A company cuts costs, so every budget drops by the same percentage. Layoffs come and each team loses the same 10% share, so a team of 8 loses 1 person because that is what it rounds to. Raises go out, and everyone gets the same 4%. It looks fair, right? Equal treatment, no favorites.
But it is not fair. The same 4% is a nice bump at the top and pocket change at the bottom. The same cut barely touches a big, well-paid team and guts a small one. Flat looks fair on a spreadsheet. It usually is not.
Seeing that gap, between what looks fair and what is fair, is the last thing I want to cover in this series.
This is the ability to see the whole system you sit inside, not just your own corner of it.
And I want to tell you about the leader who taught me what it looks like. I was early in my career when I watched him do this, and it shaped how I thought about leadership for the rest of it, through every advisory role after, and later when I was leading a team of my own.
I was once in a year-end bonus conversation. Headquarters had mandated two things:
That floor was the problem. One of the people it would hit was a junior admin in a back-office function. Not a big earner. The kind of person who quietly keeps a whole office running so everyone else can do their jobs. His bonus was already a small slice of a modest salary. Now it would drop by the same percentage as people earning many times what he did, in functions that had taken home far bigger rewards when times were good.
So I asked what a lot of us were quietly thinking: "Why should everyone take the same cut?"
The leader paused. He could have said those are the rules. Instead he said, "good question..."
We have been focused on implementing the decision. We forgot to question it. Let's walk through what the impact is.
We both agreed that what looked fair was not. Losing this junior admin would be costly. Bilingual talent with that skillset and work ethic is hard to find and harder to replace. And other roles across the organization were in the same position. That raised a bigger question: what other unintended consequences was this floor going to create?
The overall pool still had to come down, as leaders we had a responsibility to deliver on that. But he threw out the flat floor.
Then he looked across the whole population and asked a better question. "Who got the upside? "The revenue-generating teams had taken home the big rewards in the good years. The back-office functions never did. They keep the lights on, steady, year in and year out, and they do not ride the wins. So why would they take the same cut as the people who did?
Some hits were needed. But not at the lowest admin levels nor in functions that never shared the upside in the first place. So the weight went where the rewards had gone.
He had the courage to take it up the chain. He went to the CEO and said he wanted to do it differently, and that his own senior people would carry more.
And the CEO went further. He looked at it, saw these were genuine back-office functions that never got the big ups, and admitted this was the wrong approach to take. He reduced the cut. He moved it to the teams that held the greatest responsibility for the business results. These were the same teams who got the big upsides.
In 20+ years, I can count on one hand the times I have seen a leader quickly admit the original approach wasn't right, and then actually do something about it.
Most of us probably just blame our boss, say it's above our pay grade, and just carry on.
What this leader and the CEO did is genuinely rare. It would have been so easy to apply the flat number and move on. No one would have blamed anyone. The spreadsheet would have looked clean.
This is not about being kind. Systems awareness is about seeing past your own part to the whole, catching when something technically correct is actually wrong, and asking the question everyone else is too busy to ask.
Have you ever watched a leader do this, take on more themselves so the people below them would not have to? I would genuinely love to hear about it. The good ones deserve to be talked about.
And if you have ever been the person who saw the flat rule and wanted to ask why, that is a conversation I am always glad to have. Please message me at diane@ptminsights.com.
