Emotional Intelligence for Everybody Else: Part 3 - Respect
Emotional Intelligence for Everybody Else: Part 3 - Respect
Managers and teams perform best when trust and respect flow in both directions. Here's how give and get respect at work.
Introduction to Respect
The sociologist Richard Sennett asked “Unlike food, respect costs nothing. Why then should it be in short supply?” Everyone wants a leader they respect. Why is one so hard to find?
I found one right here in the building. Maybe you’ll find one in your life that you didn’t know was there, if you take a closer look.
“Trust is the foundation of every relationship in our life," says consultancy Deloitte. “Every positive relationship starts from a place of trust,” their quote continues.
The writer stops just short of naming a “framework” for trusted leadership and high-EQ management that almost everybody can identify with. It’s a famous source of wisdom about emotional intelligence and people management. We learn about it from birth, yet it almost never turns up in the management consulting literature.
It’s called Motherhood, you nerds! Are these consulting twerps all hatched from eggs, or what?
Welcome to the matriarchy, Deloitte. Get with it! Not everybody’s mother is a perfect leader, but it’s taken too long for us to recognize motherhood as an archetype for leadership in the business world. Let’s end that now.
Motherhood is a better leadership metaphor for today’s workforce than a football coach or military commander. I know which kind of leader I’d rather work for.
It’s time we gave our first role models the respect they deserve. The chapter on respect starts here.
What is Respect
In corporate life, power and respect is concentrated at the top by executives who behave more or less as they like. Down the org chart, workers are subjected to daily indignities by managers who prioritize their needs below their own.
Respect: Admiration of one’s qualities, capabilities, or achievements.
and
Respect: Appropriate consideration for somebody’s well-being.
At work, a high-EQ definition of respect has two related meaning. One relates to the identification or admiration of one’s qualities, capabilities, or achievements (“I respect Jane’s professionalism.”) Another meaning relates to how the choices we make impact another person (“I want to be respectful of your time.”) These ideas are joined together by the idea that every person has qualities that make them worthy of our thoughtful and considerate actions.
There’s another meaning of respect in the workplace. This one is used as a verb (the above are both nouns) that means “to obey without question.” It contains the delightful idea that obedience flows from authority, as in “Paul wants us to respect his wishes.” That’s fine, if we’re discussing Paul’s instructions for how to dispose of his record collection after he dies. But if this is how Paul tells us what he wants done by Friday, Paul is doing it wrong.
This “command and control” meaning of respect is, or should be, an anachronism our modern working world. If the word has been used in a way where it could be replaced with “obey” without altering the intended meaning, you have either been drafted into the armed services, or are in need of an emotionally intelligent rescue mission. Even the CEO of the company understands that to be an effective leader, their instructions need to be understood and found to be reasonable by the people they lead.
Respectful Choices
Unfortunately, disrespectful behavior by managers abounds in the workplace. One example relates tot he way that managers deliver feedback. Many report managers who have saved up feedback for a year until they have a lethal dose, then released it suddenly in a single noxious cloud. Some managers offer feedback that’s mysterious, inscrutable, and impossible to understand. Other managers may go months or years without giving any feedback at all.
Workers feel disregarded by managers who take all the credit for their hard work on a project. Some managers keep secrets, jealously hoarding information they’ve learned about what’s going on at the company. Colleagues labor under mistrustful micromanagers who demand to be informed of every detail. They insist on control over every aspect of the work taking place under their supervision.
These behaviors persist for no good reason, certainly not because research or science backs them up. Withering criticism of a decision made nine months ago does not make people want to click on your ads. In fact, science shows that treating people well makes them more productive.
Cold War traditions left over from the factory era of command-and-control style management are of course bad for productivity. Nobody wants to work this way. We just haven’t upgraded our management firmware yet. That’s what we are doing right now!
The new better way
Emotionally intelligent leaders engage workers with esteem, respect, and compassion. They understand and embrace contributions made by people who look or act differently than they do. The behaviors do not confer the need to sacrifice business results. These styles of leadership are complementary, not mutually exclusive.
Managers can be straightforward with feedback. They can keep a standing 1:1 and be present and focused in the meeting. Bosses can admit they’re wrong and can be honest about what’s happening when they can show respect for employees. They can do all of this while insisting on high performance, while measuring outcomes, while insisting on results, and demanding the highest standards.
