Your team worked out who your favourite is

You have a favourite. Not someone you like more as a person, necessarily, and not someone you would ever describe that way. Which name arrives first in your head when interesting work comes in?

You would call it judgement rather than preference. They are reliable, they understand the business, you never have to explain anything twice. All of that may be perfectly true. It is also the reason the distance between them and everyone else keeps widening, quarter after quarter, without anyone deciding that it should.

The tell is the work, not the warmth

Favouritism almost never looks like affection. You are not laughing harder at their jokes or taking them to lunch.

It looks like allocation. The visible project goes to them. The client you cannot afford to lose goes to them. When your boss asks who put the analysis together, whose name do you say?

The inverse is just as consistent. Who gets the clean-up? The documentation, the handover, the recurring meeting that takes ninety minutes and settles nothing.

Nobody announced any of this, and every individual call made sense on the day you made it. That is exactly why it has gone unexamined for two years.

You are choosing the person who is quickest to brief

Think about how the choice actually gets made. Something lands on a Tuesday, it matters, and it has to start that afternoon.

So you pick the person you can brief in four minutes. The one who already carries the context, because you gave them the context last time, and the time before.

That is not a verdict on anybody's talent. It is a decision about your own time, and it compounds quietly. Each round leaves them more prepared and everyone else less prepared, and then preparedness becomes your honest reason for the next round. The logic closes on itself.

Who on your team has never once sat in the room where you explain why something matters?

It is not a prize for the person who gets it

Your favourite is not simply winning here. They are carrying the work that is not allowed to fail, usually on top of the job they already have.

They get asked in July, then asked again in September. Saying no is harder for them than you think, because the asking is also the signal that they are trusted, and refusing feels like handing that back.

They get isolated too. Colleagues notice who receives the good work and adjust accordingly. A little less help offered, a little less shared early, a distance nobody will ever raise with you directly. When did one of their colleagues last volunteer to take something off them?

Count it instead of feeling it

You cannot settle this by reflecting on it. You will conclude that you are fair, because almost everyone does.

So count. Take the last two quarters and list the assignments that carried any visibility at all: the board paper, the new client, the piece of cross-team work, the thing your boss asked about by name.

Write a name beside each one. It takes about ten minutes and the pattern is rarely ambiguous.

Then build the same list for the necessary, invisible work. If the same names sit at the top of both lists, you have your answer and you did not need to guess at it.

Hand over the context, not just the task

Reassigning one project is where most managers stop, and it fixes almost nothing. The briefing is where the advantage is built, so start there.

Put somebody else in the conversations before there is anything to allocate. Take a second person to the meeting where the problem is being described, with no role except to listen. Six weeks later you will have two people you can brief quickly rather than one.

When you do hand something over, hand it over properly. A stretch assignment you can afford to have done at eighty per cent is a stretch assignment. One where you will step in at the first wobble is a test they already know they are going to fail, and they will read your face long before you say anything.

Tell them it is a stretch and that you expect some of it to be rough. Then tell your favourite what you are doing and why, so the change does not land as trust being withdrawn. Two minutes of that conversation saves a month of them quietly wondering what they got wrong.

None of this means treating everybody identically. People are not equally capable and pretending otherwise has a cost of its own, usually paid by the people doing the most. The question is narrower than fairness in the abstract. How much of the ranking in your head came from evidence, and how much came from the fact that briefing one person takes four minutes?

For most teams, some of it is habit. Worth knowing how much of yours.