Key takeaways
- Favoritism builds through small, repeated inconsistencies: who gets the benefit of the doubt, the better assignments, the more gentle corrections, and increased flexibility.
- For HR and leadership, this is a manager and culture issue, and sometimes an actual legal risk under Title VII.
- Consistency doesn’t mean treating everyone the same. Standards should hold steady for everyone; how a manager delivers coaching and feedback can and should flex.
- The fix is a management system: written expectations, pattern tracking by manager, standardized access to opportunities, and ongoing leadership training.
- The fastest individual fix is consistent follow-up, because employees can see it happening.
When employees believe the rules depend on who their manager likes, trust drops quickly. What looks like favoritism on the surface is almost always a consistency problem underneath: uneven expectations, uneven accountability, uneven communication, and uneven follow-up.
Fix the consistency and most of the “favoritism” disappears.
Favoritism is more common than most leaders assume. In a longstanding survey of senior executives conducted by Penn Schoen Berland for Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, 92% said favoritism plays a role in who gets promoted, and 56% of executives with more than one candidate already knew who they wanted before the process started. Employees feel that, even when no one says it out loud.
We see this constantly. EANE trainer Sandi Mauro points to leaders promoted from within who often struggle with favoritism when old peer relationships and friendships follow them into the role.
What favoritism usually looks like to your team
Teams judge favoritism by behaviors, not by a manager’s intentions. When one employee always gets the best projects, the loosest deadlines, the gentlest feedback, and first change at development, everyone notices.
Perceived fairness breaks into three parts:
- who gets rewards and opportunities (distributive)
- how decisions get made (procedural)
- how people get treated (interactional)
Favoritism tends to damage all three at once.
Comfort is a big part of the trap of favoritism. New managers tend to delegate less to the people they feel awkward leading, spend more time with the people they naturally click with, and rescue favored employees instead of holding them accountable.
When favoritism becomes a legal risk
There’s a bigger risk to favoritism. Title VII bars discrimination in compensation, terms, conditions, privileges of employment, and training, and it bars retaliation against employees who oppose unlawful practices (EEOC).
So when uneven access to opportunities, leniency, discipline, pay, or development starts lining up with protected characteristics or with who filed a complaint, what began as a credibility problem can turn into a discrimination or retaliation claim. The pattern matters more than the intent.
Consistency doesn’t mean sameness
Here’s where a lot of managers need clarity. Fair leadership means holding every person to the same standards while meeting them where they are on coaching, communication, and support.
Mauro draws a useful line: managers often aim for equality, but real leadership calls for equity.
People have different work styles, different confidence levels, and different feedback needs, and adapting to that is part of the job.
Goals, deadlines, behavioral rules, documentation expectations, and follow-up cadence shouldn’t depend on who the manager likes. The way feedback gets delivered can and should vary by person so the message actually lands.
Picture two employees who miss the same deadline. Coaching one gently and the other more directly, based on what each responds to, is adapting to each employee’s work style. Letting one slide on the deadline entirely while writing the other up is creating different standards, and the team will read it as favoritism every time.
What your organization should put in place
If you want fewer favoritism complaints, fewer manager-credibility problems, and more consistency across departments, build a management system that makes “be fair” measurable.
- Put manager non-negotiables in writing. Spell out what good work, enough work, attendance, schedule flexibility, recognition, delegation, and corrective action look like in practice.
- Audit the pattern by manager, not just by team. Track turnover, absenteeism, complaints, employee sentiment, productivity, quality, and customer impact. Mauro and Joly both treat these as early signals that a manager needs support before it becomes an HR conversation.
- Make the manager of the manager responsible. Joly says higher-level leaders need to manage how their managers manage, not wait until output drops or a complaint shows up. Employee surveys can surface inconsistency much earlier.
- Standardize access to opportunities. Build a visible process for unique projects, cross-training, promotions, schedule exceptions, and development. It’s good for the culture, and it matters from a risk standpoint too, since federal law explicitly covers training and employment opportunities.
- Train for repeated habits, not one-off inspiration. Gallup found that managers who got the right training were 10% to 22% more engaged themselves, with their teams up to 18% more engaged, with the biggest gains coming from regular, meaningful conversations. EANE’s leadership training is built around exactly that: practical tools managers can use right away to lead clearly and consistently.
What to have your managers do right away
You can’t fix every manager’s instincts overnight, but you can give them concepts they can put into practice. Coach the managers on your team to do five things:
- Reset boundaries out loud. If a manager was promoted from the team, have them explain what changed and what accountability now looks like. Joly specifically recommends re-communicating boundaries rather than assuming the team will read the shift correctly.
- Put expectations in writing. Mauro says this about vague goals: ambiguity turns work into a guessing game. Push managers to set specific goals, timelines, and standards, then revisit them as priorities move.
- Keep a manager log. Mauro argues that managers who don’t keep notes on their people miss patterns in connection, conflict, and follow-up.
- Watch the self-sufficient employees too. Strong performers often get less attention because they need less rescuing, which can turn into uneven visibility and development. Mauro says this creates the appearance, and eventually the reality, of unfairness.
- Follow up every time. Joly emphasizes that delegation only builds credibility when the manager circles back to the task, the deadline, and the standard. Consistent follow-up is one of the fastest ways to rebuild fairness, because employees can see it happening.
And encourage your managers to ask for feedback on fairness and clarity. The useful questions are simple ones:
- Are my expectations clear?
- Do I explain my decisions?
- Does access to opportunities feel fair?
Build the skill before the culture pays for it
Clear standards, manager routines, written follow-up, visible access to opportunities, and stronger leadership training create the kind of consistency people can actually feel.
For HR and organizational leaders, that means treating favoritism as a capability gap and a systems problem to solve, the same way you’d treat any skill your managers were never taught. For managers, it means remembering that a team reads fairness in your patterns over time, long before they read your intentions.