How to Earn Respect at Work

So, you’re not getting enough respect from your manager? Don’t get me wrong; everyone deserves basic civility from their boss and coworkers, regardless of what they achieve. But if you want to be respected, that takes effort. And more than effort, it takes results. Here’s how to earn respect from your manager and your peers.

Levels of Respect from Your Manager

Consider different levels of respect you can earn—like levels you need to unlock in a game or rungs on a ladder you need to climb. Start with the first rung and constantly challenge yourself to move to the next.

Level 1: Are You Busy?

The most obvious (i.e., superficial) way to measure your worth is to track your activity. Are you busy? Are you showing up? Working long hours? Responding to emails in the evening and on weekends? Attending lots of meetings? Making many calls? Collecting reams of evidence? Writing many drafts?

Your manager will probably give you credit for your hustle.

Sure, you earn some respect for being active and for working hard. You can get an A for effort. But you might be trying to convince your manager that you’re “getting sh!t done” when really you’re just doing a lot of sh!t.

There’s a better measure.

Level 2: Are You Productive?

A more critical question is, are you turning activities into outputs?

Did you make the decision? Did you finish the report? Send the contract? Ship the code? Send the press release? Deliver the training? Flesh out the plan.

Your manager will likely give you even more credit for your accomplishments.

Getting things done deserves respect, but there’s more. As Stephen Covey said, “If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”

Level 3: Are You Effective?

Is your ladder up against the right wall? That is, are your outputs creating the necessary outcomes?

Outcomes are the results of your efforts that are beyond your control. Because of that, I often hear people say, “Well, I can’t control that, so it’s unfair to evaluate me on it.”

An HR executive in a bank once argued to me that he couldn’t be responsible for whether managers improved the diversity of their hiring. He felt strongly that all he could do was provide the training and the rationale for more diversity because the decision was in their hands. I suggested that if that’s the case, we should stop measuring branch managers on how many mortgages and savings accounts they sell because they don’t have control over what the customers do. This was the same guy who complained that HR didn’t get the respect they deserved. Outputs aren’t outcomes.

When you show that your work drives desired outcomes, you earn the highest respect.

Balancing Activity, Outputs, and Outcomes

For your organization, outcomes are the most important thing to strive for. Suppose you can work two hours daily, send one proposal, and deliver a $10 million customer monthly. In that case, you are more valuable to the organization than someone who works ten hours a day, responds to five RFPs a week, and signs a $1 million customer each quarter.

In a perfect world, if you’ve found the magic formula to drive outcomes, you don’t need to prove yourself by delivering outputs or being overly active. The more outputs you deliver, the less people will monitor your activity. The more outcomes you deliver, the less they will track your outputs.

The sad thing is that it’s not a perfect world. Some managers only know how to track outputs and never stop to figure out whether the outputs are moving the needle on the outcomes that matter. Your peers might be getting kudos for climbing the ladder that leads nowhere.

Worse, some managers aren’t even focused on outputs because they’re so caught up in a traditional work ethic that they are more interested in activity than output. These are usually the managers who don’t have a clue about what they want other than they want to see you sweat. Those managers are just as besotted with the employees running in circles on the ground as those who’ve made meaningful progress up the steps.

If you have a manager who doesn’t know how to think about, let alone measure, the outcomes that prove your work is working, keep the faith. At some point, you’ll likely be rewarded with a better manager. In the meantime, be shrewd about highlighting your activity and outputs while you keep building a track record of delivering results.

Additional Resources

In the mirror: What does respect mean to me?

When Should I Manage Up

Nihar Chhaya wrote a really great article in HBR about earning respect from colleagues with more power than you.

 

The post How to Earn Respect at Work appeared first on Liane Davey.