Respect: The Key to Powerful Leadership
(originally posted on LinkedIn)
In my recent article, “My Top 10 Lessons from 20 Years at Google”, I received many comments about which lessons resonated with readers. Far and away, items 5, 7, and 8 hit the mark. Those were:
Most people can be won over with respect. Pure and simple.
Respect = listening to people and recognizing their value. Do it everyday, all the time, and that will be the basis of the work culture you create.
Treating people well is the easiest thing to do and has the most enduring value of anything you’ll do in your career. This doesn’t mean giving them everything they want; it means showing them that you respect them and their value.
Those are some of my favorites too because they focus on a core value of mine: Respect. For me, this centers around knowing and respecting you for you, not who I want you to be.
Months into being a manager for the first time, I learned that the golden rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, was wrong. The fundamental problem is embedded within the rule: assuming that others are like you. As an introvert who preferred avoiding events and curling up with a good book, I was ill equipped to foster a collaborative workplace environment where one might actually socialize. Early reviews of my performance as a manager respected my knowledge but noted my lack of…well…humanity. It wasn’t that I was a machine, I was just super awkward and focused on the work to prove myself. I was also trying to spare others the same anxiety of mingling (ugh, mingling), but instead I was creating an “all work, no fun” environment. I needed to learn how to manage other people, not myself or those like me.
That early lesson has formed the core of my focus as a leader for more than 15 years: Respect. Now funnily enough my employer has since named their values “The Three Respects” (Respect the User, Respect Respect the Opportunity, Respect Each Other), so I can’t claim any unique genius here. However, as always, the hard lessons require further reflection: how to continually respect others, to demonstrate that respect, and in turn, accept how key that is to people’s experience of you as a leader.
For this short article series, I’m going to provide 3 steps for respecting others and demonstrating that respect. They all sound deceptively simple, but practice them for a couple days and you’ll see why even today, I need to constantly remind myself that this is my job and my purpose.
If we stay at the surface level in our interactions and overlook aspects of someone’s identity, we’re missing an opportunity to fully embrace the individual, to motivate, and ultimately to empower them.
STEP 1: See the person.
I mean really see the person, and this may take practice. We tend to see people through our own filters, i.e. what we think is good, bad, smart, etc. Try removing all of those labels and really see the person. Ask yourself:
What motivates them?
What makes them happy and sad?
What frustrates them?
How do they make decisions?
What makes their eyes light up?
When are they bored?
Have conversations with them where you ask them these questions and listen objectively, without judgment, to their answers.
Often we think about these questions only when we’re getting to know a person early on. If a person begins to frustrate us, then we then drop questions and start the accusations. But that’s where we should really see the person. Do you have a strong bias towards action, and they like to ask questions before moving forward? Do you like brainstorming and idea generation, and you’re working with someone who is focused on results? Seeing a person and accepting them is the first step towards figuring out how to work with them. Often I’ll completely reverse my approach to a problematic situation after revisiting what actually makes a person tick.
Why is ‘seeing’ the first step to respect? You need to truly see a person to start to understand them and then to accept them. If we stay at the surface level in our interactions and overlook aspects of someone’s identity, we’re missing an opportunity to fully embrace the individual, to motivate, and ultimately to empower them. Once we see, then we start to take that additional information into account naturally into our habits, how we make decisions, and how we communicate.
But this is hard and takes time. Doing this once doesn’t lead to any epiphanies. It’s the relentless habit that leads to a shift in how you lead. Repeat this continually everyday as much as you can with everyone you work with. Repeat this over and over again, never assuming that anyone is the same as you.
So we start simply with ‘seeing’, and then we’ll move on to Step 2 next week.
Up Ahead:
Step 2: Re-think Respect
Step 3: Demonstrate Respect
