Wednesday, February 24, 2021

Be Fair

I'd melted down with regret the other day for not having kept up with editing Wikipedia. When I sat down to edit a page yesterday, I remembered how to do it pretty quickly.

I also remembered why I hadn't kept it up all along. It's important work, hunting down reliable secondary sources, but compiling it is kinda robotic.

So, I am not a miserable failure of a human being, at least not on that account.

I was (am still) working on the page of director Hanelle Culpepper.
I was motivated to do that by a sense of (un)fairness:
while she'd directed the pilot (and next two of ten episodes) of Star Trek: Picard, the first woman and the first Black director to launch a Star Trek series or film, her Wikipedia page was scant.

Fairness is key.
I've been thinking about that more since taking that "class" by Chris Voss, former FBI Hostage Negotiator on MasterClass, which I unsubscribed from.
He points out that fairness is so important, people will sometimes even walk away from a good deal if it's unfair and accept a poor deal if it's fair.

There's lots of Voss saying the same thing for free online.
Here, a short article he wrote on the F-word, FAIRNESS:
www.fastcompany.com/3060582/the-one-word-that-can-transform-your-negotiating-skills

I just sent this article to Big Boss.
This winter, in a meeting he shut down discussion about pay at work before it even became a discussion.

BB doesn't seem to realize (because he doesn't pay attention) that the biggest problem is not that our pay is low but that our pay is unfair.
I still make less than coworkers who started after me.
I also make MORE than some who've worked longer.
I hate both these facts.

Sometimes, if you care, you can make things more fair.
At least I can edit that Wikipedia page!