In this 7‑minute presentation, Kenston Henderson (CSP, EPIC Experiences) outlines five concrete practices that managers can adopt to earn and maintain the respect of their team members. He begins by stressing that respect is foundational to a successful career and to a healthy workplace, noting that loss of respect leads to diminished trust, morale, and collaboration. The five tips are: (1) Give respect first—treat all employees fairly, listen to their concerns in one‑on‑ones, and follow through on commitments; (2) Communicate clearly—explain decisions and expectations so staff understand the rationale; (3) Lead by example—demonstrate reliability, roll up your sleeves, and avoid offloading work without justification; (4) Be consistent—maintain steady leadership style and expectations, avoiding sudden shifts or micromanagement; and (5) Be firm yet accountable—stand by decisions, but quickly admit and correct mistakes. Henderson frames each tip with practical prompts and emphasizes that applying them will build trust, improve morale, and foster collaboration. He concludes with a call to action for managers to implement the tips immediately and to share the advice with other leaders.
Chapters
I want to give you basically 5 ways that you can gain respect with your team members. Whether you're a new leader, whether you've been with your team for a while, it's always great to refresh and renew your mindset as it relates to leading and managing people. And so today we're gonna be talking about respect, R-E-S-P-E-C-T, respect. Respect is key. It is crucial, uh, because if you gain— this is gonna be my guarantee— if you gain the respect of your employees, your team members, I can almost guarantee that you will have a successful career by standing up for them, for their best interests, and offering strong and professional leadership you are going to gain and keep the respect of your employees. How many remember a time where you didn't feel so respected at your job? Like, what did that look like? What was the disrespectful thing that your manager may have done? What was so disrespectful where, where they may not have supported you, right? They may not have supported you. They may have thrown you under the bus. Now, I've heard so many different horror stories about employees being thrown under the bus by their managers, or not— their managers not supporting them, or their managers not, uh, giving them the room to grow, right? What are the reasons why respect is lost in the workplace? And so if you're a manager, we don't have time for, you know, trust to be lost. We don't have time for respect to be lost, but we do have time to build respect build trust, and keep moving forward. The first tip I want to give you is give respect. If you're trying to gain the respect of employees, you gotta give it away, give it away, give it away now, right? Give it away, get away, get away now. Oh, I don't know where that song comes up— coming from, but it popped into my head. And so how can you give respect away. You see, if you want your direct reports to respect you, you have to be the one to first give them respect. Show respect. It makes sense if you give it away first, right? Ask yourself these questions: Do I treat everyone on my team fairly? Do I give them the same level of respect across the board? How do I show them that I value them, right? When's the last time you valued your team members, and did you value them the same, right? Did you follow through with what you said you're gonna do? Actions speak louder than words. That's number 1. With number 1, I want you to, to, to take it a step further. If, if I can go a little bit deeper in this thing of respect and, and on this one where it talks about, you know, give respect, give it away. In your next one-on-one session with each of your team members, I want to challenge you. I want to encourage you. I want to nudge you a little bit to listen to their concerns. Now, you say you want to build true respect. This is what you're going to have to do. This is what you're going to have to do. Kenston, your brother from another mother is telling you what you got to do to gain respect. At your next one-on-one session, I want you to listen, uh-oh, listen to the employee's concerns. And after it's over, I want you to take some time. It may be a little bit of time, it may be a lot of time to think about ways that you can help address their concerns. I need you to think about ways that you can address their concerns. To do this, it's going to— uh-oh, I already went to the T for interest. It's time, but it's going to take time. It's going to take intentionality to build respect. If you listen to their concerns and if you're able to help assist them in their concerns, you're going to gain respect. That's the goal. That's the goal. There's no hidden agenda. You want to gain respect. It's going to take some time. It's going to be some relationship building. You're going to have to give respect, and then over time you're going to gain it. All right, number 2. Number 2, communicate clearly with your employees. Communicate clearly with your employees and explain