Why Fairness Makes High Standards Possible
A manager I’ve been coaching for years told me something fantastic last month.
She’d just gotten her quarterly performance review. She asked her manager what she could do better. He didn’t answer that question directly, but he did tell her she does a really good job holding people accountable.
That might not seem so remarkable, but it stood out to us both because she used to hate accountability. I mean that literally. Those were her words in one of our early sessions after she was promoted.
She was a scientist-turned-manager in a large technical organization, and the pressure coming down from senior leadership that year felt brutal. Identify the low performers, get rid of them, we need higher turnover.
She heard nothing in that framing that allowed for the fact that she actually cared about the people she managed. She’d built her whole professional identity around listening and empathy, and holding someone to a standard that could cost them their job felt like a betrayal of who she was.
So in her second year of managing people, she made “understanding accountability” her goal for the year. She wanted to figure out what accountability could actually mean for someone like her. And what she came to, piece by piece, working through one of the hardest performance cases she’d ever managed, was that the thing making accountability feel brutal was the absence of fairness around it.
Organizational researchers have a name for this. Two names, actually.
Procedural justice is the perceived fairness of a process: was it consistent, transparent, and free of bias? Did the person have a voice in it? Interactional justice is how the person was treated during that process: with dignity, with honesty, with genuine regard for their experience.
When both are present, people can accept hard outcomes.
Research on this is fairly consistent. Employees who experience procedural and interactional fairness are significantly more likely to accept negative feedback, engage with a performance improvement process, and sustain their effort even when the bar is high. They may not like the standard, but they don’t feel ambushed by it, and what’s more, they don’t feel disposable.
When both are absent, high standards don’t just feel hard. They feel like a setup.
This is what most accountability conversations miss. The question isn’t whether you’re willing to hold the line so much as whether you’ve built a process that gives the person a real chance to meet it.
My client built that process from scratch, because nobody handed her one.
For her challenging employee, a scientist who’d struggled under multiple managers across more than a decade, she did a few important things:
- She created a structured audit process that distributed the quality reviews across three colleagues rather than one, because she didn’t want any single person bearing the weight of a decision that could cost him his job.
- She reviewed the audit feedback herself before passing it on, filtering for what was actionable and fair.
- She gave him weekly summaries with specific things to work on.
- When his quality scores were low, she found what was improving and named it out loud, because she understood that someone who believes they can’t succeed won’t try.
She told me later: “Setting clear expectations is actually a compassionate thing to do. It’s kinder to tell someone what’s expected than to let them flounder and fail.”
That reframe is what changed her relationship with accountability. When she was clear she was not cruel. When she measured she did not punish. Fairness was the structure that made the standard survivable and, in his case, meetable. He worked his way off the plan. A year and a half later he was performing at the required rate and moved into a new area where his foreign-language skills were critical.
High standards with no fairness architecture around them are just pressure, producing fear, defensiveness, and performance that only happens when you’re watching.
High standards inside a fair process produce something different. People may push back on the goal or may struggle, but they stay in the conversation because they believe the conversation is real. That’s what “leading with teeth” actually means. The teeth aren’t the consequences. The teeth are the clarity, the consistency, and the investment in the person’s ability to meet the bar you’ve set.
If you want to take stock of how your own accountability practices hold up on the fairness dimension, the reflective self-audit linked below is a good place to start. It will offer you a set of questions designed to help you see where your process has real structural support and where it’s running on good intentions alone.
My client still has the framework she built that year taped to her computer. Without being asked, her manager named accountability as one of her strengths in her performance review. She knew she’d made that change in herself, but hearing him name it as a strength was more than gratifying.
