Do your employees feel respected? Business leaders know respect is important but there’s often confusion as to what that respect looks like and what it really means. In this episode, I cover the main points of Kristie Rogers’ article; including the distinction between “owed respect” and “earned respect”,  how a recent experience with one of my sons is the perfect example of these two types of respect, what needs to be considered when deciding how to balance the two types of respect in an organization, and more! Mentioned in this episode:

• Kristie Roger’s Harvard Business Review Article | Do Your Employees Feel Respected?

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Transcript Hey, hey, it’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. Lately, I’ve been working on a project.  It’s a little training or an offering that I am putting together that would help companies or organizations be able to get really clear on their values, their mission, their vision, and their purpose in order to be able to share that with the rest of the company so that they can help people connect their purpose to the purpose of the company.  So a feeling like it matters “What I do really matters here.” And in the process of working through this and working on this and testing it out with people, I’m also putting together a talk to use at conferences.  So in the process, I’m reading some articles.  And I came across this one from Harvard Business Review.  It is by Kristie Rogers who’s out of Marquette University, and I really appreciated what she had to say about respect. So today, we’re going to a look out what she does say about respect just like a couple of things that she says and discuss what that looks like or what it means for us as people who are trying to help others connect their purpose to the company, help others be able to feel like we matter and that their voice matters because this is something that we talk about a lot here, you voice matters, but you can make it matter more. This is sort of the tagline that we’ve been working with the last year or so and this idea that your voice does matter.  It matters inherently.  You’re a human being that matters. But on the other side, you can still make it matter more in a different sense.  And I talked about this a number of times.  You can do things that make your voice have more influence.  So there’s an inherent quality but then there’s also this quality that has to do with your performance and what we do, what we say, and how that actually impacts our influence. So what Kristie Rogers says in this article is that that there is kind of a consensus that people know, business leaders know that respect is important.  They kind of know that.  We’ve been talking about it quite a while, but maybe there’s confusion around this idea of what it really, really means and what it looks like.  So she makes a distinction between owed respect and earned respect. Let me read to you her definition.  This is from the article Do Your Employees Feel Respected?  Show Workers that they’re valued and your business will flourish.  This is from Harvard Business Review, July-August 2018.  And owed respect as she defines it is accorded equally to all members of a work group or an organization.  So this is for everybody.  It meets the universal need to feel included.  It signaled by stability in an atmosphere suggesting that every member of the group is inherently valuable. So, owed respect is really this general overall feeling and this general overall consensus that everybody matters.  It’s this idea that your voice matters, inherently you are valuable.  But earned respect recognizes individual employees who display valued quality or behaviors.  It distinguishes employees who had exceeded expectations and particularly in knowledge work setting affirms that each employee has unique strengths and talents. Earned respect meets the need to be valued for doing good work.  So earned respect has to do with performance.  I think that is so important.  I love this distinction.  I think it’s so important because you have to have a sense of owed respect.  Everybody like that people matter and if they don’t feel like they matter at all, they’re not valuable, that they don’t _____ value then how are they supposed to feel like what they do matters? Or maybe they get kind of stuck on this cycle of trying to climb the corporate ladder in a sense or be more and more and more successful because they’d be more valuable if they’re more successful.  So we don’t want people to find their inherent value in success.  That is something that is just there that everybody is valuable as a human being.  But when there is a distinction between that and earned respect that means that the people can truly outperform somebody else. I know that one of the things that gets confusing in schools for example is you know, do we give everybody the same grade?  Do we kind of make grades a deal an issue at all?  Or do we reward for things like, you know, your grades or your test scores, or do we need to just make it about attendance and the only things that you get rewarded are your behavior, you know, being quiet in class and being there. Well, students just as much as any other human being needs to know that they are valuable and that being there is important.  And at the same time, they also need to be rewarded for hard work or their abilities of what they do, with what they have and outperforming themselves essentially but it could be outperforming others as well. So it becomes tricky though, right?  It becomes tricky as a teacher, as an educator, as somebody who’s trying to decide what to recognize and what not to recognize because you don’t want to have people feeling bad and then giving up but on the other hand, you don’t want people feeling like, “Gosh, it doesn’t really matter what I do with my abilities.  It doesn’t matter what I do with them so I’m just gonna give up as well.” There is a need for both owed and earned respect.  It kind of also made me think of a story with my son.  So we went out to eat as a family and it was actually…let me think about this before telling you but this particular meal, we went out to eat, it was a celebration because one of our children did really well on a test and one of our children did really well with their grades, and we wanted to celebrate that.  