How To Be Respected|blue pea Pod

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[Please excuse and typing errors. This is a direct transcription of the podcast for your benefit.]

Hello there. This is Ruth Sanderson from Blue Pea POD, and in this podcast, I want to talk about being respected. As a leader, we can hope that our title will bring respect. Now, of course, we know that that isn’t true. Very few titles are fully respected. King, queen, but after that, it gets a bit thin, so we want to be respected, and of course, we want to demonstrate respect for others.

R.E.S.P.E.C.T – Give me a little

Now, you earn respect through your qualities, characteristics, through what you do and what you say, consistently. Moreover, if I’m being pedantic here, it’s about the qualities, skills, knowledge, actions, and words you are perceived to do consistently because of course there’s how we would describe yourself, and then there’s how others experience us and describe us. If someone is being professionally respectful, there are general culturally accepted basics that occur, and of course what we really want is for there to be a genuine respect for us, which of course only happens as people get to know us, and genuine respect is demonstrated by what people say about you when you’re not there. Leaders desire for their team to be proactive, to come with solutions to problems, not just bring them the problem, to trust them. Without real respect for you, that isn’t going to happen. Take the art of delegation. It’s more than just a process. The success of this is linked to the respect others have for you, the ability to make things happen, respect.

Firstly then, you can take time to review where you think you are regarding respect, so for example, whose respect do you have? How robust is this? What do people say about you? Whose respect have you yet to gain and why is it important to you?

Now, a slight aside here, because I’ve coached people around respect, and on the odd occasion they’ve been discussing gaining the respect of somebody and what they’ve tried, etc, to get it to happen. When I ask this particular question, why is it important for you that this person respects you, sometimes the startling realisation is, it isn’t. Either it’s another person’s viewpoint or agenda, or the person has a 100% rule. “Everyone; I should have gained everyone’s respect.” My question is, do you have to respect everyone? As you view your level of respect, you can also ask yourself, “How do I know what I’ve written to be valid? What do people say about me when I’m not there? How consistent am I?”

Now, we know it’s not all about us because respect is something we show to others. We want to be respected genuinely and to genuinely respect others, so what happens if we don’t respect somebody? What then? Well, let’s start with some brutal honesty. Do you want to respect them? Again, why is this important to you? Knowing the answer to that, there are several routes you can go down. Now, today I’m going to share just one.

How To Increase Respect

So, what’s the quality, skills, knowledge, actions, behaviours, and words that this person demonstrates? And then, what would you like to see them demonstrate that would gain your respect? With the second list in mind, have you ever seen them do anything on that list even once? And what feedback could you give them that would encourage an increase of what you’d like to see? If you look for what you would like to see and remain open to finding it, all is well and good, but this is different to somebody saying, “I’d like to see them apologise if they make a mistake, but that’s never going to happen.” It’s like saying, “I want to see X, but I don’t expect it. I’m closed to the possibility that it could happen.”

So again, another story. A guy I was mentoring said one of his peers never apologised at all and it was something he wanted to see. Over lunch we were all having a conversation, all chatting away, and twice I heard this particular person apologise. When I asked my client about our lunch conversations, he’d missed both apologies. Now, once the blinkers were removed, he noticed it more and their relationship got stronger. So, if you want your team to be respected, then think about how you want them to be described, and we’re back to consistency, so what can you support them in so that they can do it consistently? What can you reinforce, so it becomes consistent? The benefit of this is that as genuine respect increases, so does trust.

Until the next time, go and be the difference in leadership.

Thanks,

Ruth

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