#73: Leading with Respect

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Proteus Leader Show. My guest today is Greg Ward, the Executive Director of the Center for Respectful Leadership, and an award-winning bestselling author, speaker, and executive coach who has utilized his approach to repair numerous relationships in global industry and government over decades. This process is outlined in Greg's new book, Restoring Respect, and the companion, the Restoring Respect Workbook, which provides everything needed to bring people back together into functional working relationships. So welcome to the show, Greg.

Thank you so much. It's an honor to be on.

I'm very happy to have you. You know, as you've noted in your work, there's ever more disrespectful behavior, especially in public life over the past couple of decades. And it seems that the unease and disconnection from the pandemic may have even exacerbated that.

So I thought— That seems to be the trend, yes.

Yeah, yeah. So I thought it'd be just really helpful for our listeners to learn from your wisdom about this important topic. How do we turn this? How do we turn this toward respect?

Well, that is the million-dollar question, as they say. What we are seeing, all the research seems to indicate, and I don't mean to be a downer, but we are now experiencing more public and private, meaning inside our organizations, disrespect than we have seen since the height of the Vietnam War.

Yeah.

And what is compounding this problem is we all now have what we didn't have back then, which is we're carrying around these smartphones.

Right.

And we are being constantly fed a stream of negative news and information, which triggers the threat centers of our brain. And it significantly elevates the stress levels that we're all feeling. And when we have an old saying here at the center that, you know, the The famous trope that when the going gets tough, uh, the tough get going. Well, that may be true, but we've also found that when the going gets tough, people get tough on each other.

Each other.

And yes.

Yeah.

So respect and treating people with kindness and courtesy tends to go by the wayside when we are under stress, which we all are very much so. And the pandemic only just, uh, exponentially made it worse.

Yeah, certainly by my observation, everything you're saying seems true. And I've read some of the research too. So let's go away from the dark side. So tell us about respectful leadership. How do you define it? And why have you decided to focus your work on it?

Well, it's a wonderful question. Thank you very much. The origin story is this. When I was growing up, I was a smart aleck. I had a mouth on me, as my mother used to say. And I had a few run-ins with the police and I thought I was all that and I never treated them with respect. And then in my 20s, I actually fell into a job where I was training police officers using the skills of improvisation because I trained and worked in theater. And we were training cops how to use improvisation to de-escalate what they call EDPs, emotionally disturbed persons. And so I saw a police officer's life from their point of view. And I realized that they are often treated with terrible disrespect.

Yeah.

And what a toll that can take on any human being, regardless of where they sit. And I started to realize that in my own life and my own work, how much I craved some respect. I just wanted to be treated And not just how others wanted to be treated, but how I wanted to be treated. And I'm a kind of sensitive guy, and I started to realize how much respect meant to me. Kindness and being nice to me was fine, but once I realized that I was somebody worthy of respect, that opened my eyes to how important it was. And if it was important to me, I figured it must be important to a whole bunch of other people.

Yeah. Yeah.

And eventually, our research over the decades led us to the understanding that respect is highly, highly important in driving what we call partnership, productivity, and performance in organizations. But people don't really understand it. And so, they shove it to one side. How we define it is very simple and truly common. It's essentially Treating someone with courtesy and kindness and civility in a genuine way, because you have some kind of appreciation for either their knowledge and experience or their position of authority or their talents or skills, or simply because they're another human being. So that's essentially how we define respect.

Okay.

Does that line up with how you think about it?

Yes, absolutely. And I love that you define it behaviorally, treating people with courtesy, kindness, and civility, you know, for whatever reason, whatever, whatever reason lives in you that can then result in that genuine behavior.

Yes, genuine being the key word. You're absolutely right. Oh, that's perfect.

I love the origin story.

Well, thank you. And, and once we Once we set that baseline of what respect means, then we started to look at, well, how do leaders behave in a way that people perceive them to be respectful? And we eventually came up with 7 little practices that we call the 7 Respectful Dos. And they're mostly about the things that we learned as children. Common courtesy, saying please and thank you, but also being open and honest in a respectful way. Catching people doing things right, not just always criticizing them. Apologizing when you behave badly, when you make a mistake, rather than pretending it didn't happen. And if you're a leader, nipping disrespect in the bud before it grows from a molehill up into a mountain. So those are the practices of respectful leadership. They're fairly common. They're fairly easy to do.

