How to Get More Respect as a Manager – 3 Vital Principles to Adopt
How to get more respect as a manager or leader from the team you lead is an awful lot easier when you follow 3 hugely important principles. You can put these into practice immediately, whether you are a new manager or have many years’ experience.
Plenty of managers really struggle to get respect, appreciation and trust from their teams even when they follow standard management advice. These managers go through the motions of managing yet have not embraced what I think are fundamental requirements to manage any team well and get more respect as a manager.
How to Get More Respect as a Manager – 3 Vital Principles
- Visibly and proactively improve team members’ experience of work
- Think partnerships not boss-employee relationships
- Use the power of your position to help others
I have lived these principles managing multiple teams in top companies. These principles have help me win Best Team prizes with different teams at national and company level and gain a promotion nearly every year. Many great managers I have worked with over the years follow exactly the same approach i.e. anyone can use these principles and gain a lot of respect quickly.
Earning the respect of your team, your boss, colleagues and managers comes through a mindset focused on consistently helping others be better and doing better; helping the team and the company perform better. For each principle, I share a ton of practical tips for how to turn what you learn into specific practical actions you can take immediately.
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visibly and proactively improve team members’ experience of work – The first principle to get more respect as a manager
I would like you to think about the fairy tales or stories you know about leaders. Most kings or leaders that are truly respected and loved are kind kings or leaders that work tirelessly for the good of their subjects or those they lead. Most evil kings or leaders are those that seek power and wealth for themselves. In every culture and across the ages, these themes remain the same. Those that help others are respected. Those that help themselves are not.
A critical test to pass day in day out to earn respect from your team is:
How are you going to demonstrate that you being leader of the team is beneficial to each person in the team and the team overall.
i.e. if you weren’t their manager, the team believes they would be worse off.
The more the team believes you are helping them, the more respect you will get because you are making their lives at work better, easier, etc. The more you can improve team performance, the more respect you will get from everyone else.
Helping your team is not winning a popularity contest. It is not being really nice to everyone. It is not letting them do whatever they want.
Here are six really important actions you can take to help your team deliver more and deliver better and, in the process, get your team to respect you:
1 – Set Really Clear Goals & Expectations
Set really clear goals and a direction of travel for the team that you keep to over the quarter or year. Clear goals and expectations increase the focus on the value adding areas and help drive results. It provides psychological safety and all the benefits you get with that. It provides more autonomy and ownership. It creates a common purpose. All these help increase team performance.
2 – Proactively Solve Problems for your Team
Proactively look for and ask your team to identify problem of all shapes and sizes. Then visibly work hard to remove those problems on behalf of your team as quickly as possible. Think people, processes and systems when looking for problems and prioritise the problems that have the greatest negative impact on the team.
3 – Protect Your Team
Work out steps you should take to protect your team from low value requests, work that does not aligned to team and business goals, unhelpful changes of direction and office politics. Communicate to your team the steps you have taken when appropriate.
4 – Live your Rules
Manage your own decisions, actions and behaviours to align with the expectations and goals you have set your team. If you don’t follow your own rules, why should anyone else. This is not easy, but it is incredibly important.
5 – Communicate Progress & Provide Support
Create a reporting and meeting cadence that communicates team progress to everyone and be part of the support structure within the team that helps every individual meet their goals faster and better.
6 – Help Team Members Learn Faster
What can you personally do to help your team members learn faster and increase their skills and experience. You could personally mentor and coach team members, you could set up a buddy system so peers can teach peers, you could get external providers involved – there are lots of different options. Help your team increase their skills.
There is a lot more that can be added to this list. Remember, how are you personally going to make your team members lives at work easier, happier, more productive and more fulfilled.
When you can confidently list of a set of actions you are taking, you will get more respect as a manager.
think partnerships not boss-employee relationships – The second principle
How you think of your team members will translate into the decision and actions you take and the behaviour you display. You need your team as much as they need you. A manager’s performance is assessed on their team’s performance. The better your team performs, the better you are assessed to be performing.
The mental transition from directly controlling your success as a worker to indirectly influencing your success as a manager or leader is a difficult shift for many. A great way to speed up this shift is to think of your team as valuable partners.
What the Partnership Approach Encourages
When you think of team members as important partners, you:
- Are more likely to fully use the skills and experience team members have. For example asking them to solve specific problems rather than issues a set of instructions of what to do.
- You are much more likely to ask for and listen to their views, ideas, challenges and solutions. Even better is to put the good ones into practice. This is a powerful way to demonstrate you value and respect your team members
- You will share more openly and honestly information and discuss why you are taking certain action, which in turn will help them personally do a better job
- I guarantee you will spend more time listening to your team and understanding your team members, which will improve relationships and increase their respect for you
- You are ten times more likely to follow the rules and expectations you have set for your team and hold yourself as accountable as your team members. This is motivating for team members, and you gain more respect as a manager living your own rules.
- You are more likely to appreciate, praise and celebrate team members successes. Praise is a great way to positively reinforce what you want more of and discourage what you don’t.
Improve Your Mindset Today
What other ways can you think of to demonstrate consistently that you view your team as partners rather than just employees.
Being treated as a partner will make your team members feel more valued and appreciated. They will be willing and feel more enabled to use more of their skills and experience to help the team perform even better.
Thinking in terms of partnerships will earn you a lot more respect as a manager too.
use the power of your position to help others – The third principle to get more respect as a manager
When you are promoted into a management position, you are given the power and responsibility to direct and manage your team. You also have significantly more influence within the business and over your team members’ career progress – both other types of power.
Everyone is tempted to use additional power to help themselves. It might be small things – like exempting yourself from some of the rules you set your team. Turning up a few minutes late to meetings. Or it might be using threats to get an annoying person to do what you want or shut them up.
Really do your best to resist the temptation to use the power of your position to make your life easier or better WHEN this is at the expense of your team or those around you.
Do use the power you have to make work life for your team as enjoyable and productive as possible. Do use your power to help others, to remove problems quicker, to develop and improve.
The more you use the power you have to help others and refrain from using it to help yourself at the expense of others, the more respect you will get as a manager and leader.
Use power carefully and to help others before helping yourself.
In summary
Use the three principles for how to get more respect as a manager or leader. Managing and leading others is a responsibility, a privilege and an important job for the benefit of your team and business.
The more respect you get as a manager, the more you will be able to do a great job, which in turn will earn you even more respect.
Visibly and proactively improve team members’ experience of work. You have lots of opportunity to do this as a manager. Next, think partnerships not boss-employee relationships and your team will massively respect you. Finally, use the power of your position to help others to gain even more respect.
Don’t forget to take a look at the additional resources in the description and if you have any questions on “How to Get More Respect as A Manager – 3 Vital Principles”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
How to get a lot of respect as a manager quickly come from how you approach the job. The purpose of a manager is to lead and serve your team. The more that you can help, enable, encourage and coach your team members to do the best jobs they can, the more respect you will get as a manager.
Getting respect and serving your team is not about being nice, or trying to win popularity competitions. It is absolutely about doing the best for the team overall which includes making tough decisions in the right way.
Do the best you can for your team!
