Originally published in the Unashamedly Ethical newsletter, December 2024.
“I strive to commit to be diligent without being harsh and striving to be just and fair.”
Most of us have worked for someone who confused high standards with harshness.
The manager who believed that pressure was the same as leadership. Who corrected in public. Who remembered every mistake and none of the effort. Who got results, for a while, from people who were quietly looking for the exit.
And most of us have also worked somewhere with the opposite problem: kindness without standards, where nothing was ever addressed and the people who carried the load grew tired of carrying it for everyone else.
Our fifth commitment rejects both. It asks us to hold high standards, and to hold them in a way that is just and fair.
Diligence matters
Diligence is not optional in an ethical life. Careless work has consequences for other people. Deadlines missed, details ignored and promises half-kept all land on someone.
So this commitment does not ask us to lower the bar. It asks us to think carefully about how we hold ourselves, and others, to it.
Where harshness creeps in
Harshness usually begins with good intentions. We care about the outcome. We are under pressure. Someone falls short, and our frustration finds its way into our tone, our emails and our decisions.
The problem is not that we expect a lot. The problem is that harshness damages the very thing we are trying to build. People who are afraid stop raising problems early. They hide mistakes instead of fixing them. They comply rather than commit.
A harsh culture is not a high-performing culture. It is a fragile one.
What fairness looks like
Over more than twenty years in labour law, I have relied on a principle that is as old as justice itself: before you decide, hear the other side.
It sounds simple. In practice, it is one of the most frequently skipped steps in any workplace.
Fairness, when we hold people to account, looks like this:
- We establish the facts before we form a view.
- We give the person a genuine opportunity to explain.
- We apply the same standard to everyone, not only to the people we find difficult.
- We respond in proportion to what actually happened.
- We address the behaviour, not the person’s worth.
None of this weakens accountability. It strengthens it. A fair process produces decisions that people can accept, even when they do not like them.
Turning it inward
This commitment also applies to how we treat ourselves. Many diligent people are harshest with themselves, and that harshness eventually spills over onto others.
Holding ourselves to a high standard while extending ourselves the same fairness we would extend to a colleague is not indulgence. It is what makes diligence sustainable.
The goal is not softer standards. It is standards held with humanity.
If you want to lead and work this way, make this commitment your own at unashamedlyethical.com/commitment.
Yours in ethics,
Ilene Power