The Virtue of Justice: Fairness and a Sense of Community

The Virtue of Justice: Building Community

Some strengths only make sense in the company of others. Of the six virtues Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman proposed in their 2004 classification of positive psychology, justice is the one that groups together the strengths oriented toward life in community, connecting individual well-being with the collective, much the way the virtue of humanity does at the level of closer bonds.

People who lead with this virtue tend to actively care that the rules of the game, whether in a team, a family, or a group of friends, are fair to everyone involved.

The Three Strengths That Make It Up

• Teamwork (citizenship): a sense of identification with the common good and a felt obligation toward it, beyond self-interest. It shows up as being a loyal, committed group member.
• Fairness: the product of sound moral judgment: giving everyone a fair chance, not letting your own feelings about a person distort a decision about them, and staying sensitive to social injustice.
• Leadership: the ability to organize your own activities and other people’s within a system, motivating the group toward a shared goal while still looking after the relationships between its members.

How It Shows Up in a Group

• They treat everyone with the same respect, regardless of position or status.
• They care that decisions are fair, weighing the impact on everyone involved, not just themselves.
• They don’t let personal liking sway their judgment: they’re just as able to recognize a mistake or a good call coming from a friend as from a stranger.

Leading From the Team’s Strengths, Not a Generic Improvement Plan

In Now, Discover Your Strengths (2001), Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton, creators of Gallup’s StrengthsFinder method, criticize a common tendency in organizations: taking each person’s natural strengths for granted while becoming expert at diagnosing their weaknesses, relabeling them “areas for improvement,” and sending them off to training to fix them. The authors call this damage control, not real development, and warn that, used as the only strategy, it’s a poor path to excellence, both for the person and for the team. Applied to leadership, the implication is clear: someone who organizes a group well understands this distinction and builds the division of labor around what each person already does well naturally, instead of imposing the same standard improvement plan on the whole team, as if everyone needed to fix the same thing. That kind of leadership doesn’t ignore the team’s weaknesses, but it handles them differently from how it treats strengths: surrounding each weak spot with support, or with someone else who covers for it, instead of insisting that every member become good at everything.

What Peterson and Seligman Say About Building It

One nuance Peterson and Seligman (2004) highlight is listening to different perspectives before deciding, especially the perspectives of people with less power to be heard in a group: a meeting where only the same two or three voices speak tends to produce decisions that are worse informed, not just less participatory. Add to that explicitly acknowledging other people’s merit, instead of taking it for granted, and periodically checking your own decisions for bias: asking yourself whether liking or closeness to someone shaped a particular judgment.