Yeah.

And they're not hard to understand.

Yeah, and I'd love to come back to that a little bit later, because I really want to dig into, okay, so if I want to start being more respectful today, what do I do? Let's put that to the side for a minute. I'd love to get your insight into what kind of the why— what do you see as the main organizational factors these days? Because there's disrespect in politics, there's disrespect in public life. But let's focus organizationally for a minute. What do you see as the main organizational factors that you think allow and even promote sometimes disrespectful leadership? Where do you think that that's coming from these days?

That is an excellent question. Our research tells us that— I wish there was an easy answer. I wish I could give you, say, yeah, it's all due to this. But the best way to describe it comes from Dr. Christine Porath at Georgetown University, who's arguably the world's foremost expert on civility. And what she says is the amount of stress that we are all under in our organizations these days is unprecedented.

Yeah.

And again, the pandemic only made it worse. And what she wants us to put into context is our organizations— there used to be a time where you went for stability and you could expect some stability in the marketplace, in the organizational space, in hiring and firing, the economy. There was some stability over time. And then what began to happen really kicked it off with the Great Recession beginning in 2008, 2009. Stability kind of went out the window. And we had everything from supply chain disruption with the financial crisis, the housing crisis. We just had one crisis in every industry after another. And the Army War College has a term called VUCA.

Yeah.

V-U-C-A. I'm sure you're familiar with it. Volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, which they used to describe the battle space. Well, business looked at that and said, well, that's a perfect description of what's going on inside of our organizations. And VUCA used to be now and then. In business. Now, VUCA is normal. Every day, things are volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. So that'll stress anybody out.

Yeah.

So all of these things together make for a stew of stress and upset and ambiguity and concern. And again, when the going gets tough, people get tough on each other and they just push Respect to one side.

Yeah, boy, that, that all just lines up so much for me and, and lines up with our work and the research we've done. I don't know if you knew, but I had a book. My last book came out a couple years ago, year and a half, and it's about change. And I talk about the same thing, how change used to be an every once in a while thing, and now these days it's just constant, and we're not wired for it. Our whole history is here.

No, we're not.

leads us to be very wary of change. It feels very uncomfortable to us, especially when change comes on top of change comes on top of change. And so I'm just agreeing with you basically that some people, many people, unfortunately, it seems like react to it by just getting reactive, you know, and they get—

Yes.

On other people, you know.

Yeah. Especially if it's change that's driven from the top. Where the folks at the bottom had no say-so whatsoever. It wasn't socialized with them. They didn't even ask their thoughts on it. It was just like, hey, folks, we're the leadership team. We've decided we all need to change. Let's go. Everybody climb on board. It'll be great. Well, nonsense.

Yeah, totally, totally agree that we talk about how difficult imposed change is, change that isn't like, we think we're going to do this, come and help us understand it and figure out how to do it. But just like, This is what's happening, folks. That's hard for anybody.

And I would assume— I'm going to make a leap here since you're the expert on this topic— that if change is imposed, then the person upon whom it is imposed feels disrespected. I would assume so.

100%. That's a great insight. Victimized, disrespected, like they don't have any agency, all those things that make people then be disrespectful in return.

Right, exactly. Because our natural tendencies when we are disrespected, it's very hard not to disrespect back.

Yes.

Because our threats, our primitive reptilian threat centers have been triggered in our brains.

Yeah. And then escalates as you—

yeah, it escalates. Yep. Yeah, absolutely.

So we, we agree with each other. So then let's, let's— I'd love to get your help. So you started talking about your 7 dos. What are What are the practical takeaways? What do you— like, if one of our listeners is sitting here going, yeah, you know, I think I'm being a little disrespectful, what can I do differently? Where do you start?

