Fair But Not Equal
Treat every stakeholder fairly, but allocate your scarce time by impact.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 83%
Liniger calls this his most controversial principle: everybody deserves to be treated fairly, but not equally. With 9,000 offices he cannot attend a 15-agent broker's Christmas party, but he will fly out for a broker with 100 offices and 2,000 agents. The scarce resource is a leader's personal time, so it must be allocated by impact while still treating the smaller stakeholder fairly, for example with a personalized video message. This lets a leader honor everyone's value without pretending they can serve everyone identically.
Origin
Liniger formalized this while running RE/MAX at massive scale, constantly fielding personal-appearance requests from brokers of vastly different sizes and needing a defensible rule for saying yes and no.
Core principles
- 01Everybody is valuable, but you have limited personal time.
- 02Treat people fairly, but not necessarily equally.
- 03Allocate scarce leader attention proportional to impact.
- 04Offer scaled alternatives to those who can't get your full presence.
How to run it
- 1
Affirm universal value
Start from the premise that every stakeholder, large or small, is genuinely valuable to the business.
- 2
Rank by impact
Prioritize your limited personal time toward the requests that reach the most people or create the most value.
Pro tip A 2,000-agent event beats a 15-agent event when your time is the constraint.
Watch out Allocating by who asks loudest or first, rather than by impact, wastes your scarcest resource.
- 3
Substitute for the smaller ask
When you must decline, offer a scaled-down alternative like a recorded greeting or hyperlink so the stakeholder still feels valued.
In the wild
A broker in Canon City with 15 agents invites Liniger to a grand opening; he can't attend in person across 9,000 offices, but sends a DVD or hyperlink greeting. A California broker with 100 offices invites him to a 2,000-agent meeting and he says 'hell yes.'
→ Time allocated to highest-impact appearance while the smaller broker still receives a personalized gesture.
Common mistakes
Confusing fair with equal
Trying to give every stakeholder identical access spreads a leader too thin and starves the high-impact relationships that matter most.
Is it for you?
Best for
Leaders of large, distributed organizations with more demands on their time than they can meet.
Not ideal for
Small teams where equal access is feasible and expected, or contexts where perceived favoritism is destructive.
From the transcript
“I think that everybody needs to be trade treated fair but not equal”
“everybody's valuable but you have such limited personal time to care for the network”
From the episode
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success
Dave Liniger