This was a moment of earned respect. There are many times that we just do things with them and for them because we love them, because they are our children and they don’t have to do anything to earn that love and so we’ll rotate them out.  We’ll do special something with them just because they’re our kids, but this was a particular celebration. So we wanted them to know that we were recognizing, that we recognized how hard they’d worked and that it’s important and it’s good to do that.  And so this was a moment of earned respect.  So we decided; we were playing games at our table while watching a football game and eating and that sort of thing.  That was really fun. And then our son realized that he had forgotten something in the car.  So we gave him the keys.  He’s 9 years old, we gave him the keys and he walked out.  We kind of looked at each other hoping he doesn’t get hit you know.  We warned him before he left, you know, “Make sure you’re watching for the cars,” because he kind of tends to be oblivious to his surroundings sometimes.  He looks down and walks instead of looking up.  So we were a little concerned about that, you know, sending him out there by himself. But pretty soon we saw him coming back in the door.  We were across the whole entire restaurant.  We see him walking in the door.  He opens the door and he’s kind of looking down and he opens the next door and he sees an older gentleman that is kind of struggling to walk, and I was like “You guys, what’s he’s gonna do?”  I actually said that.  I wondered, you know, “Will he really do something?  Is he just going to walk right by or is he gonna notice?”  And you know what he did, he actually opened the door for this gentlemen and I was like “Oh, yes!  I’m so glad that he noticed.” We were sitting there and just kind of like “Oh this is awesome.  Good for him.”  He can’t see us.  He doesn’t notice us.  And then I said “Do you think he’ll open the second door?”  I really wasn’t sure, and sure enough he did, he opened the second door.  And my mom heart just beat out of my chest.  I was so happy that he did that.  It just elevated the level of respect that I had for him in that moment. And so he came back to the seat or the table with us and we told him, we’re like “Grant, we are so proud of you.”  Like him doing a good job on a test, but he didn’t actually worked too hard at was one thing.  But Grant actually paying attention to another human being and giving him owed respect, opening that door for him. He didn’t notice the gentleman _____ so it’s not like he earned their respect in the sense that he had done something for Grant, instead he gave him owed respect because he’s a human being and he could see that he needed help, he opened the door.  And this made me so proud of him, and in that sense, Grant, earned more respect from me. When it comes to how we apply this to our work environment or to our organizations, we need to, and these are some of the things that Kristie said in her article but also some things that some of my thoughts as well kind of make _____, we really need to provide an atmosphere where everybody knows that they matter, that they are valued and their contribution does matter. So when I’m doing a workshop or I am helping a company come up with their values, we make sure to do things and to integrate ideas that will help bring out the voice of the people that are working there, not just the executives but also those who are kind of on the frontline and doing work with customers and things like these.  So we capture their voice.  We give them an opportunity to speak then we go and have conversation with the executives then we get more clear from their perspective. You know, we kind of hear both perspectives and what kind of the executives kind of do some of that real work of determining which things we’re going to really highlight in terms of values or initiatives that they’re wanting to move forward and then we go back again to the people and we say “This is based on what you said and what the executive said and do you have any ideas of how we could implement this?” So in each instance, we’re making sure that these folks feel like, and that truly are respected, that they are giving a voice.  But at the same time, a voice doesn’t necessarily carry as much weight or influence as another voice because some people are in a position where their voice, their influence is greater simply because of their job position and they earned that position.  And so they do have greater influence over the whole entire process; however, that doesn’t negate the fact that everybody has influence.  Everybody has a voice in a sense and all of those voices do matter. But we do have to acknowledge both and that when somebody does put the extra effort that they should be rewarded.  So it is a balance.  It is a balance of certainly understanding what the people need in terms of respect and owed respect as well as rewards or celebration or the opportunity to take new opportunities to explore new options or to have more influence. Another important point that Miss Rogers makes is that when you’re trying to decide what the balance should be of owed and earned respect in your organization, there are some things that you should take into consideration.  If you are trying to produce a collaborative result perhaps it has to do with innovation or coming to consensus on something then owed respect should be given more weight. However, if you’re in a situation where there does need to be some competition or it’s more of an individual situation where individual effort and success needs to be measured, well maybe then earned respect needs to carry a little bit more weight. But it is certainly true that every single place you go, owed respect is absolutely important.  It’s imperative.  If you want to have a voice of influence, if you want to make your voice matter more then you will give voice to others.  That is how you make your voice matter more. So respect all and give even more respect or celebration to those who have gone above and beyond and make your voice matter more!