A client missed his team’s Christmas party because a client flew him to Europe for consulting work.
When he got back, people asked questions. Direct ones.
Who paid for it? Did you fly first or business? Was it leave?
He answered plainly. The client paid. Economy. He used the special leave category for that kind of work.
A few weeks earlier, several staff had planned to attend a conference. Then funding changed. Budgets tightened. Unless people paid for it themselves, they couldn’t go. None did. Only the two most senior people went—him and his direct report. They were presenting. They were attending in their formal roles. They were fully funded.
We talked about what was happening underneath both incidents.
I used the phrase:
envy of the troops.
He stopped.
Yes. That’s exactly it.
He hadn’t thought of it in those terms before, but the recognition was instant.
Where envy shows up
This is one of the places envy appears in organisations. Not as wanting a plane seat, but as a response to difference made visible.
Who gets to go. Who gets funded. Who is representing the work elsewhere while others stay behind.
Hierarchies give some people access that others don’t get. That’s how they work.
What gets said instead
Envy doesn’t usually get named directly. Leaders hear complaints about fairness, resentment, entitlement, morale.
But envy is often what’s underneath: the discomfort of watching someone else move more freely, be recognised differently, have access you do not have.
It’s a normal response to status and scarcity.
When envy intensifies
Envy gets worse when the system itself is unclear. When exceptions accumulate. When pay feels opaque. When pathways are uncertain. When people cannot easily tell what the rules are.
In those conditions, every visible difference becomes loaded. Travel starts to mean something. So does leave. So does funding.
People start doing their own accounting. Not casual accounting, careful accounting. Who gets the call when something interesting comes up. Whose name is on the presentation. Who gets cc’d. Who gets asked to the meeting versus who gets sent the notes.
They’re building a case. Not necessarily consciously, but they’re accumulating evidence about whether the system is fair or rigged. Every exception becomes data. Every ‘this one time’ becomes pattern.
Tone helps, structure matters more
The client handled the questions well. He didn’t get defensive. He didn’t pull rank. He just answered. That made it safe for people to ask without it feeling risky or insubordinate.
He made it look easy. But not every leader would.
Some leaders feel entitled to the perks that come with seniority. They work hard. They’ve earned it. Why should they have to explain themselves?
That sense of entitlement—even when it’s unconscious—is what staff pick up on. It’s not just about the policies. It’s about whether the leader actually believes the questions are legitimate.
Being open and direct only goes so far. The real work is structural. Organisations that take fairness seriously make it visible in their policies and in their consistency, so that people are not left to work it out socially.
Where governance matters
Things settle when decisions are easier to understand. How travel is funded. What external work is supported. How special leave operates. How pay adjustments are made. What counts as standard, and what counts as genuinely exceptional.
The more these things live in informal arrangements, the more emotional charge they attract.
The complication
Here’s what’s hard: even when you make things transparent and fair, there’s still envy.
Because the real issue isn’t the rules. It’s that some people have more access, more autonomy, more reach. That’s the job. That’s the hierarchy.
A leader can make the policies transparent. They can answer the questions. They can fly economy. But they can’t make it not true that they get to go places their team doesn’t. They can’t eliminate the gap.
Governance helps. But it doesn’t solve. It makes the envy manageable instead of toxic.
What else matters
The client is doing more than clarifying policies. He’s working with his managers to understand where people want to go and what work they actually want to be doing. Creating pathways for those who want to advance. Making it clear what comes at each level.
It doesn’t eliminate envy. People will still watch him board planes they’re not on.
But it changes the nature of it. Envy can be corrosive—leading to resentment, undermining, disengagement. Or it can be motivating—showing people what’s possible and what it takes to get there. The difference isn’t in the envy itself. It’s in whether the organisation gives people a way forward.
Instead of ‘the system is rigged and I’m stuck’, it becomes ‘I can see how this works and I can see where I might go’.
The leader’s task
Leadership involves being watched. It involves occupying a position where differences are unavoidable.
The task is not to eliminate envy, but to run an organisation where fairness is obvious enough, governance solid enough, and pathways open enough, that envy does not become the organising force in the room.
Image by Armin Forster from Pixabay
