Every leadership team has one. The person the CEO lights up around. The one whose ideas get the most airtime, whose mistakes get the most grace, whose version of events tends to become the official version. Sometimes it's conscious. Usually it isn't. But everyone in the room knows who it is.
And that's the problem.
Not because favoritism is unfair, though it is. Not because it demoralizes the people who aren't the favorite, though it does that too. The real problem is what it does to the information the CEO actually receives.
When people believe the game is rigged, they stop playing. Not loudly, not with a resignation letter. They just quietly recalibrate. The unfavored employee stops bringing the problem that might go nowhere anyway. Stops volunteering the opinion that probably won't land. Stops putting up a hand in the meeting where someone else's hand is already predetermined to win. And the CEO, surrounded by a tighter and tighter circle of people who tell him what he wants to hear, starts making decisions on filtered data without knowing it.
I've seen this in leadership teams more times than I can count. The CEO will tell me the team is aligned. Meanwhile, half the team will tell me privately that they stopped bringing real problems to the table six months ago. That gap between what the CEO believes is happening and what's actually happening is almost always downstream of trust. And trust breaks fastest when people feel the rules don't apply equally. If you want to understand why psychological safety on an executive team is so hard to build, this is a big part of the answer.
The research backs this up in ways that should get a CEO's attention. Nearly nine in ten employees say they've witnessed favoritism in their organization. Forty-seven percent believe their manager has a clear favorite on the team. And the people who aren't the favorite don't just feel bad about it. They report less motivation, more emotional exhaustion, stronger intentions to quit, and less trust in their supervisor. That's not a morale problem. That's a performance problem wearing a morale problem's clothes.
I'll add this: in almost every team I coach, this dynamic is present. And it's never invisible to the team. The people who aren't the favorite know. They've known for a long time. The only person who's usually surprised when it comes up is the CEO.
Here's what makes this harder than it looks. The research from Personnel Psychology, a study of more than 200 teams and 1,100 employees, found that favoritism isn't uniformly destructive. In teams without clear structure or established hierarchy, having a leader who showed preference for certain members actually improved coordination and performance. The bias created a pecking order where none existed, and the team moved faster for it. But in teams that were already well-structured, the same dynamic tanked performance. Which means favoritism isn't simply bad. It's context-dependent and almost always invisible to the person doing it.
That last part is the one I come back to. The CEO who plays favorites isn't usually trying to play favorites. He genuinely thinks he's recognizing talent, rewarding performance, listening to his best people. What he can't see is that his best people became his best people partly because he gave them more airtime, more coaching, more benefit of the doubt. The favorite gets better. The unfavored get less practice. And over time the gap between them starts to look like evidence that the preference was justified.
The fix isn't manufacturing equal attention. It's building the kind of culture where the question gets asked out loud. Who isn't speaking in this room? Whose ideas aren't getting tested? Who would never tell me if something was wrong? Those questions are harder than they sound, especially for a CEO who's been rewarded his whole career for trusting his gut about people.
But the gut that got you here is the same gut producing the blind spot. And the team that's too polite to tell you that is the same team described in the founder bottleneck: capable people who've quietly stopped trying to change things they don't think will change.
If that's landing somewhere uncomfortable, it's worth a conversation. This is exactly the kind of thing the Six Shifts is built to surface.