BlackBerry CEO John Chen on Making Hardship and Adversity Tolerable For Employees Through Fairness

The most important thing that makes a difference to a leader is about fairness. Fairness is the hardest things on earth to deliver because what's fair to you might not be fair to your coworker. The reason is, it's very simple. People could deal with a lot of adversity or hardship if they believe they're treated fairly. And that doesn't mean you don't give a high reward, a high performer, a lot more than a low performer. That doesn't mean that. You have to have the ability to articulate, you know, why that is fair. Now, in order to articulate why that is fair, KPIs and all that needs to be well-defined. And however you want to do it, unless you're a computer, there's some level of subjectiveness to this. Minimizing that subjectiveness and being fair and being able to communicate about being fair is something that I would always like to practice.

And it speaks to truth, doesn't it? So how people perceive, think, whatever it is that they're being given, right? Or not given. And people's truths are different. So you have to manage that, that properly.