How to Gain Respect from Your Team – 10 Tried & Tested Approaches
How to gain respect from your team is on the mind of every manager taking on a new team. It doesn’t matter if you are new to management or an old hand. How you approach managing others – the actions and decisions you take and the behaviour you display will determine how quickly you get respect at work.
I am sharing 10 tried and tested approaches for how to earn your team’s respect quickly. None of these approaches are underhand or psychological tricks. You can tell you team exactly what you are doing and you will get not lose any respect by telling them. These approaches work quickly and will still be working 5 years later with the same team.
How to Gain Respect from Your Team
- Help your team members do better
- Respect and admire each team member
- Be friendly, but not friends
- Match words with aligned actions and decisions
- Listen to team ideas and solutions and act on them
- Be prepared to change your mind
- Extend trust and responsibility
- Be Humble
- Be Consistent
- Celebrate your team member’s success
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Probably the most important starting point in how to gain respect from your team is your mindset or approach to the team. Your job as a manager is to
Help your team members do better
Work hard to make your team member’s ability to do their job well easier and more enjoyable. The more you demonstrate your willingness and effectiveness at helping team members do better – the more respect you will get.
After all, who doesn’t like and appreciate a manager making our lives at work easier.
You should be absolutely focused on helping your team members because when they do better work, more work, smarter work, the team overall performs better. When the team performs better, you the manager will be doing your job well and will get rewarded with promotions and more people to manage.
The most effective way to consistently increase team performance I have found is to – for example –
- help each person overcome the hurdles they face,
- remove problems that impact the team,
- help develop the team’s skills,
- working hard to create a positive team environment,
- setting really clear and consistent direction.
i.e. do your absolute best as a manager to get the best from each team member by setting direction, creating the right team environment, and supporting wherever you are needed. There is no better way to earn respect as a leader.
[Learn more about the mindset of the top managers]
The second approach in how to win your team’s respect is to
Respect and admire each team member
We all tend to like and respect those that like and respect us. This response is part of group social rules hardwired into us over generations.
I think managers need to get on with as many people as possible, and certainly team members.
Find something that each of your team members does well – professionally or personally. It must be something you admire, something they are good at. Every person has something, even those that you don’t like and are not great at their jobs. Look hard until you find at least one thing, preferably more.
Then with total sincerity, you can show your respect and admiration towards each team member for what it is you like about them or what they do well. This is a great step in how to win your teams respect.
Tell them you respect their skills or their approach, or their behaviour or their choices in this particular area. Show your respect in an authentic way for you.
How to gain the respect of the team should start with you building your respect for them.
Be friendly, but not friends – The third approach in gaining respect from your team
To be respected by your team, I think you need to be confident in your own self-worth as a manager. If you need to rely on your team to give you a confidence boost, then you are going to be taken advantage of by team members or struggle to make the right decisions for the good of the team.
So be friendly to each team member. Take a genuine interest in their lives, their passions, their interests. Be personable. Demonstrate your empathy. Maintain a positive professional relationship and a personal relationship to a point.
Keep some separation from team members so you can make the right tough decisions when needed. Go to social events with the team but don’t become friends with team members. Your professionalism as a manager and your judgement will be questioned if you do. Plus you become in danger of treating some team member differently from others. I don’t think you can afford this, if you want to do a good job as a manager of others.
To gain respect at work as a manager, be friendly but don’t be friends.
The fourth approach in how to gain respect from your team is
Match words with aligned actions and decisions
One of the biggest killers of trust and respect from your team is if you ask them to follow rules that you are not prepared to follow yourself.
Do as I say is not enough. You must do as you expect team members to do. Lead by example and behave at work in the way you expect your team members to behave.
You must also match your actions and decisions with what you say and ask for. If you are asking the team to work hard, then you should be working just as hard or harder to help them deliver as a team.
Another example – if you ask team member for ideas, then you should listen and implement the good ideas provided.
Match your decisions and actions with what you are asking from your team to make your team respect you.
Listen to team ideas and solutions and act on them – The fifth approach in how to gain respect from your team
There is no bigger vote of confidence in ideas or solutions provided by the team than to implement those ideas or solutions.
The team members are at the coal face as such. They are wrestling directly with the problems faced by the team. Team members should have more expertise in their area or at least more first-hand knowledge of a given situation than you. This puts them in a great position to produce great solutions or input ideas into creating great solutions.
I never felt it important that the manager comes up with the ideas. What I thought was very important for the manager was to recognise the best ideas and solutions and make sure they were implemented.
For these reasons, ask your team for their input, activity listen to what they tell you and implement their ideas when you see their value. What better way for you to show your respect of what team members can offer the team. In doing so, you will get a lot of respect back from team members and the team as whole.
