Who’s the Fairest One?

My Jungian psychology studies over the years have taught me about the deep potency and importance of the stories we tell and believe. Stories have always been our most powerful technology (one that AI can’t replace). Stories have started every war, elected every good or corrupt leader, and shaped how we see ourselves and each other for centuries. Myths and fairy tales both come to mind.

Not every fairy tale worth telling contains a mirror. But one of the oldest and most prevalent has been staring back at me, and to some extent, all of us, recently. In Snow White, the evil queen keeps a mirror that answers exactly one question, and she asks it daily as if the asking might change the answer. Who is the fairest of all? When it finally names someone other than her, she doesn’t update her worldview; she responds with retribution.

We keep a version of that mirror at the office, and we consult it more often and with less ceremony than she did.

Economists have a name for part of what’s happening: the beauty premium. More attractive candidates get hired faster and paid more, a pattern with its own body of research behind it by now.

Sociologist Lauren Rivera found something similar hiding inside a word we use constantly and rarely define: fit. At the elite firms she studied, interviewers favored candidates from a short list of familiar schools who carried an unteachable kind of polish and called the result “meritocracy.”

It shows up in the candidate we call a strong culture fit before we’ve read their work. We promote the person who is fast on their feet in a meeting (think: extroversion), and the one we quietly write off because they’re more introspective. These biases also color who gets credit for the win and who’s more likely to get blamed when something breaks.

A CEO I work with recently recounted a story about a leader who was publicly criticized by her peers for seeking coaching support to improve her presentation skills, including how she dressed for presentations.

We tell ourselves this mirror answers with merit. Often, it’s answering with beauty, pedigree, and a kind of command that reads as leadership, mostly because it looks like the leaders we’ve already seen. People who measure their worth through comparison — especially economic and physical appearances — report lower life satisfaction, and teams that rank people the same way report lower trust, even when performance is on par with leadership expectations and role norms.

Here I’ll offer a dash of hope and perhaps a silver lining for mid-life leaders and team members.

Arthur Brooks has studied why so many high performers come apart exactly when their performance peaks, and the answer is closer to arithmetic than tragedy. What he calls fluid intelligence, the raw speed behind hustle and charisma, rises fast and falls earlier than most people plan for. What he calls crystallized intelligence, the pattern recognition built from years of paying attention, keeps rising for decades. A team that rewards only the first kind of currency is betting against the earned wisdom in the room, built over years of insight, longevity, and meta-thinking.

Thomas Moore spent a career on a related question, and answered it with a distinction worth bringing into your next one-on-one: the difference between curing and tending.

Cure wants the problem gone.

Tending stays present with what’s actually there and often finds more in it than an immediate fix would.

I watch this play out in consulting and coaching every week. The leader who tends to a struggling team member, rather than rushing to cure the under-performance, usually keeps that person and gets more thoughtful and effective work from them, and they double down on earning trust.

Between these insights, I see four practices worth building into how we lead and work alongside each other:

Presence: actually being able to see the whole person in front of you instead of managing our own bias-colored reflection in their eyes.
Genuine connection: the kind that survives a project that fell short, a mediocre presentation, or a challenging quarter.
Creativity: building something with real human ingenuity that didn’t exist an hour ago, instead of defending or putting up with what already exists.
Service: remembering that the work we all do, when our companies and we are at our best, is ultimately in service to something and someone greater than just the task at hand and beyond the standard societal scoreboard.

This weekend as the US turns two hundred and fifty, it’s a time-marker like this that invites a pause and reflection on our own habitual and familiar mirror-gazing. It’s worth asking the same set of questions in the rooms you lead and the personal world you live in, before you ask them of a country.

You and your people are already being ranked by somebody’s mirror most days, with few people conscious of what programmed biases are doing the judging of who’s the fairest one of all. You have the power to choose which mirror your team lives inside of and uses as judge.

If you want a more trusting team, a culture of belonging or a magnetic brand that attracts more of the right customers, I can help. If you'd like to explore if working together makes sense, drop me a line.

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