Research by Slack, now part of Salesforce, studied the most important factors in powering healthy collaboration in the workplace. The top issues reported by employees were “mutual respect and trust,” “kindness and respect,” and “professionalism.” So we know the employers know it’s important.
The report shows “respect and admiration” is the #1 most important factor to both employees and their employers in terms of what matters most to them. Respect is 54% more important than autonomy and 50% more than doing good in the world. I’m not even sure that’s a good thing.
That’s an overwhelming message about what matters among an arrangement of emotionally intelligent signals.
Respectful Characteristics
Different traits may elicit your feelings of respect depending on the role. Your own sense of this can vary depending on your craft, culture, and needs. People who respond to your own expectations will be rewarded with your respect. People will respect us when our behaviors meet their expectations.
I’ve organized the traits I expect from people in different roles into columns. Your own expectations might be different, and that’s cool! Your idea of a candid peer might well improve on mine! It takes something different to earn your respect than it does to earn mine. We respect these things about each other. That’s another aspect of what makes our world diverse.
As you move through the chapter you can annotate my diagram or reflect on how your expectations differ. What matters is that you apply your expectations consistently from one person to the next. That is important. If you find yourself applying different expectations from one person to the next, you might have discovered a source of unconscious bias. That’s normal, but it’s not something you want to let pass unnoticed.
Also, be sure that you’re expect at least as much from yourself as you do from others. We’re here to be fair and honest. Got it? Awesome.
Respectful Leaders
Professional Communication
Leaders earn respect when their tone and style of communication is elevated above the people they’re meant to lead and inspire. Professionalism in all forms of communication are essential aspects of emotional intelligence. This includes written and verbal communication as well as your behavior. That includes any behavior that is observed or understood to have occurred by your colleagues in and out of the office.
A leader’s written communication sets the organization’s standard for how thoughts are recorded and stored. This applies to business writing in email, internal documents, web sites, and external communications including marketing and communications to customers.
With so much surface area, you can’t always be perfect. You’ll have to make considered choices about when it really matters. Prepare those communications carefully and concisely. Encourage this same behavior of your team. Good communication with careful editing evidences your concern and respect for your reader and their time. If you take the additional step of putting this same care into your products, you’re showing this same respect for your customers.
Leaders respect different styles of communication that arise from differences in native language, socioeconomic status, race, class, and neurodivergence. I’m ashamed to admit that I sometimes feel impatience for someone who speaks with a heavy accent. I’ve learned to interrupt this response and remind myself that they have just as much right to be heard as I do when I’m overcoming my own disorganized communication style.
Leaders have an important role to play here in leveling the playing field for people with communication styles that differ from the majority. Ingroup bias makes it very easy for the majority group to unconsciously erode respect shown to the minority. High-EQ managers will interrupt these influences and ensure that all colleagues are treated as equals.
Texting
Social media DMs and text messages present some challenges for managers. Do the same expectations that apply to email at work apply to text messages? When communicating with co-workers, I act as though they do. Many others do not see it this way. Some think of text messages as equivalent to a casual voice chat, even when messaging with the boss. I choose not to make this distinction. All work communication gets the business writing standard. That’s just me!
Some managers might be put off by a text from a worker that contains abbreviations or emoji. A manager’s text that uses the tone and style of an email sent to a more casually-minded worker might convey more gravity than intended, this could inadvertently cause a misunderstanding. My setting the expectation that all communication from me is going to look and sound the same, I hope to avoid these misunderstandings. I say “I hope” — I’m not saying I’ve been perfect about this.
Managers exacerbate these problems when they try to use text messages to expedite a conversation for their own convenience. No sensitive topic should be addressed by a cell phone call from a busy street or a meeting hold outside. It’s the manager’s responsibility to know the appropriate conversation belongs in which context. All of these matters contribute to the respect a professional earns when their communications are held to a higher standard.
Consistency
“Success isn't always about greatness. It's about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come.” That’s a quote from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
Consistency will make you successful. In the corporate world, you really cannot excel without it. In fact, you can be very successful with consistency and little else. If a successful corporate career is your goal, you must overcome any barriers to your ability to deliver dependably.
