An employee usually does what you ask for more than one reason. He needs the paycheck, and hopefully, he also believes in you and your mission. There is nothing wrong with the first, since a man who supports a family ought to care what his work pays. What matters is how much of his effort would remain if the paycheck were not the reason.
What is left over is respect, which is what happens when your words and actions influence another’s; effort isn’t bought, it is earned. You quietly discover your impact on him in the week you need someone to do something inconvenient and unsupervised that moves a project from good to great.
What Respect Actually Costs
Six behaviors earn it, and each is learned rather than inherited.
Pay the cost. You sacrifice something for the group that they can eventually see, whether that is the pay cut you took before touching payroll or the Saturday you spent on the manufacturing floor.
Produce outcomes. Things reliably improve when you are involved, and the improvement traces back to you rather than to luck.
Keep your word. What you say will happen… happens, in all matters.
Enforce the standard. You do not let people repeatedly cross you or your people without consequences.
Show restraint. You hold back when you could punish harder, and you hand out more credit than you strictly have to.
Stay steady. Your worst day looks recognizably like your ordinary day. You are seen as trustworthy.
The Two Ways Owners Lose It
Enforce too much, and you become a tyrant. People will stop the moment your power over them ends, because fear was the only mechanism you built. On the contrary, if you do everything else and never enforce anything, you become the admired doormat, well-liked and quietly ignored.
St. Benedict provided abbots the following guidance: “Let him strive to be loved rather than feared” (Rule of St. Benedict 64:15). Strive is the most important word in that sentence. Being loved rather than feared is not a personality you are born with; it is an outcome you achieve with years of commitment.
The most respected man in my first company was not the loudest one in the room; he was the one who humbly took on the hardest tasks for years without comment.
The Model Is Not New
Christ held authority and washed His disciples’ feet with it. The Good Shepherd lays down His life for the sheep, and the sacrifice comes first. When we ask owners to place their companies under the Sacred Heart of Jesus, part of what we mean is that His way of holding power becomes the pattern for yours.
Pick the weakest of the six this week and work only on that one. Respect built out of six ordinary behaviors holds up under pressure, and by God’s grace, it outlasts whatever authority your title happens to give you today.
Owners who consecrate their companies hand the entire enterprise to the Sacred Heart, including authority. A man who has done that in earnest leads differently on Mondays.