Chasing Real Respect

You can fake a lot of things in business. Authority. Expertise. Competence. But you can’t fake certain traits, like respect. Think about the managers you’ve had in the past. The good ones. The bad ones. People do respect good managers. Why? You remember how it felt to work with them. I bet it felt safe, challenged, trusted and a few more. In contrast, no one respects the bad ones. Not really. People might comply, go along, do what’s asked, but deep down they know: this person didn’t earn it. And that’s the key. Respect has to be earned. You’ve got to make it happen.

When I transitioned from IC to manager on the same product, I knew the ins and outs of what we were building and what we could build next. That part came naturally. People saw I had my shit together technically, and that gave me instant credibility. But I carried a naive assumption: that being technically strong would be enough. It helps, for sure. But technical strength doesn’t make people respect you. What earns respect is something else entirely. It’s how you back them up, how you lead, how you push others to take ownership instead of just delivering your answers. 

The other part is, technical skills aren’t always immediately transferable from one job to another especially as an EM. You really don’t get your hands dirty, particularly as you move higher up. So that technical credibility you once had? It starts to fade, or at least becomes harder to rely on. You still need technical depth for strategy and planning. That part doesn’t go away. But day to day, you’ve got to earn respect in other ways.

Hence, that’s why it’s hard to understand how you can lose and gain it. It comes from your behavior when there’s no incentive to perform. It’s all those acts you do when no one’s watching, and it would be easier to look away. That’s where it starts. That’s where people decide if you’re worth following.

Titles Create Compliance

You hit your targets, play the game just enough, and suddenly. Congrats! You’re a “people manager.” The title changes. The calendar gets weirder. You’ve got a couple of direct reports and a welcome message in some leadership Slack channel. And for a moment, it feels like a big deal. But then it hits you. The title doesn’t mean much. People will listen because they have to. They’ll nod, respond, maybe even laugh at your jokes. You might think you’re funny. I definitely feel that way sometimes but let’s be honest, probably not. People act that way out of compliance – not because they respect you, but because nobody wants to piss off their boss.

You wake up the next day and nothing magical has changed except now people are watching more closely. Your words carry weight. Your silence carries more. Your decisions, your fairness, your consistency. It’s funny, because I literally didn’t have the faintest idea at the time. But you realize those things start to matter in ways they didn’t before.

Title just makes people behave around you at best. People might follow instructions, hit the deadline. But they’ll do it out of obligation. They’ll stop challenging you. They’ll stop telling the truth. They’ll start working around you instead of with you.

This is exactly what Patrick Lencioni talks about in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. When there’s an absence of trust, people avoid conflict. They say what they think you want to hear. They nod, but they’re not aligned. And it looks smooth on the surface. If no one’s disagreeing with you, it’s not a sign of respect. It’s a sign that they’ve stopped believing you’re worth pushing back against.

Respect isn’t silence. It’s an engagement. It’s a challenge. It’s knowing your team will call your bullshit because they trust you enough to be honest. When that’s gone, when everyone’s quiet, that’s not a high-functioning team. That’s a dead one.

There’s no shortcut to fixing that.

How You Lose Respect

People think you lose respect in big moments. That might be true in some way but not all that much. Generally, it’s not that dramatic. It often dies in the small, quiet, day-to-day moments you think no one’s noticing. It dies not from what you say but from what you consistently fail to do.

It’s never one thing. It’s cumulative.

1. You avoid the hard Calls

Someone on your team is clearly underperforming and you are supposed to do some performance improvement but you don’t. Everyone sees it. People are picking up the slack. You hope it sorts itself out.  Guess what? It never does. Here’s what your team sees: that you’re afraid of conflict. That you don’t have their backs. That the person who isn’t pulling their weight is more protected than the ones who are.

So many managers do this under the illusion of empathy. “I don’t want to be harsh.” But what they’re really doing is prioritizing their own comfort over the team’s clarity. And you don’t get respect for that.

When people see that you won’t deal with problems, they’ll stop bringing them to you. They’ll stop trusting you to do anything meaningful. They’ll handle it themselves or worse, they’ll disengage completely.

