How to earn respect from your team (it cannot be forced)

I got to tell you, spoiler, and I know we already know this, your team members aren’t going to just respect you simply because of the hierarchy. They’re not just going to respect you just because you’re in charge. And this is especially the case if you are managing folks that you were formerly peers with. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast. I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my signature Ops Playbook, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech to save you time, money, and stress.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be, are a new manager looking to learn the ropes, or are a seasoned manager ready to up their game, everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. From conflicts, to feedback, to delegating, and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between.

Let’s go. Welcome back to the show. If you’ve ever felt that feeling of, ah, why don’t my team members respect me? I’m in charge. I’m the manager. I’m the business owner. I’m the leader. What’s going on here? Then this episode is for you because I want to talk about how to actually create a culture of respect in your team so that your team members listen to you, take action on what you say, but it’s not because you’re ruling out of authority and out of fear, but because your team members actually genuinely respect you as a person, you as a leader, and the things that you want for your team and business.

Now, this is a question I have been getting a lot. How do I get my team members to respect me? I’m in charge, but they’re not doing what I asked them, or they’re kind of disagreeing. And I got to tell you, spoiler, and I know we already know this, is your team members aren’t going to just respect you simply because of the hierarchy. They’re not just going to respect you just because you’re in charge. And this is especially the case if you are managing folks that you were formerly peers with.

I know I talk about this a lot. One of the topics on one of my recent Managing Your Team Q&As that I’ve been doing on Fridays, how do you get your team members to respect you when you move into this new role of a manager? Potentially, as for business owners, if you have hired folks that were your friends or family members, how do you get your team members to respect you when you have this new dynamic?

And I think the first sort of thing to pick apart is this, how do I get people to respect me or how do I make people respect me? This is implying that you can kind of push it or force it, or there’s some magic thing that you do and then it unlocks this thing, or again, that it should be automatic. Well, like I said, it’s not automatic. And I know for me, when I was managing a former friend and our dynamic changed and then I was in charge and I felt this way, like, gosh, why doesn’t she respect me as a manager?

The reason was because I hadn’t done a lot of the things that actually earned someone’s respect in this new dynamic. And so I want to talk about a few things that we can do to show our team members that, hey, I am here for you as a leader. I am going to show up for you. I am a good leader. I have confidence in myself. So that your team members kind of relationship with you shifts and their perception of you shifts.

And then it creates that sense of respect. Now obviously, why do we need our team members to respect us? I mean, it’s a question we don’t need to answer, but because when people respect us, they trust us, they trust our direction, they trust what we’re asking them to do. They trust our vision for the team or the business. They take action when we ask them to do something, even if it’s not really what they want, because they know, oh, I see something in them.

They actually have a good sense. I have confidence in them as a leader. So a lot of this is about how do you help your team stay motivated? How do you help them stay on, you know, on the right path, working towards the priorities, working towards the goals that you set? How do you retain people? Well, we’re not going to stay on a team if we don’t respect the leader. We’re like, uh, you know what this person doing?

So a lot of this comes together to create a higher retention, to create more motivation around the goals, priorities, folks really taking that ownership mindset to be helping supporting growing the business or, or getting to the team goals faster. All of that creates better results. So this is why it’s so important. And also we just feel better as leaders. We know respected, like I don’t want to be a manager of a team when I know everyone kind of rolls their eyes when I’m asking them something or things like, who cares what they have to say that is demoralizing for you and your team.

So respect is so important. And I think the first and foremost thing that I would suggest and that I see be a real difference between leaders who have a ton of respect, whose team members see them and they follow them into the fires or whatever, whatever it is, is when you are as a leader, roll up your sleeves and go get in it with your team. Our team members want to see us walking the talk. They want to see that, Hey, when we say no work from home, we are there in the office too.

We are following the policy. We are following it. We are modeling the behaviors we want to see. We are rolling up our sleeves. We are there. We are in it. And yes, there are certain, certain kinds of roles that we may not be doing firsthand or certain circumstances that require us not to be totally in it. But we create a sense of I’m here with you. I understand the details of the work that you’re doing. I understand the nuances.

