How Do I Explain a Call to the Person Who Lost?
Nobody accuses you of playing favorites when there’s enough to go around.
You have two open slots and two good candidates? No complaint. There’s budget for everyone who asked for the conference? Nobody writes to HR. The word favoritism only shows up when something is scarce. There’s only room for one promotion, one plum project, one headcount, or one exception to a policy.
Which means the accusation is almost never really about who you like. It’s about what the person who lost couldn’t understand. They watched a decision come out of a room they weren’t in, and the only explanation available to them was the relationship. So that’s the explanation they used.
You can’t make the scarcity go away. You can make the decision traceable.
Three gates for decision making
Every hard allocation call has to clear three gates. If you miss one of them, then you’ve got a problem, but each is a problem in a different way.
Gate one: Is it good for the team?
Not good for one person on the team, but is it good for the unit that has to keep working together on Monday. A promotion that rewards the loudest person teaches everyone else that volume is the selection criterion. Reassigning the hardest work to your strongest engineer looks efficient right up until she’s the only one who can ever do hard work.
Gate two: Is it good for the company?
You’re accountable to the company and responsible to your team, and those two things point in different directions more frequently than people would like to admit. A decision that’s good for your team and bad for the company isn’t a decision you get to make. It’s a request you get to escalate to your manager. Managers who blur this line spend a lot of energy defending calls that are hard to defend in retrospect.
Gate three: Is it legible?
Can the person who lost reconstruct how you got there without you in the room? This is the gate almost everyone skips. Gates one and two happen in your head. Gate three is the only one anyone else can see.
A decision can clear the first two gates clean and still detonate. Right call, no trail, and you look exactly like a manager protecting your favorite.
The worked example
You have one senior slot available on the team, but you have two candidates.
Marcus is visible. He presents at the all-hands, he answers first in every meeting, he’s the name leadership says when they say your team’s name. Priya is not. She’s the one who caught the data problem before you deployed it to all your customers. It would have cost you major problems, and she caught it quietly, and three people know about it.
You promote Priya.
Marcus hears about it Thursday afternoon. In the absence of anything else, here’s the story he builds: she’s closer to you, you two were on that project together last year, and I got passed over for a friendship. That story is now in the team’s slack by Friday, and it is very hard to get out.
Use the gates:
- Good for the team? Promoting on visibility teaches nine people that the path to senior is talking more. Promoting on judgment teaches them the path is catching the thing nobody asked you to look for. Priya clears.
- Good for the Company? You want the word “senior” to be meaningful because it shows scope of judgment, not scope of audience. Priya clears.
- is it Legible? Marcus has no idea any of that was the criterion. The team has no idea what your criteria were. You fail. Do not pass go, pay $200.
You did well on two out of three, but two out of three is a favoritism accusation.
The Decision Trail
You can fix this with an artifact. If you think you’re going to have a tough decision and you’ll need to justify it later, create a decision artifact.
The easiest example of a decision artifact is the feedback from candidate interviews. If you’re doing this the best way, then you ask yourself how you’re going to select a candidate before you start the interview process. For example:
- Does the candidate demonstrate strong judgement in high complexity situations. Can they present mulitple examples?
- Does the candidate demonstrate understanding of how to apply the latest technology. They can provide examples.
- Does the candidate explain how to break down a technical problem into sufficient subsystems.
- Etc.
Then assess the candidates on the same criteria. It’s easy, it’s defensible, and it’s easy to recall why you made a decision after time has passed. That’s your Decision Trail.
For the Marcus situation, have a 1:1 and explain your decision. Marcus still doesn’t get the promotion. He still doesn’t like it. Then explain when you announce Priya’s promotion what you were looking for (your criteria) and how she met or exceeded them (with specific examples). Don’t say how Marcus didn’t meet them because that’s not right either.
But he cannot say he doesn’t know how you decided, and he can’t sell that version to anybody else on the team, because you can explain it to all of them with the same criterion. You want to be a remarkably consistent manager, because consistency is what lets people aim. A team that can’t predict how you decide will spend its energy guessing instead of working.
Where AI helps
This is where AI can help you. Develop your criteria, then feed that to your AI to create a form . Then you can fill in that form to have an artifact of why you made a given decision.
Don’t use the AI to justify your decision. The order protects you. Criterion first, then evidence, then the call. The model only enters the scene after you define your criteria. If you reverse that order then you’ve built a machine for justifying favoritism.
If you follow this process, it’ll help encourage you to be a more structured reasoner. Again, it’s about consistency as a manager, because consistent managers lead strong teams.
Your next move
Before your next scarce-resource call, write the criterion line and date it. Do it before you make the decision, not after. If you can’t write it in one sentence, you’re not ready to decide.
See you next week!
Frank
You’re getting this because you’re on the Manager School list. Thursdays are email-only — this one doesn’t go up on LinkedIn. Forward it to a manager who’s about to make a call they can’t explain.
See you next week!
-Frank