What may not be obvious is that perfectionism is the enemy of consistency. If you have unrealistic expectations of yourself, this can be a barrier to achieving consistent results. My clients often struggle with comparative thinking — the false belief that they must live up to imaginary standards set by others. This can drive an inappropriate and unrealistic understanding of how you measure up against the rest of the world.
For example, if you have an established track record of increasing responsibility and several promotions under your belt, you are already a consistent performer by objective criteria. That’s a fact.
Are you struggling at your current level? Do you have issues in your personal life that you need to address? We’ve all been there. You may need to make consistency your focus before you turn towards advancement. That’s how I’d think about consistency.
Courtesy
The workplace is a great place to avoid unintentionally emotionally harming other people. You’re a good person, and I know you wouldn’t harm anyone deliberately. But we all need an occasional reminder not to do it accidentally, either. There are so many of us, and the accidents just add up!
Our best efforts at getting along well at work will be supported through the elevation of our standards for courtesy. In the U.S. a recent report described 50% of people reporting feelings of daily stress, 41% of worry, 22% as sad, and 18% angry. And them we have Twitter, where all of these things are being felt all at the same time.
Here are some reasons we might be feeling more complex things at work in recent years:
The Black Lives Matter movement and the related social unrest
The astounding loss of life to the COVID pandemic
The global disabling event of long COVID
The sudden shift to remote work
The feckless, morbid, and unnecessary return to office
These things have all had an impact on us, and we’re far from a return to normal. An elevation of our standards for courtesy could reduce conflict and strain. Some suggestions:
The modern workplace is a more sensitive place, and likely to stay that way for a while. You may hear the term “microaggression.” This is unfamiliar to many people yet it’s increasingly common and very important for describing friction that occurs in our workplaces and our culture.
If you hear it used to describe something you said or did, you should probably accept that you may have messed up. That’s ok, you can fix it. Get an apology out of your mouth quickly. Make it sincere by not using the word “if” when you apologize — just say “I’m sorry I said that, it won’t happen again.” As we discussed in the chapter on empathy, if you need to ask a question to understand the situation, now is the time. Then close your mouth and get back to work.
Respectful Collaborators
I define collaborators as people working together towards a shared goal. When it’s working well, teams working together form a partnership. Maybe it’s even a kind of fellowship, Lord of the Rings-style, united towards a common purpose. Effective teams are able to overcome hardships, resolve problems, compensate for their weaknesses, and celebrate their victories together.
Kind People
What can I say about kindness without insulting your intelligence? It’s good to be kind and it’s bad to be mean. Hmm, that wasn’t very good.
For some people, understanding the role of kindness in the workplace requires a major adjustment to their entire attitude. For others it comes quite naturally.
There are unkind people out there who are respected. In fact, it’s possible to be so unkind that people get very inspired, enough to win an election. That’s not common, though. It’s far more common for respected people to be very nice.
I’ve done extensive research on this. Disrespected people are almost all very unkind. There are very few exceptions! Here’s a diagram summarizing my research on the subject:
That quiet lower-right quadrant is what you want to pay attention to. It’s hard to find High Kindness / Low Respect leadership figures. In the worst case, you end up being an adorable or annoying neighbor. You can go from being very respected to being hated quickly by being mean, especially to your employees or people in the service industry. Avoid that.
I’d like to share a secret with you, now, but you must solemnly promise not tell tell anybody. I’m serious about this. Tell no one.
Kind people are extremely desirable as collaborators. People with moderate levels of skill and modest talent are amazing IF they are easy to work with. Hear me now on this day: Take a bunch of sincere managers, each with twenty or more years of experience. Put them in a room which is carefully and covertly bugged and recorded. This is what you’ll learn: managers have very little use for extremely talented and brilliant people. Not any more. We want people who are kind, courteous, and easy to work with, and who have reliable transportation.
Myriad research reports indicate that kind people are healthier, happier, and more empathetic. These studies support emotionally intelligent behaviors like forgiveness, and predict that teams that are practicing kindness and generosity will see a lift in their productivity and overall happiness.
Honesty
Honesty between co-workers facilitates trusted relationships and supports collaboration. Honest people are folks we want to work with, and honest work is the kind we want to do together.