I was managing an engineer once and I didn’t understand the details of his job. What I did in that case was I asked him questions about it. I said, Hey, I want to learn about your process. I want to know where do you get stuck to, you know, teach me the things that are getting in your way so that I can better support you. What kind of opportunities do you want? What kind of stretch projects can I help you go after?

So even if you don’t have the same background or you’re not working in that same field as someone, you can still be in it with them by having conversations to really try to deeply understand and demonstrate that you really want to learn about what they’re working on. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been talking with a business owner or manager and they’ve said, I want to be a better manager. I just don’t know the steps.

Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. And frankly, I’ve felt that way too. Even when I had been managing people for a while because this stuff is hard and it changes all the time. So the last time someone asked me for the steps, I made a cheat sheet. Head to Leahgarvin.com slash scorecard for 20 things you can do this month to be a better manager. This is literally your tell me what to do and I’ll do it steps to motivate your team and get better results.

There’s no time like the present. Grab the scorecard or write freaking out Leahgarvin.com slash scorecard. And that I remember because when I first started managing this engineer, I was like, they’re going to think like, why is this person my manager? And at first he asked like, I don’t know why you’re a manager. I don’t really know what you can offer me. And I felt that too. I was worried about it. But then I built a relationship with him and by understanding, well, he actually was really interested in becoming a manager himself.

And that’s something I knew a lot about. And he was interested in getting more visibility for his work and that was something I could support him in. So you see, by getting in it with him and talking to him and making time and really understanding, okay, well, what are some of the nuances of his work that I can help amplify and elevate? That’s how we started to build a relationship. And then he really respected me as a leader.

And then he would come to me when he needed help and our whole dynamic changed. And it was awesome because I think both of us were able to really reframe our whole perception of what the relationship was because we both invested the time. But it starts with you as that leader to show, hey, I am here with you. I want to figure this out. I want to help you. I want to roll up my sleeves. Teach me some of this stuff.

Maybe I can help out one day. So that you’re showing, I don’t see myself as this untouchable leader. I think, wasn’t it the guy that the CEO of Snapchat, I think he had an office where he wanted to sit above everyone to create this weird hierarchy. What I’m saying is doing the opposite of that. Sit with your team members. Show up in the office, in the studio, in the center, wherever you’re at. Be there in person when you have events if you’re fully remote.

Show up for the coffee chats if you’re all virtual. Show up for the happy hours. Be there with them. That’s going to start to command a lot of respect. Show them that you don’t see yourself as this untouchable leader that’s totally far removed. The next thing I would say is to really operate in integrity. This is basic, but if you say something’s important, do it. If you say, hey, we really need to show up for these meetings five minutes early because we’ve got to get prepared for the client, you’ve got to show up five minutes early.

If people don’t show up, you’ve got to hold people accountable. When you say something, it has to matter. I think all of us, probably the biggest way we lose respect for a leader or anybody really is when they say something and they don’t follow through with it or when they let other people not follow through with it. Because that’s frustrating to all of us. We showed up, we’re there, and we see our boss letting other people just kind of not do it.

This is something that I personally find to be the biggest gap in teams in general is a lack of accountability. A lot of times people ask me, what do you think is the biggest place teams go wrong? Without thinking, accountability. Because so many times it’s hard for leaders to say something and people agree and then later it kind of fizzles out and you don’t want to be mean, you don’t need micromanager, so you kind of let stuff slide.

And then over time, that process that you were really bought into, it’s not really sticking and more people stop following it and it kind of fizzles out and then you kind of have this mess that’s been created. Or you made a decision on the team and it felt really good and then kind of there’s some chatter like, do I really want to do this behind the scenes? And you let that go because you don’t want to, again, you don’t want to be too overbearing or micromanager or too kind of pushy or whatever, so you let that dialogue continue.

And then the decision doesn’t get followed through on. All of these little things start to chip away at the respect your team members have for you. And when I talk about leading with integrity and operating with accountability, I don’t mean managing through fear and punishment, no. I mean through follow through and creating a sense of ownership in your team. And that is the biggest shift. I think when we think about accountability and we think about integrity, I don’t mean creating a bunch of rules and making it this environment where like you get one shot and you’re out.