2. You protect yourself

Pressure rolls downhill. You’re caught between upper leadership demanding business outcomes, and a team that’s already stretched thin. And then the meeting happens. Someone needs to take the fall. You pass the blame. Or you say nothing while someone else takes the hit. The best one? Pointing fingers at someone else instead of actually learning from the mistake.

You may think you’re being strategic. They see you as spineless. A low life.

The manager who throws the team under the bus, even passively, doesn’t just lose respect. They become a liability. People start managing you instead of relying on you. You’re no longer their shield. You’re something they need to defend against.

3. You’re Indecisive

You make a decision Monday. Reverse it Wednesday. Like putting tariffs in one week and calling them off the next. What does that cause? Markets to tumble. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Why? Because it’s unclear what the hell you’re doing. You’re sending mixed signals. You tell different things to different people, depending on who’s in the room.

This is one of the fastest ways to kill psychological safety. People don’t know what to expect from you. So they stop investing. They go all in cash. No trust, no risk, no long-term play. Just survival. I’m betting this sounds familiar, too. They stop sharing. They start playing it safe. If you can’t make the call when your people need you to, why are you there? That’s the erosion of respect. Your team has to overfunction to compensate for your uncertainty. Eventually, they lose confidence in your value.

No one respects chaos disguised as flexibility or negotiation.

4. You pretend to listen

You schedule the 1:1s. You ask for feedback. You even sound empathetic in meetings. But nothing happens. Problems repeat. Decisions stall. Concerns disappear into the void.

Eventually, people realize you’re not listening. You’re managing the optics of listening. People stop sharing ideas because it just feels like talking into a void.  That’s the moment you lose initiative, energy, trust and yes, drum roll please, respect.

It’s not enough to nod. You have to act. And if you can’t act? You have to follow up with transparency about why. I think most managers lose it here. Like why don’t you tell why you can’t do it. Otherwise, all you’ve done is reinforce the belief that their voice doesn’t matter. And that’s when they go quiet.

5. You’re Nice

You let that toxic top performer slide because they hit targets. You tolerate disrespectful behavior because that’s just how they are. You don’t call things out because you don’t want drama.

This isn’t kindness. It’s cowardice wearing a polite mask.

Respect doesn’t come from being easygoing. It comes from showing that your values don’t shift just because someone’s difficult or influential. When you fail to hold the line, your team learns they can’t count on you. And if they can’t count on you, they won’t respect you.

Nice doesn’t build respect. Consistency does.

Respect in Practice

Let’s kill the myth that respect is about being inspirational or charismatic. It’s not. You don’t need to be loud. You don’t need to be brilliant. You don’t need to give TED talks at all hands. (I definitely want to though)

Here’s what I’ve found it actually takes to be respected:

1. Clarity Without Ego

People don’t want perfection. They want direction and vision. They want someone who says: “Here’s where we’re going, here’s why, and here’s what I need from you.” No jargon. No hand-waving. No hiding behind alignment. Just clarity. That’s why I like my subteam tenets which give a recipe for clarity. I also like establishing clear ways of working. I know it sounds like an extra process but you need to have those set; otherwise, you end up with no structure.

This isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about taking responsibility even when the path is unclear, especially then.

2. Fairness

Fairness doesn’t mean being nice. It means being consistent. It means giving the same feedback to your favorite engineer and your most frustrating one. And simple ones. If someone is late to the meeting, give that feedback to everyone consistently. It means not tolerating gossip from one team just because their metrics look better. It means telling the truth, even if it makes someone cry.

Fairness is such an interesting thing.

In Frans de Waal’s experiment with capuchin monkeys, two monkeys were trained to exchange tokens for food. When both received cucumber slices, they were content. But when one started getting grapes while the other still got cucumber, the monkey receiving the lesser reward became visibly upset, even throwing the cucumber back in protest.

This reaction isn’t about the quality of the reward; it’s about the perceived fairness of the situation. If monkeys can recognize and react to unfairness, imagine how your team feels when they see inconsistent treatment. They might not throw cucumbers, but they’ll disengage, lose trust, and eventually, respect for your leadership erodes.

Fairness isn’t about equal treatment in every situation; it’s about equitable treatment. You need to ensure that your actions and decisions are consistent, transparent, and justifiable. When people see that, they’re more likely to stay engaged, trust your leadership, and contribute their best work.