An Atlassian survey of 1,000 employees said that candid feedback and transparent decision-making supported a culture of open communication that made workers 80% more likely to report high emotional well-being. These characteristics support the development of psychological safety.
There are many ways to define, detect, and encourage honesty in your employees and yourself. It’s not important that we have an identical definition. Be consistent in your expectations, and have consistent expectations for yourself and others.
Honesty working relationships among peers accelerates candid and useful feedback. It might avoid some of the difficulties associated with that topic between a manager and their subordinates. Sometimes it can be easier for a peer to receive feedback from a trusted peer than to get the same instruction from a manager.
Honesty and trust sometimes develop rapidly in relationships between collaborators when helpful ideas are exchanged between people who practice a related craft. Candor may be supported when these exchanges occur outside of traditional “constructive criticism” or performance-oriented conversations. I think that’s because these formats are actually often counter-productive to their intended purpose.
I’ve noticed my respect colleagues growing as they share stories of how they learned their trade. The vulnerability they express when revealing their evolution is a form of honesty that earns my respect. Their generosity in sharing tricks of the trade helps me build my own capabilities, which causes my trust and admiration for them to increase. These selfless behaviors are rooted in honesty. Genuine servant leaders also model these behaviors of respectful leadership among their teams.
One last thing: The shared experience of learning a new skill seems to cause people to engage with each other in a particularly honest way that builds connections in a particularly honest and authentic way. I think this is why axe throwing and escape rooms have become such popular activities for team building and company onboarding.
Communicative
The Slack study I mentioned identified the characteristics that workers selected as most important to enabling good collaboration. Workers of different age groups favored different factors:
18-24: trusting colleagues to do good work
25-44: clear responsibilities
45-65: communicate with colleagues easily
Older workers favor communication, while younger ones favor trust and clarity. I think I know why this is, reader. It’s because we are tired. There is only one comfortable chair in this house, and we’re not sitting in it. If we can get the communication done right the first time, we might have time to walk over to that chair, and sit down in it and rest for a while.
A good communicator takes it on themselves to resolve communication difficulties regardless of where the actual difficulties arise. A great communicator recognizes that all people possess communications differences. One person may have abilities that enables them to express themselves in certain circumstances. Another may be less adept at communicating in others.
Politeness is a valued communication style that draws me to respect someone, especially when they afford it equally to people regardless of their rank. People who consistently pay a little extra attention to daily courtesies strike me as trustworthy. I also appreciate communicators who are very patient, especially in high-stress environments.
A seasoned team usually has at least one member who is known to be completely unflappable. This person may actually grow a bit bored as the situation becomes more intense. I enjoy watching folks draw on the calming energy of someone who shares their confidence and poise this way. I adore someone who just calmly exudes respect and the steady, trusted stature that we associate with people who are ready for a leadership role.
Respectful Subordinates
I know, who even says “subordinates” — what is this, a submarine? Subordinates are my term for the wonderful, empowered people who you are trusted to manage.
People use the collective noun “direct reports” to identify these wonderful individuals. I just can’t bring myself to use it. It will get shortened to “directs” or “reports.” Those are really important verbs that I need for other things, quite often in the same sentence.
I know it’s an awful term. I’ll say “team members” instead. Don’t worry, I am going to respect them so much, they won’t even care what I call them. Let’s move on.
Dependability
How and why do we respect our subordinates? When we discussed leaders earlier, we talked about the essential role of consistency. The same values apply to how we see the dependability of team members. A steady drumbeat of performance is repeated over time by contributors who are part of a team. This is more valuable than any one occurrence of a memorable performance.
I learned an early, painful lesson about this when I was fired from my first job delivering the Chicago Tribune at age 13. I was not getting my ass out of bed at the appropriate time every morning. When he fired me my boss explained (not for the first time) that people required their paper on their doorstep every morning no later than 7am, because their morning routines depended on it.
My insufficient consistency was impacting how customers perceived the product. My mother was so proud of me when I got that job. I’ll never forget the look on her face when I got fired. It was a pretty low moment for both of us.
An experienced manager appreciates a team member for what they lack. Leaders of high turnover teams treasure employees who show up when they are supposed to. If they don’t bring drama to the office, that’s a win. If they ask questions when they’re not sure what’s expected, awesome.
