Managing Leadership^®

The rising tide of demand for respect shows no sign of waning. From popular culture to the workplace, people demand it without feeling the need to show it, or even to understand it.

Jamie Notter has taken this subject up in a managerially germane way. He cites an argument that lack of respect is at the bottom of a large measure of problems with employee turnover, which concludes with a rather unremarkable call for more respect to be shown to employees.

But then he adds the questions: Okay, but what does that mean? What is respect, in this context, and how do we know when it is or isn’t being shown?

Jamie concisely offers some additional thought-provoking questions arising from these that are well worth your while to view. Here, I just want to offer what I think is a useful way to approach the subject of respect at work.

Since work is such an important element of self-fulfillment, it is worth considering how some of the important emotions associated with it operate in the work environment. It would seem to me that the environment is the key, since if the emotion or element of self-satisfaction we are talking about isn’t related to the context in which it is discussed, there is little point in discussing it in that context.

So, if the topic is respect, we ought to be looking at how it relates to our being involved together in a collaborative endeavor – in our joint work. And the key to that is the work. If an employee is contributing meaningfully to the overall enterprise, in a way that adds value to the contributions of others, then he or she can be said to be showing respect not only for the work, but for everyone else also laboring along in it. That, in turn, warrants respect from one’s peers and managers. And the best way to show that respect is to add value to that employee’s contribution to the joint effort.

A key role of a manager is to arrange matters in such a way that the organization as a whole can facilitate this process. And that suggests the key way managers can show respect:

If employees are complaining of getting no respect, perhaps what they are really feeling the lack of is means of, or an opportunity to, contribute. In the face of such general, ill-defined morale problems, then, your job isn’t really to show respect in some essentially patronizing, effusively verbal or showy way, but rather to reorganize the organization in a manner that gives productive expression to your employees’ instinct to contribute.

After all, just as with most things of value in the context of work, respect is itself grounded in the work. You earn it by contributing, and you show it the same way. Managers add the role of affording employees a respectful regard for their contributions by facilitating and supporting their efforts to make them.

If you aren’t doing these things, then the words are just words. And you’ll be right back at the beginning: no respect, and no loyalty.

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Today’s tip: BNET has published a really excellent set of posts on the hard truths about the MBA degree, the real nature of the MBA curriculum, and the real opinions of executives about them – definitely worth a visit, whatever your biases are on this somewhat charged subject.

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