Preferential Treatment Can Poison Company Culture

The same way one should not have a favorite child… one should not have favorite employees. Or if as a leader you do have favorites, at least don’t make it obvious to everyone else when giving them privileges and benefits that are not afforded to other employees.  In my experience, this is a very quick way to create a toxic company culture. The good news is that there is a fairly easy fix.  If you are doing it, stop.  

The problem is many leaders who do this cannot stop… either because they feel they are entitled to do what they want in their company, or they don’t see the harm that it creates in the organization. Having worked with several companies of varying sizes, I recall one engagement where the leadership picked out a few favorite employees (old bar buddies), and let only them stay at the leader’s beach house, charge expensive meals to the company, and even sent one person and their family on a cruise for simply doing the job everyone else was doing, and most of them were doing it much better.

This preferential treatment created a lot of animosity towards leadership and I could feel the tension every time I walked into the office.  Being the outside consultant, I fielded the same question from many employees – is this normal?  In my opinion, this favortism was quite excessive and didn’t need to be as public as it was.  This was compounded by the fact that the “chosen ones” would brag about the extravaganzas they received because, as one of them stated to me, “I deserve it”. 

Leaders need to begin Changing Their Lens, and seeing the direct impact of their preferential treatment.  If one wants to reward employees, it is pretty simple to put together sales contests, service contests, etc. and give everyone an equal shot at some of these cool rewards.  

If you would like help improving the culture of your company, please reach out to me.