The sixth approach in how to earn your teams respect is
Be prepared to change your mind
There is no way a single person can be right all the time. A manager of a team is certainly not going to be right all the time.
A really practical and effective way of being right more often than wrong is to listen carefully to ideas, solutions and challenges your team members provide you. Compare them to your options and keep aiming to choose the best one, regardless of who it came from.
I can’t tell you the times I approached a situation with a preferred option to resolve it – only to change my mind after listening to a team member or being given a better solution. Every time – you see the team member smile a bit brighter, have a slightly bigger spring in their step – generally appreciate that you – prove through your actions- they have something of value to offer.
Showing that you are prepared to change your mind is a great way of gaining respect from your team. Taking this step will also give you better solutions to problems, give you more time and less personal stress. All these lead to a nicer time as a manager and a better team performance.
Can you afford not to listen to your team members?
The seventh approach in how to get your teams respect is
Extend trust and responsibility
To each team member. Do flex the level of trust and responsibility you give to each team member depending on their skills and behaviour.
For inexperienced team members or new joiners, this level would probably start fairly low. If you don’t trust your team members and give them responsibility, how will they trust you and allow you to have responsibility over them?
For experienced team members and high performers, provide them more responsibility so they can continue developing their skills and decision making.
Use reporting, visibility and regular contact to exert a level of control while providing responsibility – instead of micromanagement or only asking team members to do tasks.
If your team members are not trustworthy and don’t show responsibility towards their roles and other team members, why do you have them in your team? If they are in your team, trust your team members and give them responsibility and you will get respect at work in return.
[Read more about 10 factors to Create Team Accountability]
Be Humble – The eighth approach in how to get your teams respect
No-one likes a manager that goes on power trips, that has an inflated sense of their own importance, that looks down at others or any negative behaviour that leaves team members unhappy.
A team manager or leader is a privileged position – you are responsible for the culture, work, and output of the team. You have a different role from the team members. Both manager and worker roles are important.
Great ways to be humble are to admit your mistakes, to show your emotions and recognise your frailties. Work on ensuring your mindset and way of thinking shows the respect you have for your team members. Part of motivating others is knowing and reminding them of their value.
Be humble to a point and your team will respect you a lot more.
The ninth approach in how to earn your teams respect is
Be Consistent
If you as a manager can be consistent with your behaviours, your decisions, and your actions you will give the team a lot of confidence.
The more consistent you are, the clearer the boundaries you set for the team. Apply the same rules to each team member and yourself. If you don’t live your rules, then your team won’t either.
If you struggle to keep your behaviours, decisions and actions consistent, then focus first on keeping each as consistent as possible towards each team member. You can’t afford to have favourites as a manager if you want to earn everyone’s respect and keep the team happy and motivated.
Every time you need to take a decision or undertake an action, ask yourself:
- Is this consistent with my previous actions or decisions?
- If not, am I setting a precedent that I am happy with?
- How will this affect the team, the team’s culture and the team’s performance.
The more consistent you are, the less problems you create for yourself as a manager. It does take work, effort and discipline to be consistent. I personally, think this is a lot less work that dealing with the problems caused by not being consistent.
The tenth approach in how to gain respect from your team is
Celebrate your team member’s success
Always give credit where it is due. If Dave contributed a great bit of work, or implemented a solution very well, praise Dave in front of him and the team. This encourages Dave and the rest of the team to work to earn praise.
Compliment great results, actions, choices and behaviours. Team members need to be praised three time more than criticised to remain happy. In top performing teams, praise is given 5.2 time more than criticism. Both are high bars for managers.
Team members respect managers that celebrate their successes and give credit where it is due to team members.
In summary
Use each of these the ten approaches we have gone through in gaining respect from your team. The more effort you put in and more consistently you use each approach, the quicker you will make your team respect you.
The ten approaches for how to gain respect from your team are:
- Help your team members do better
- Respect and admire each team member
- Be friendly, but not friends
- Match words with aligned actions and decisions
- Listen to team ideas and solutions and act on them
- Be prepared to change your mind
- Extend trust and responsibility
- Be Humble
- Be Consistent
- Celebrate your team member’s success
Gaining respect from your team should because of the work you put in, and how you behave, in helping the team.
If your team doesn’t respect you, then they don’t see the value you are providing to them or you are not helping them. You can gain respect from your team quickly – in weeks. More importantly, act and behave in a sensible way and focus on helping your team and you will have their respect for years.
Start with the right mindset and align your behaviours and your effort behind that mindset. Enjoy helping your team more and getting a lot of respect back from the team.