important decisions to them. If you treat staff— treat your staff members well, they will most likely reciprocate that treatment, and that treatment equals respect. Okay, well, lead by example is number 3. Demonstrate through your work ethic and contributions that you're reliable. You're reliable. You're showing your team members that you are reliable. And if you're reliable, again, that builds trust, again, that builds respect, and you're going to be successful. A good leader doesn't just push their own workload onto their team members just because. There has to be a valid reason why, right? You put— if you push things onto your employees Just because you don't want to do the task, guess what that's going to do? It's going to do the direct opposite. It's going to tell your team members not to trust you or not to respect you, because why would they respect a person that won't even pull up their own sleeves and get in the weeds? Uh-oh. Now I know there's different levels in, in the workplace, but if you're at a level where you can't pull up your sleeves and get in the game with your employees, I can guarantee respect is going to take place. You guarantee that. Number 4 is actually being consistent. So consistency is key among strong, respected leaders. You should be consistent in your leadership approach and your expectations. So we go back to clarity. They should always understand what's expected of them. They shouldn't be caught off guard during review time. If your leadership style changes from time to time, I'll just give you an example. If you give your employees freedom to make decisions on different projects or their workload, if you give them that, that freedom, the next day don't change your mind and say, you know what, I think, I think you should do it this way. Uh-oh, micromanaging. I think, oh, well, what's your idea? Okay, okay, okay, no, do it this way. Now if you're asking for ideas, you shouldn't be going back on that. Consistency is key, okay? Number 5, be a firm leader. Be a firm leader. I was reading something the other day And it was talking about, you know, managers who are pushovers with their workers don't gain the respect of employees. I'll say it again, managers who are pushovers do not gain the respect of their employees. So when you make decisions, you gotta stick to them. And some of those decisions may not be popular. In fact, your employees may look at you like, what is he doing? Oh, what is she doing? Here's the thing: if you're doing what's best for the team, and after a while it will show, then it'll all work out. If you need to do a U-turn, you need to make an adjustment, and one of the employees was right about the decision that you needed to make, It's okay. Make the adjustment. Have the conversations with the team. Don't be pressured by popular demand. I'll say that. I'm gonna give you a bonus. I'm feeling good tonight. I'm feeling good, feeling good. It's starting the week off right. I want you to quickly admit when you're wrong. We talking about respect. Talking about respect. Quickly admit when you're wrong. If you're the manager, and you got it wrong, you got the decision wrong, you made the wrong choice, and your employees are looking at you, and you go back to your desk and you shake your head and say, I got it wrong. You need to, you know, toughen up, walk back out there, talk to your employees, and let them know you got it wrong. And apologize. We're human, we make mistakes, they happen. Just because you're the manager doesn't mean you're perfect, doesn't mean you're going to be perfect, but it does mean that you're going to sometimes make mistakes, and that's okay as long as you're learning from those mistakes. But the worst thing you can do that will make you lose respect in the workplace is not fess up. That's right, not fess up. If you try to cover it up, it's still doing damage. And depending on how long you let it linger, how long you don't admit that you were wrong in your decision, respect is going to go down. It's going to go down. And so I want you to take these, these 5 tips and put them into action starting today. Look, today, right now, because we want to build respect with our employees, our team members. Because if we do not, then that means trust is diminishing. That means, uh, team morale is diminishing. That means collaboration is not going to be a thing, so much a thing anymore. That means all negative things, and we don't have time for that, managers, leaders. So make sure that you do the right things by giving respect. Give it away. Communicate clearly. Lead by example. Be consistent. Be a firm leader. And quickly admit when you're wrong. If you do these things, Yo, brother from another mother, Kenston Henderson CSP EPIC Experiences guarantees that you're gonna get greater respect in the workplace. So that's all I got for you today. I hope you enjoyed this session. Please feel free to tag somebody and, and share with them who is a manager, who's a leader, because it is my goal to ignite, inspire, and empower and equip leaders to be the very best that they can be. So till next time, I'll see you soon. Peace.