Thank you so much for asking. First of all, I want your listeners to know it's not hard. There are some simple things you can do. The first respectful do is literally right in the name. Be the first to respect. Do not assume because you have a title and a position of authority that others should respect you first. of your way to say, good morning, how are you today? Hold the door for someone regardless of who they are. Just be genuine, genuinely outgoing, behaving in a way that many of us were taught when we were children. Say please, say thank you, say excuse me when you bump into somebody. Or if you need to talk with someone urgently and you don't have any kind of set appointment, you say, is it okay? Do you have a moment to talk to me? If not, I'll come back later. Simple stuff. I was in Costco a couple of weeks ago and right at closing time, everybody lines up to pay. And right in front of me, there was a woman who needed a price check. And in my head, I went, oh, here we go. This is going to take forever. But the supervisor turned to one of the associates and said, I don't know what his name was. I think it was Joe.

Hey, Joe.

Would you please go back to aisle 5033 and check on the price of this particular product? And Joe said, absolutely. And Joe took off at a trot.

Wow.

And he came back really fast and, and with the price. And the supervisor said, thank you for doing that so quickly. You really helped us out. Simply saying please and thank you. And you could tell Joe appreciated it.

Yeah.

So return to your roots as a child and listen to what your parents told you. Do those kinds of simple courtesies that make a huge difference, even though they seem like they're just simple and basic. They do actually make a real difference. And if I could add one other thing that is so very important, Ken Blanchard calls it catch people doing things right.

Yeah.

Instead of just, as a leader, we're always focused on what's wrong, what's the problem, let's fix it. But also, we have to take the time to, in our jargon, we call it look for diamonds in the rough. Look for those things that people are doing well and compliment them on it. I mean, who doesn't want to go through— who wants to go through their entire career never being told what they did well and what worked well? So take the time, yes, of course, to catch the mistakes, but also take the time To look for diamonds in the rough and give people specific praise on what they're doing right. People truly appreciate that.

Yeah, this is great. I love this. Thank you, Greg. This is such simple, practical advice. It's almost like we all know this. We just forget it when we get under stress. We do.

We get so busy. The other thing you can do also is own your stuff. I mean, who among us is not human? I, you know, there are many times where I've opened my mouth and I've said something or I've done something. And right after I said it, I'm like, oh man, I shouldn't have said that. What am I thinking? And then I go apologize for it.

Yes.

And we've developed a technique that we call the full apology, but mostly it's about not making any excuses and owning your behavior.

Yeah.

And here's what's really cool, Erika. Our research tells us, and this has actually been proven over and over again, That if you as a leader make a mistake, you say something that's disrespectful, and you go and fully apologize for it from a genuine— from your heart, respect for you actually goes up.

Increases. Yes, yes, yes.

Actually increases. It's when you deny it or you say it's no big deal or you pretend like nothing happened, that's when you lose people's respect. But when you own it and sincerely apologize for it, People actually will respect you more for that.

That I completely believe that because I've experienced it myself. I've seen it with leaders. It's like, wow, everybody makes mistakes, but it's what happens afterwards that makes the difference.

That's right. And sometimes people, people use what I call weasel words. They say, I'm sorry if you were offended, or I'm I'm sorry that you felt offended. No, you say, I screwed up. I made a mistake. I shouldn't have done that. Here's how it hurt you. And I'm sorry about that. And it's not going to happen again. And some people say, well, I can't promise that it won't happen again. I'm like, then don't even apologize at all. Because the moment it happens again, your apology goes right out the window. It means nothing.

Oh, this is great. So thank you so much. And listeners, if you'd like to find out more about Greg and the work that he and his colleagues are doing and to buy his latest book, Restoring Respect, go to centerforrespectfulleadership.org. So thanks.

That's it. That's it. They can also type in just respectfulleadership.org and it'll come up there too.

Oh, great. Okay, that's good. Yeah. And listeners, also to find out how Proteus supports leaders to lead well and respectfully, you can go to proteusinternational.com, click on What We Do. Thank you for listening. And until next time, here's to creating the life you truly want.

We hope you're feeling better equipped to create the career, the business, and the life you want. For more insights and tools for leadership and management, join us at theprudentialeader.com. Have an excellent day, and thanks for listening.