fbq('track', 'ViewContent');
Play

Love me Love Me Not

Forget About Their Love – Go For Their Respect

Are you a leader looking for love? In today’s world of social media we all want to be ‘liked.’  We count our ‘likes’ and somehow feel more loved.  That’s a fallacy, just like being a manager of a team in business who always wants to be liked is a fallacy.  Like being a parent, there will be times when the kids – or the team – don’t love you.  They don’t even like you.  But that’s OK.  Great leaders understand why it is far more important to gain their team’s respect than love.  Listen to this episode of the Manager Mojo podcast to learn about the 3 C’s of Respect and how they often lead to love.

Click Here for Show Notes

 

Manager Mojo on iTunes

Listen to Stitcher

Manager Mojo

 Transcript: Love Me or Respect Me?

Hello and welcome to the Manager Mojo podcast, I’m Steve Caldwell.  And today our topic is this, “They Love Me They Love Me Not”`.I’m sure you all are familiar with that little ditty that we would play with flowers or whatever he you know he loves me he love me not, she she loves me she loves me not, and you’d go over and over and over. Well, why in the world would I be talking about, they love me, they love me not on a Manager Mojo podcast?

Well here’s the point:  Most managers and most leaders today are really working, I think way too hard to get people to love them. They believe that everybody should love everything about them, and everything that they do. And this idea of having, everybody love you is really getting in the way of productivity and success. It gets in the way of achievement.

Of course, everybody would love to be loved by everyone. But is that really a goal or should it be a goal for a manager and a leader that everybody loves you.  Well I’ll give you some thoughts about that today.  One of the problems with trying to get everybody to love you is that it actually creates inconsistent action by you as the leader. Now what I mean by that is this, you’ll be tough in one instance, and you’ll be easy in another. In other words, your opinions are going to just fly in the breeze; one day you’ll be one way, one day you’ll be another way, and your employees, before long, can’t figure out who the heck you really are.

And so this idea of trying to get everybody to love you, even though psychologically we know it’s impossible to get everybody to love us, many of us have this innate built-in desire to try to get everybody to love us anyway, and it’s such a waste of time and it certainly a waste of your ability as a manager and a leader because that’s not really your job.  You’re going to be faced with circumstances where people are not going to love you because of what you had to do in relation to the job. Your responsibilities are going to cause stress situations.

So, you know, people think, well, I still I want people to love me.  Well that’s not really the point. I think I actually think that Facebook is actually closer to getting it right. You know they have this like button on Facebook and we all have used it and will see a post that we like and we’ll click like.  But did we really love it or we just think “Well that was kinda cool I’ll like that a little bit.

I would suggest that most of the time we just, like, stuff, you know, we know what we know what we don’t like. And so we click that little like button.  And even the for the Manager Mojo podcast and the Manager Mojo website we have a Facebook page and thousands of of people have already liked us on Facebook. Does it mean, they love us yet?

Well I’d have to suggest probably not. That’s really not the point. But I’m glad that they like us and I want you to like us on Facebook, if you haven’t done it already. The reason for the like is simply so you can be connected.  You know, you would be closer to what you need to be doing as a manager to leader if you just had a quote like button on you.

And when people like something and then they could push the like button and you’d feel good about.  But what would you do when they didn’t like it? There’s no hey “I dislike you” button; there’s nothing little that I know of anywhere that says okay I dislike you, maybe taught me that maybe a lot of people get rather frustrations more if there were a dislike button.

I’ve seen on YouTube, for example, there’s a thumbs-up and thumbs down for videos and always get a kick out of the thumbs down because it’s like okay, why go the trouble if you didn’t like it just click on and move on. But that’s not what people do they hold grudges, and they think that their opinions should count for something that it doesn’t.

And I think that this idea of like me, love me, is his so far away from what we should be doing as a leader. So what would be the answer?  Well I’m going to suggest that it something a little different. Now I just want you to listen to the song and I’ll bet you know it immediately: [plays Aretha Franklin R-E-S-P-E-C-T]

Yeah, that’s the great Aretha Franklin singing, “Respect”, and you know, respect is really and truly what our goals should be.

What we ought to be doing as a manager and a leader is to do things that would get people to respect you. Respect is so much deeper then whether somebody like you and it certainly closer to what we should be doing in business.  Because a respected leader has done something the really essential, and here are some of those things that they’ve done: number one is that they set a standard for achievement.  People respect leaders that really recognize achievement.

Whether it’s by themselves or their team or their company, or even their competitor.  When you have set the standard for achievement you done some great things.  And your people will take a cue from that.  And they’ll say, you know what I want to be an achiever. So a respected leader has set that standard that achievement is going to be rewarded and recognized.  Another thing a respected leader has set is that they set the value for action.

We spend so much time sitting around thinking about doing something and so very little time just actually doing it.  But action requires us to move it makes means that we have to make decisions.  And a respected leader is one that always takes action; people aren’t sitting around waiting for them to do things.  And then there’s one third thing that I want to talk to you about today, that a respected leader has done and another standard that they’ve set, and that is, they set the standard for results.

You see they measure results, they value your results, and they want their people to get results. And they expect those results themselves.  In business it’s all about the result.  Are we doing what the customer needs?  If we are,  then we’re going to be rewarded with their hard-earned dollars and they’re going to want to do business with us. You see the respected leader should be all about results. Now, how do you get to be that respected leader?

And I can hear some people saying already yeah Steve that’s all cool, I know all `of that stuff. But how am I gonna get that respect, how am I going to earn it?  Well, I give you three things today that you will… if you’ll just do and be, then you will began to earn the respect that you desire and deserve in order to be a great leader. And I call on the three C’s.  No they’re not after my last name, Caldwell, but you can attribute them to me if you’d like.

You can say, “hey these are the three Caldy rules for respect”.  And the first one is consistent.   If you’re gonna be a respected leader, you must be consistent. You cannot be one way one day. Another way another day. Consistency is the key to earning respect. Be consistent in all of your actions, and be consistent in such a way that people understand you’re being consistent.

Number two, of the three Cs is that you must be concerned with results. There’s nothing worse than a manager or leader, who is not concerned with the results of their team and the people that they work with. You should always be concerned about people’s success. Because if you really want to see them successful, you’ll find ways that you can help them become successful. So you must be concerned.

And then the third C that you need in order to gain respect for your team and your company and your customers is that you must be a communicator. You must communicate all the time your principles, your values, those things that you hold high in near and dear to your heart; so that people can understand what you stand for. They can begin to say, “Look, I know what this guy, this girl stands for. Because they always communicate the same way. They’re always communicating their values.

So that to get respect, to get what Aretha says that R-E-S-P-E-C-T, I suggest that you practice the three Cs.  And those Cs are: consistent, concerned, and communicator. If you do that, then you’re got a be well on your way to becoming exactly the leader that you want to be. Thanks for joining me today.  Look for respect over love!