsighted and based on an incomplete understanding. I often hear leaders say something to the effect of there will always be people you can’t please or who constantly want more so all you can do is what you think is best. There may be some truth to not being able to satisfy everyone and, in my own leadership roles, I have had to get comfortable with making the best choices I can, knowing they will not be perfect, knowing that I will make mistakes. Still, I have also seen that sentiment used to avoid the hard but necessary work of bringing groups along, particularly in moments of change.
One framework I’ve found tremendously helpful is fair process, which was first considered in the context of a legal justice system, and later for the workplace in a 2003 Harvard Business Review article by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne called, Fair Process: Managing in the Knowledge Economy. The big takeaway is that “employees will commit to a manager’s decision—even one they disagree with—if they believe that the process the manager used to make the decision was fair.” The article highlights three principles that characterize fair process, which are sometimes referred to as the three Es: engagement, explanation, and expectation clarity.
I thought of these recently after starting work with a team experiencing conflict and significant lack of trust between the director and the rest of the staff. One major source of these challenges has been the move to a new software. Team members felt overwhelmed by orienting to this new system and disappointed that they were not part of the process to choose it. It has led to high stress, low morale, and clocking many extra hours to catch up.
As I learned more about what happened with this change, it became clear how all of the three Es were missing. There had been no meaningful engagement to get input from team members who were the primary users of this software and had strong opinions about what was important in it. There was no opportunity to bring their wisdom, experience, and skills to the decision-making process and this felt to them like a blatant sign of disrespect.
When I talked to the director, he explained some of the reasons the managers had chosen this new software, and, in his mind, it was very much focused on what would be accessible and user-friendly for his staff. However in talking to some of the team members, they could not articulate this explanation themselves. Explanation can build empathy for leaders and all they are holding by pulling back the curtain to see what goes into the choices they make. This does not necessarily mean full transparency on every aspect of that decision-making, but sharing some of these factors can foster collective ownership for complex choices.
Lastly, team members shared frustration that, short of a few training sessions, there was little communication about what this transition would mean, how their day-to-day routines might look different, and how the whole team would work together to navigate the process. Expectation clarity likely might not have lessened the difficulty of transferring to a brand new system for almost all key tasks, but it would have helped the team feel more prepared for and supported during it.
Even beyond the workplace, I find there are so many applications to these principles, anything from parenting (kids care an awful lot about fairness) to local government (think town halls or public council meetings). I encourage you to consider how you can model these principles in your leadership roles and how you might advocate for them from your leaders when they are missing. These three E’s can not only help us reach smarter, more innovative decisions but also cultivate a sense of belonging and trust.