Archives for November 2006

Respect is something that is earned. It doesn’t just happen because you are in a leadership position. If your subordinates respect you simply because you can fire them, you are a very poor leader.

You earn respect in different ways. The biggest way to earn people’s respect is to do what you say you are going to do. I’ve seen many moderately skilled leaders lose a tremendous amount of respect simply because they didn’t follow through on what they said they would do.

The Honest Leader

I once worked at an organization where the CEO was trying to increase the skill level of his management staff. Many of the people in management had a rudimentary education when they started at the organization and were doing very little to expand their skills and knowledge.

The CEO told all the managers that he wanted them to be continually pursuing their education and that he expected every manager to take at least two college classes each year at a minimum. He made it clear that year-end raises would be tied to meeting this goal.

No one heard any more about this requirement. I took several classes toward a second masters degree that I was planning on taking anyway, so I was prepared to document my educational efforts for the year. In December, my manager (a vice president) stopped me in the parking lot and told me that they had decided to give me a 2% raise.

I was kind of surprised because it had been made clear that we would only be getting a raise if we had documented our educational efforts for the year. Assuming that I must have missed the instructions on where to document this, I wrote up a summary and sent it to my manager stating that I wanted my raise to be based on the educational achievement as we had been informed would be the case.

Basically, the reply I got back made it clear that year-end raises were in no way impacted by our meeting the educational goal. Later, when talking with some of the other employees who had been there much longer than I, it became clear that the educational goal was treated almost as a joke. They had been around enough to know that, like many other goals and policies before, it was just a passing fad that wouldn’t ever actually be implemented.

This type of behavior is one of the easiest ways to damage your credibility and respect as a leader. If you have to change your mind for some reason, you should make it clear that you are changing your mind. Think twice before ordering something if you are not completely sure you will follow through.

The Competent Leader

Another way to cultivate respect is by being really good at what you are managing. This doesn’t mean you need to be an expert in everything every one of your subordinates does, but if your conversation makes it clear that you haven’t even spent the effort to understand their job, it will be very difficult for them to respect your expertise.

Your direct reports are going to run into roadblocks and difficulties in their work. While you don’t need to help them work through every single issue, being able to understand the problem and point to solutions will go a long way in building respect. This isn’t something you can fake. If you don’t understand their job, you will probably lose more respect than you gain by trying to help.

The Leader Who Cares

A third practice that will help you gain respect is to take a genuine interest in your employee’s success. If they feel like you are trying to help them achieve success, not just in their current job, but over their whole career, they will respect that you care beyond just the fact that they work for you.

Respect isn’t something that happens automatically and it is easier to lose than to gain. These three practices (following through, being an expert, and caring about your employee’s success) will go a long way toward helping you build respect.

The best leaders I’ve worked with are the ones that know when to wait. Early on in my career, I tended to respond to things quickly—especially when I was angry or upset. This is the exact opposite of what the leaders I respected did.

Mature leaders know that some problems go away if they are ignored. There are some leaders who try to take this to an extreme and never deal with anything. The correct balance is somewhere in the middle. There are very few times where putting off sending a scathing email or administering a harsh verbal rebuke will give you cause for regret. On the other hand, it is pretty frequent that haste to respond to a loaded situation will make you wish you had taken more time to think about it.

There are times where a situation calls for immediate attention. The skilled leader will keep an eye out for those types of situations before they happen and make a decision about what to do ahead of time. This allows you to respond quickly, but not be reactive—you’ve spent the time in prudent thought ahead of time, so you are not acting on impulse.

Some of the situations where a swift response would probably be necessary are extreme insubordination, breach of ethics, etc. Sometimes a delayed response will send the wrong signal to your team. Most of the time, delaying in order to act wisely will be to your advantage.

Many leaders assume that everyone understands their vision. Often, there is a big gap between their vision and what the people they lead see as the vision. Unfortunately, many leaders don’t take the time to actually find out how well they have communicated their vision.

When the vision is unclear, people tend to default to doing whatever seems best to them. If they are effective at communicating their version of the vision to people they lead, you can easily end up with a direction where each department or organizational unit is heading in a very different direction.

I was sitting in a meeting at a medium sized organization that was having a discussion about branding strategy. One of the vice presidents gave his opinion on a branding issue and then casually mentioned how it aligned with the vision. The only problem was that the vision he articulated was in the complete opposite direction of what the CEO was trying to do.

The problem wasn’t that the CEO didn’t have a vision. He just hadn’t communicated it effectively to the rest of the organization. I’m sure he thought he had communicated the vision, but the test of a well-communicated vision is whether or not the people responsible for implementing the vision understand it.

A very simple way to test your organization’s vision alignment is ask people to write down the vision anonymously in a short paragraph. It doesn’t need to be a long drawn out thing, but this feedback will give you a much better idea of how well aligned everyone is. Keeping it anonymous helps people concentrate more on articulating the vision and less on worrying about getting it wrong. After all, you are really testing your performance, not their ability to remember.

Once you get the feedback, read over each and every vision statement. If you notice that most of them miss something that you consider to be important, that is a good sign that you need to do some more vision casting in that area. It is very likely that you’ll find things that aren’t part of your vision. These are areas where you may need to apply some course correction to make sure everyone is headed in the same direction.

If everyone comes back and states the vision exactly as you feel you’ve communicated it, consider yourself fortunate. Most of us will find that there is some room for improvement in conveying our vision.