If you’ve ever found yourself thinking, “Why don’t my team members respect me? I’m in charge. I’m the manager. I’m the business owner. I’m the leader. What’s going on here?”…then this episode is for you.
There is a way to earn respect from your team so that your team members listen to you and take action on what you say—not because you’re ruling out of authority and out of fear, but because your team members genuinely respect you as a person, as a leader, and respect the things that you want for your team and business.
“How do I get my team members to respect me?” is a question I get a lot. I often hear, “I’m in charge, but they’re not doing what I asked them to do,” or “They’re disagreeing with me even though I’m in charge.”
Spoiler alert: your team members aren’t going to respect you simply because you’re in charge. And this is especially the case if you are managing folks that you were formerly peers with.
But the thing is, asking “How do I make people respect me?” implies that you can force it, or that there’s some magic thing that you do to unlock respect, or that it should just be automatic.
It’s not automatic. Instead, we need to commit to finding ways to earn respect and show people we’re there for them as a leader.
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How to Earn Respect
Roll Up Your Sleeves
First and foremost, you can earn respect by being the kind of leader who rolls up your sleeves and gets in it with your team.
If we want to earn respect, we have to remember that our team members want to see us walking the talk. They want to see that when we say no work from home, we are there in the office too. When we have a policy, we are following it. We are modeling the behaviors we want to see. We are in the nitty-gritty of the day-to-day with them.
There are certain kinds of roles that we may not be doing firsthand, or certain sort circumstances that require us not to be totally in it, but we can still create a sense being present, being on their side, and making an effort to understand what they’re doing. Effort will earn respect very quickly.
Understand Their Job
Understanding your team members’ jobs is more important than you might think.
I was managing an engineer once, and I didn’t understand the details of his job, but I went the extra mile and asked him questions about it to learn about his process, where he was getting stuck, and what kind of opportunities he wanted so I could better support him.
At first, he was really skeptical. He didn’t really know what I could offer him as a manager, and I felt that too. But in an effort to earn respect and actually be able to support him, I built a relationship with him.
I found out he actually was really interested in becoming a manager himself, as well as getting more visibility for his work, and I could support him in both of those things. So by getting in it with him and making time and really understanding some of the nuances of his work that I could help amplify and elevate, I was able to build that relationship and earn respect as a leader from him.
Don’t Be Unreachable
I heard once that the CEO of Snapchat had an office designed so he could sit above everyone to create this weird hierarchy, and that is…the opposite of what we want to do to earn respect.
If you want to earn respect from your team, you want to sit with them, not above them. You want to show up in the office, in the studio, in the center, wherever you’re at. Be there in person when you have events if you’re fully remote. Show up for the coffee chats if you’re all virtual. Show up for the happy hours. Just be there with them.
That’s going to help you rapidly start to earn respect, because it shows them that you don’t see yourself as this untouchable leader that’s totally far removed.
Operate in Integrity
This is basic, but very important when you’re working to earn respect: if you say something’s important, you need to follow through.
If you say, “We really need to show up for these meetings five minutes early, because we have to get prepared for the client,” then you’ve got to show up five minutes early. And if people don’t show up, you have to hold people accountable.
When you say something, it has to matter. People will never lose respect for you faster than when you say something and then don’t follow through…or let other people not follow through.
It’s frustrating to your team members. If they listened and they showed up, and they see you letting other people not do it, that shows a big lack of accountability.
Accountability is the biggest place teams go wrong. And I understand why: it’s hard for leaders to say something, because if they establish a standard, people agree, and then it gradually fizzles out, you don’t want to be mean. You don’t want to micromanage. So instead, you let stuff slide…but then that process doesn’t stick.
All of these little things start to chip away at the respect your team members have for you. And when I talk about leading with integrity and operating with accountability, I don’t mean managing through fear and punishment; I mean follow through on what you say.
I also don’t mean creating a bunch of rules and making it this environment where you get one shot, and if you mess up, you’re out. I just mean you want to make sure you follow up and give firm reminders if people don’t follow that new policy.
Create Ownership
When you create a sense of ownership for folks, they will feel accountable immediately, because they’ll be able to see what their role is in getting something done.
So when you say, “Hey, I really want our team to track our work in this way,” or, “Hey, we’re going to be doing three days in the office, two days at home,” or “We’re going to have no work from home for a few months,” or “We’re going to focus on these priorities,” you want to make sure you explain why.
Tell them why this change will benefit them, how it will benefit the team, and how it will benefit the company as a whole or how it will bring you closer to your goals.
Walk the Talk!
You will set yourself apart so much more as a leader if you commit to these things, because so many people talk without walking the walk, and we’ve all been there. We know how frustrating and demoralizing it is as a team member to follow a policy, then see your manager and other team members not following it. It often makes team members think, “I don’t think I have a future here, because I don’t really care about this leader or their business.”
But when your team believes in you, respects you, and trusts you, they can accomplish anything.
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