No, no, no. I mean, follow through and ownership and when you create a sense of ownership for folks, they will feel accountable because they see what their role is in getting something done. OK, so when you say, hey, I really want our team to track our work in this way or, hey, we’re going to be doing three days in the office, two days at home, or we’re going to have no work from home for a few months or we’re going to focus on these priorities or we’re shifting our, we’re going to pivot in this direction.

We’re all going to really be on board. All of that requires you to first show up, model it. And then when folks don’t do it or there’s some kind of dissent to really have conversations about that. If folks are disagreeing, is there perspectives that we hadn’t weighed in or folks just kind of dragging their feet? If people are not showing up for the three days in the office, checking in with folks and saying, hey, you know, this is something we all committed to.

We got to do it. If folks are continually, you know, video off on meetings and you have a team norm around being on and present and ready to engage, then having conversation with them. Because with that one specifically, you know, the moment you kind of start having everyone halfway on the video, everybody’s going to be off video, maybe doing something else. I don’t want to accuse people of that. Maybe they’re fully present. But you create this thing where everybody starts to snowball and do the behaviors of kind of like the lowest common denominator.

And this is where, again, I just see leaders lose so much respect from their team members. Because even if we don’t like something, we will go with it if we see, hey, that’s what everybody is doing. Okay. Even if your team members don’t all want to be in the office three days a week, if you are all doing it and we’re all following consistently, they will show up. But if it’s like, hey, Sarah doesn’t come in on Tuesdays and Joe doesn’t come on Fridays and Steve doesn’t come on on this day, and it’s sort of like we’re all just winging it.

When you set a policy, you say something’s important, they’re going to be like, well, that thing fizzled out. She didn’t care about that. He didn’t care about this. And you really lose that. And again, we implement process and we implement policies and norms through setting context on what’s in it for your team and why it’s important. But once we say it’s important, once we say something’s non-negotiable, we got to stick with it. And that’s a lot of what I talk about in the Ops Playbook program is not only how to create, you know, what are the lightweight processes you want to have for your team across onboarding and priority setting and working norms and decision making and work tracking and performance.

We set the norms. We also talk about how we want to hold people accountable because that’s where you build that relationship with your team. That’s where you find they respect you. That’s where they do better work. Because when stuff starts to fizzle out, that’s where it feels random. That’s where it feels like, who really cares? We said the party was this one day, now it’s that. We said this was important one day, now it’s this other thing.

And that creates a really high sense of disengagement on your team, disillusionment. We think, well, who really cares? Can I even grow here? So with this conversation of respect, again, I said it in the beginning, it’s also about team retention. It’s also about keeping productivity high, keeping performance high. Because when we are working for a leader we really, really respect, we really, really believe in, that’s where we’ll rise to the occasion and, you know, be able to achieve anything, right?

Meet any goal, even if it’s really hard. Because we bring a different level of commitment when we respect someone. And so that’s what I want to encourage you to do, is these two kind of themes. Really roll up your sleeves, get in it with people. If you do that same task, learn from them. If you are able to kind of get in there and sit next to them and understand the work. If you don’t, you know, if it’s a totally different discipline, an area you don’t have experience in, ask them about it.

Demonstrate enthusiasm to learn about what their work is. Get in it with them. And the other is to really operate in integrity and hold people accountable around what you say is important. We’re going to show up for that. We are going to, you know, for lack of a better word, enforce it. But in a way that’s through context setting and supporting people and collecting feedback and refining if we need to. But we are going to hold ourselves accountable to what we say.

And we know those two things. You will set yourself apart so much more as a leader. Because so many people talk without walking the walk and we’ve all been there. We see it. And again, it’s frustrating, it’s demoralizing and it makes us say, I don’t think I have a future here because I don’t really care about this leader or their business, right? So that’s how you make work more than just a paycheck. That’s how you get people to take that ownership mindset.

Because when they believe in you, when they respect you, they can accomplish anything. See you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive. With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it.

See you next time. Bye.