February at my company is when everyone receives their performance rating for the previous year, which not only assesses their performance at work but influences year-end compensation. I imagine most companies operate on a similar schedule.
Rating season is a lot like a high school classroom after a big test. Leaders pull their direct reports aside to walk them through designations and to share feedback on the year. Out in the halls, colleagues quietly discuss their own performance and fish for information about their peers.
In my nearly seven years at the company, I have yet to experience a year-end process that everyone felt was fair. By its very nature, any system which rates thousands of individuals against a handful of simplified metrics is bound to be imperfect, and this one is no different. Since no one single person can objectively evaluate everyone side by side, leaders are left to advocate on behalf of their teams, and corporate politics and individual personalities end up playing a larger role than they should.
Here are some common complaints:
- “My boss didn’t go to bat for me.”
- “My work wasn’t high profile enough.”
- “All that matters is who you know, not what you do.”
- “The system rewards poor performers and punishes high performers.”
We can all empathize with this type of frustration, because each of us has experienced it on many occasions. When things don’t go our way, we reach for a phrase we mastered as kids: “That’s not fair.” It’s not fair that our friend got more Christmas presents than we did. It’s not fair that our classmate got into our dream school and we didn’t. And it’s not fair that our coworker got a better rating than we did.
But the core issue is often not what we get, but what everyone else gets. The problem is not that I don’t make enough money, but that I make less than someone else who does the exact same job. Outcomes that we would consider fair in a silo become unfair only once we learn that others are coming out ahead.
That would be just fine, if comparison were a productive activity, but it’s not – focusing on how we stack up against other people is practically guaranteed to make us feel awful. It is a recipe for jealousy, bitterness and resentment that is unlikely to change anything.
Imagine what a superpower it would be to learn to be happy with what we have, rather than fight to get what someone else has.
This is not a new idea.
Arthur Brooks, in writing about Aristotle’s rules for a good life, reminds each of us to “stop struggling for [our] fair share.” As the philosopher originally put it, “the equitable man is one who by choice and habit… is content to receive a smaller share although he has the law on his side.”
In the Bible, Jesus tells us the parable of the workers in the vineyard, who are upset to find out they received the same pay for a full day’s work as someone else received for only one hour of work. “These who were hired last worked only one hour,” they said, “and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.” Rather than be happy with the fair day’s wage they received, the workers focused on the injustice of their treatment compared to the others, to which the landowner replied: “I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?”
And if none of this sounds familiar, all of us learned a version of this lesson in preschool:
“You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.”
As I’ve tried to get better at this myself over the past few years, I’ve found a few questions to be helpful when I feel like I’m getting treated unfairly:
- Would I consider this situation unfair if I had nothing to compare it to?
- Have I received more than my fair share elsewhere, and would I be willing to give that up in exchange?
- What might the people I am envious of be envious about in my own life?
In my experience, the answers to these questions typically reveal a lot to be grateful for. For those of us living in the United States, working high paying jobs, our idea of “injustice” would look pretty sweet to most of the world. I expect we all would be happier if we could learn to meet these injustices with a smile, and to focus our energy on doing what we can to relieve true injustice elsewhere.
– Emmett
What I’m Reading:
The 2% Manifesto – Michael Easter
“It turns out that only 2% of people will do the harder thing that has a greater long-term benefit if there’s an easier option. This applies to how we exercise, eat, work, create, think, and spend our time and attention.”
Divergent Path – Friday Forward
“Today, more than ever, there is a ton of pressure of kids and young adults to follow ‘The Path’ – getting perfect grades, attending the best universities, and grinding to get a high-paying job in medicine, law, finance or something similarly prestigious. Risk-taking and bold decisions are decidedly not a part of The Path.”
How Far Can Running Take You After Decades of Addiction? – Peter Flax
“It’s tough to fully grasp the scale of this turnaround until you see Ammons run—to see him metronomically cruise 4:50 miles for more than an hour or to watch him push himself to the brink of consciousness in an interval session at sunrise. Then you can absorb the way he embraces suffering—relishing the revelation of what his body can do while immersing himself in pain that must feel like a cosmic body rub compared to waking up every morning in opiate withdrawal.”