“Growth and comfort do not coexist.”
Ginni Rometty, former CEO of IBM
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We all have people we gravitate toward at work: the ones who feel easy, familiar, low-friction. There's nothing wrong with that instinct on its own. The problem starts when comfort quietly becomes the basis for who gets stretch assignments, real feedback, and a path forward, and who gets managed on autopilot.
Most leaders don't choose favorites on purpose. They choose comfort, over and over, until it hardens into a pattern nobody examines. The people who look, sound, and think like you get the benefit of the doubt. Everyone else gets left to wonder why the growth they've earned keeps going to someone else.
If you're the one who isn't the favorite, this cuts the other way too. Thin feedback and quiet neglect aren't neutral, they're a decision, even when few name it as one. You're allowed to notice that, and you're allowed to ask for more.
This month's resources are about closing that gap: seeing your own blind spots, building the habit of fair feedback regardless of either party’s comfort, and understanding what favoritism actually costs a team. They explore the research on bias at work, the discipline of giving feedback you'd rather avoid, and the practices that turn fair from an aspiration into a minimum or floor.
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💜 The Heart
Tools to support your conscious leadership practice.
UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center offers this free, research-backed loving kindness meditation, with a script that walks you through extending goodwill from yourself, to someone you love, to a neutral person, to your wider community. The research behind it is striking: one study found that a single brief loving kindness meditation reduced racial bias, an effect driven by the warmer feelings toward others it produces. Widening who gets your goodwill is the first step to widening who gets your attention.
Psychologist and executive coach Renee St Jacques breaks down what well-intentioned leaders get wrong when they avoid, soften, or delay honest feedback, and offers a clear way to rebuild trust with the people on your team you find hardest to talk to. If you've ever told yourself you'd circle back to someone on some feedback and never did, this talk names exactly what that habit costs.
Dolly Chugh, a social psychologist at NYU Stern School of Business, wrote The Person You Mean to Be for people who already believe in fairness and still, without noticing, favor whoever is easiest to relate to. Her research reframes bias not as a character flaw but as a mental habit, one you can catch and interrupt with practice. If you've ever assumed your good intentions were enough on their own, this book explains why they rarely are.
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🧠 The Matter
Leadership trends that caught my attention.
McKinsey and LeanIn.org's Women in the Workplace 2025 report, now in its eleventh year, found that employees with a sponsor were promoted at nearly double the rate of those without one. Sponsorship isn't a soft perk. It's a mechanism, and it tends to go to whoever the person in power already feels comfortable with.
SHRM's research on affinity bias, the unconscious pull toward people who feel familiar, found that it shapes who leaders promote and which ideas they take seriously, often before anyone consciously decides anything. As SHRM's Chief Data and Analytics Officer Alex Alonso puts it, sticking with sameness quietly makes a culture stale and stagnant over time. Comfort feels like instinct. It's actually a decision, repeated often enough to look like one.
Harvard Business School professor Katherine Coffman's case study on one software company's shift away from annual reviews surfaced an uncomfortable finding: without deliberate structure, in-group bias, or favoring the people who remind us of ourselves, quietly shapes who gets promoted. Her fix isn't complicated: build clearer, more objective criteria before comfort gets to decide.
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🎯 Final Thoughts
Fair isn't the same as warm. You don't have to like everyone equally to develop them equally. Comfort is not a strategy, it's a blind spot. And if you're the one who's been overlooked, take the same permission back: name what you haven't been given, and ask for it directly.
This week, name your actual favorites, the real faces, not the idea of them. Then ask what you've been withholding from the people who didn't make that list, and go deliver it.
Favoritism is one of the quieter ways politics operate at work. There are others, and most of them go unnamed. Later this month, I'm hosting a free webinar on navigating office politics without compromising who you are. If you've ever watched an opportunity go to someone else and couldn't name why, this one is for you.
Save your seat.
Sending love and light,
Ginny
