How do you prevent favouritism in the workplace?

Favoritism in the workplace rarely begins as malice. It starts with speed. A founder or manager reaches for the two people who have delivered reliably in the past, assigns them the next urgent task, and keeps them close in the meetings where context is shared. Those two learn more, receive sharper feedback, and appear to outperform, while others are left chasing fragments of information. Over time performance looks like access rather than capability. Trust thins out, and a story takes hold that proximity to power is the only real KPI. Preventing favoritism is not a matter of nicer intentions. It is a matter of building structures that make clarity easier than convenience and that hold up even when the most senior person is away.

The core mistake is not uneven kindness but uneven clarity. When ownership and decision rights are vague, leaders default to the familiar. They pick the person who requires less explanation or the one who is already in their chat window. Proximity then pretends to be performance. People closer to the center get clean briefs. People further away get last minute instructions. The gap grows, and the original cause is forgotten. Repair begins at the first moment work enters the system. If intake is informal, private, or untracked, the same names will cycle through high value assignments. A shared intake channel or board, clear owners for each request, explicit approvers, and visible due dates turn guesswork into process. The person who decides is named, the person who delivers is named, and the two are not confused. This is the mundane scaffolding that keeps opportunity from clustering around a few.

Clarity matters most when the founder is absent. A useful stress test asks whether the team would still know who decides, who delivers, and what good looks like if the most senior leader disappeared for two weeks. If the answer is no, the team is running on personal memory rather than institutional design. Three simple artifacts close that gap. An ownership map lists the single accountable owner for each major workflow. A decision matrix spells out who proposes, who checks, and who approves. A definition of done describes quality in observable terms for recurring outputs. None of this is bureaucratic theater. It is how a company chooses fairness without slowing down.

Recognition practices often harden favoritism into culture. If praise lands in private messages and bonuses are decided in rooms with shifting rules, distrust becomes rational. Predictable cycles with stated criteria change the story. Publish what counts and how it is measured, from incident response time to cross functional impact. People will accept unequal outcomes when they trust that the process is visible and repeatable. They will not accept invisible rules that seem to move for insiders. Language plays a part here too. Casual labels like high potential or leadership material sneak into conversations and shape opportunity without definition. Replacing labels with evidence brings the discussion back to observable behaviors and results. When someone is ready for more scope, point to deliverables and habits that justify the judgment. When someone is not ready, point to the gaps and show the plan.

Feedback loops deserve the same redesign. In many teams, only a few people receive detailed coaching because only a few have regular time with the boss. Standardized one to ones for every direct report and brief quarterly peer samples create breadth. Use the same questions in each cycle so signal rises above noise and so the organization learns what feedback looks like. This is not about making every interaction identical. It is about ensuring that learning opportunities are not monopolized by the people who already sit closest to power.

Meetings are another quiet engine of favoritism. Extended, unstructured sessions reward confidence, endurance, and relationship capital rather than clarity of thought. Pre reads, time boxed segments, and rotating facilitators counterbalance the gravitational pull toward the usual voices. Assign note taking and action logging to a role, not to the same person every time. Publish outcomes the same day in writing. When artifacts are reliable, being in the room loses some of its political value. Contributing to the work gains more.

Escalation patterns reveal access inequalities in the same way. In the absence of a visible path, people escalate through relationships. They message the person they know rather than the role responsible. This builds a private queue for the favored few. A clear protocol that defines triggers, receivers, and response norms protects speed without creating a back channel. Encourage escalations to roles, not personalities, and capture responses where others can learn from them.

Hiring and internal mobility can either dilute favoritism or reinforce it. Ad hoc processes tilt toward familiarity and produce culture clones who shore up existing networks of trust. Structured interviews, shared rubrics, calibrated panels, and short written decision records shift the focus back to evidence. Apply the same discipline to internal transfers and promotions. Publish opportunities and criteria before decisions are made and invite interest rather than tapping a favorite in private. Transparency before the fact is the credible test of fairness. Announcing reasons after the fact helps, but it cannot substitute for an open field.

Incentives must point leaders toward broad capability, not only rapid delivery. If managers are judged solely on near term output, they will concentrate risky work with their most trusted operators and call it efficiency. Add measures that reward bench health, from retention of critical roles to the progression of junior staff and the existence of documented succession plans. This does not punish speed. It teaches that building capacity beyond two lieutenants is part of the job.

Accountability needs a place to live. Values on a wall cannot hold back quiet bias. A simple monthly culture review gives the organization an operational way to notice drift. Look at the distribution of ad hoc assignments, the dispersion of stretch opportunities, the patterns of recognition, and the shape of promotion outcomes. Concentration around a few names is not an indictment of those people. It is a signal that process needs attention. Fix the mechanism that produced the skew rather than blaming individuals for taking work that was offered to them.

Senior leaders set the tone through everyday habits. Two are especially powerful. Share the same core context with everyone who needs it at the same time. Weekly updates on product and revenue should not have a shadow version for insiders. Then make office hours predictable and bounded. Invite questions about priorities and systems, not private exceptions. When access is structured, social closeness loses some of its exchange value.

There will be crunches when a small group carries the load. That is not failure. It becomes failure if the exception turns into the model. Debrief publicly after the push. Explain why a narrow team took the lead and what changes will spread capability next time. Rotate hero roles by design. If the same names appear in three consecutive incidents, the company has a dependency, not resilience.

Measurement keeps intentions honest. Watch the share of unplanned tasks that land on the same two people. If it regularly exceeds a third, intervene. Track invites to planning meetings, allocation of stretch work, and the cadence of skip level feedback. Use a simple monthly snapshot that any manager can read in minutes. Complexity creates a new form of opacity.

All of this asks leaders to choose emotional discipline over reflex. It is natural to prefer colleagues who anticipate your needs or cushion your weaknesses. It is natural to reward the path that looks fastest under pressure. The question is not whether preferences exist. The question is whether the system allows those preferences to shape outcomes. Preventing favoritism is less about policing feelings and more about designing conditions where access aligns with responsibility, recognition follows visible criteria, and decisions leave auditable trails. When those conditions are in place, performance stops looking like a popularity contest. It resembles what most leaders wanted in the first place, which is a clear and repeatable way for people to do their best work without guessing whose good graces they need.

A practical starting sequence keeps momentum high. Write the ownership map for the ten workflows that drive your results. Set a single approver for each. Publish a definition of done that removes guesswork in recurring outputs. Move all new requests into one visible channel. Standardize one to ones and short quarterly peer samples. Run a monthly culture review using a small set of distribution metrics. Announce promotion criteria ahead of opportunity windows. Tighten meeting design so airtime is balanced and outcomes are written. Tie managerial performance to delivery and to bench health. These moves reinforce one another and make fairness cheaper to maintain than favoritism. Each month, ask two questions. Who owns this, and who believes they own it. What would break if the two most trusted operators were away for a month. Wherever the answers reveal dependency, fix the system at the point where the dependency starts. Real culture is what people do when you are not in the room. Real fairness is what survives your absence.