When people say they respect their manager, they almost always mean: “They treat people fairly, even when it’s hard.”

3. Defending the Absent

What you say when someone’s not in the room tells your team everything. If you throw others under the bus, the whole team hears the engine revving. They know you’ll do the same to them. No one says anything, but the trust drains quietly. It won’t come back fast.

I once had a boss who never spoke badly about anyone in private. Even when it was clearly justified. At first, I found it strange, almost naïve. But over time, I realized I trusted him more than anyone else I’d ever worked with. Not because he was perfect, but because I knew he wouldn’t shit-talk me the moment I stepped out of the room.

That’s respect. Quiet. Unassuming. And powerful.

And I’ll be honest. I’m not great at this. I don’t throw my team under the bus, and I never tear into them behind closed doors. But when it comes to people from other orgs? I’ve definitely vented. Criticized. Mocked decisions. Sometimes I even do it in front of my directs. It feels harmless at the moment. It’s not. It chips away at the culture I say I care about. It creates a dynamic where people start to wonder: “If he’s saying that about them… what’s he saying about me?” I need to be better. No excuses.

4. Holding the Line

There are moments when a stakeholder pushes too far. When a high performer crosses a line. When an exec makes a political move that screws with your team’s integrity. And there you are alone. Spine to the wind. Everyone’s watching. No one’s saying it out loud, but they’re all thinking the same thing: what’s he going to do?

Respect comes from holding the line. Not with rage. Not with performative outrage. Just calm, clear boundaries.

“This is what we do. This is what we don’t do. I’ll take the hit for this if I need to.”

Do that once, really do it, and your team won’t forget it. Not because it was dramatic, but because it was rare. Because most people fold when pressure shows up.

And look, this isn’t about being the hero. This is about consistency. When you stand your ground under pressure not to be stubborn, but to protect what matters, people see it. They might not thank you. They might not even say anything. But they remember.

5. Admitting your Weaknesses

One of the most underrated ways to earn respect? Owning what you’re not good at.

It sounds counterintuitive, especially in leadership roles where you’re expected to have answers, direction, vision. But the truth is, people don’t expect perfection from you. They expect honesty. When you pretend to know something you don’t  or act like you’ve got it all figured out, people notice. And it doesn’t make you look strong. It makes you look insecure. Because confident leaders don’t need to posture. They just say, “I don’t know yet,” or “That’s not my strength,” and move on.

Some of the most trust-building moments I’ve had were when I said, “Yeah, this isn’t something I’ve done before,” or “I’ll need your help on this one.” Not because it lowered the bar  but because it made space for the team to step up. It showed that I wasn’t bullshitting my way through the unknown. It also sets the tone. If you can admit your weaknesses, your team feels safer to do the same. That’s when real collaboration happens. That’s when people stop covering their gaps and start filling each other’s. You don’t need to be good at everything. You just need to stop pretending that you are.

Not There Yet

I’ve written a lot here about what earns respect, what kills it, what builds it, what it might look like in practice. But the truth is, I’m still figuring it out.

I don’t even know if my own direct team respects me, let alone others. I hope they do. But respect’s a quiet thing. It’s not always loud or visible. You can’t measure it. You just try to be the kind of person who might deserve it on a good day. And I mess up. I say the wrong thing. I sometimes delay hard conversations. I vent when I shouldn’t. But at the very least, I think about these moments. I don’t want to walk around preaching what I can’t live. I try to hold the line. I try to admit when I’m wrong. I try to ask myself the uncomfortable questions, even when the easy thing would be to keep moving. I know you’re there with me if you are reading this. It looks like you care. I think that’s a good start for any of us. One step at a time.

I’ve made it a habit to ask folks when I start a job: “Who was the best manager you ever had?” And every time, I listen closely. Because I want to be that person. I really do. Not for the business. Not for performance reviews or team morale scores. But because that’s what earns respect. Being someone who listens. Who cares. Who shows up. Who doesn’t run when things get hard.

And no, I don’t want to be remembered as the manager who was just a project manager on steroids. That’s not the story I care about. I want to be remembered as someone who was worth following. Someone people trusted even when I didn’t have the answers.

That’s the version of respect I’m chasing. Quiet, earned, and real.

That’s it.