The upper ranks of big companies are not filled with great geniuses. They’re filled with people who did not make terrible mistakes, or who corrected them when they did.
If you have doubts about your abilities, know that success in the corporate world is defined by consistency. It does not call for, demand, or even truly value extraordinary performances. If you’re dependable, deliver quality work, and are trusted by your colleagues, you’re good enough as you are. Keep up the good work, and you’ll soon be rewarded.
Candid
As they develop in their careers, leaders often complain that it’s hard to know who is telling them the truth and who is telling them what they want to hear. The most senior people in a company sometimes become frustrated by the “yes people” who surround them. This can be a dangerously self-perpetuating culture of psychologically unsafe environments, where teams are not permitted to disconfirm the prevailing beliefs of the leaders.
In an ideal environment, team members earn respect through candor. They enjoy the trust and respect of leaders who believe that their shared values and interests join them together. They can be honest with each other about errors, mistakes, or revealing unpopular or difficult viewpoints, even if they are potentially damaging to the interests of an individual or a team. Leaders who have navigated politically difficult situations come to prize a candid and honest team member, who will tell the truth even when the news is bad.
This a far more valuable asset than a loyal friend who will stick with you with fidelity and affection. Candor is an attribute of a critical thinker who can counted on as a partner, to skeptically evaluate a situation from their own perspective. Your loyal friends, as valuable and important as they are, are often too close to your own perspective to truly be as valuable as an auditor as a candid third party subordinate on your team.
A second-in-command who is a skeptical, rational, candid foil to your decisions is one of the greatest asset any leader can have. If you have a trusted partner who you are vulnerable to, trusted by, and feel completely truthful and sincere with, then you may have discovered the magic of a truly great business partnership.
Resilient
Resilience is a trait that can qualify someone for leadership, regardless of their background, education, or level of talent. It took a decade longer than it should have for me to get good at it, and I’m still more reluctant than I should be to deploy it when I should. I don’t know how to help people learn it, and I don’t know how to teach it.
Resilience is the way we process outcomes that suck. My favorite resilient slogan is “survival is success.” A resilient person embraces a bad outcome. A person who is not resilient is defeated by an outcome they don’t like. Resilient people are persistent and determined while others whine, whinge, and complain.
I am not intrinsically the second kind of person. With discipline, I can manage an optimistic attitude, but it takes a little bit of work to respond optimistically to a setback. When things go poorly at work, and a colleague reacts with a positive attitude, respect for them swells within me.
When a minor setback occurs, some people behave like it’s a personal defeat. Others let loose a stream of blame, like an uncontrollable firehose. I try to control those feelings. I’ve been there.
Leaders should inspire resilience in their teams when setbacks occur. The most important tool we have is to inspire them is our vision. We look up, over, and past these obstacles. This can be difficult, because sometimes our nose and glasses have just been broken by the thing we collided with.
A client once described his frustration at being forbidden by HR from discussing the reasons for terminating an employee. He wanted to answer the questions that he knew the employees were asking about the firing.
I suggested that he give a brief talk at an all-hands meeting. Acknowledge the firing, just don’t talk about the reasons. They’re confidential. If you talk about this one, everybody will know you’ll talk about them when they leave. That’s not respectful behavior.
Talk about the values that matter to you right now instead. What kind of company are you and this team building? Which company values really matter to them? What are the most important things that you are doing together this minute? These are the things people need to hear about. Nobody really wants to hear about why a person was fired, anyway. They’ll have forgotten about that in 3 days, anyway.
If you try to pretend it didn’t happen, or you try to spin it somehow, people are going to see right through it.
Resilience takes on the situation in front of you, then looks up and over it. You have a little bit of immediate defeat, but also determine that victory is inevitable. That’s resilience, and when you look at things that way, people are going to respect it.
Please let me know what you thought about this chapter by leaving a comment below.
This is the third of the four-part “Emotional Intelligence for Everybody Else.” The first two installments are Part 1: Self-Awareness and Part 2: Empathy. Part Four, Compassion, is coming soon.
Hundreds of Business Letters clients benefit from coaching. They advance in their career, find new jobs, developed new skills, earned promotions, and become better managers by increasing their emotional quotient.