Respect and Self-Respect

[jducoeur]

We had a "leadership roundtable" at work today, which proved to be more interesting and less navel-gazing than I'd feared. One of the topics we covered was "what are the qualities of a leader?", and one of the qualities we talked about a bit was Respect. This helped crystallize some thoughts for me, that are just as relevant to club life as work life, so let's put a stake in the ground.

A leader needs to both have and show appropriate respect for those around him or her. Note that "respect" is not the same thing as "deference"; rather, it is starting from the assumption that people are intelligent, and that their viewpoints are valuable. That's important in a lot of ways: it's necessary in order to provide effective guidance (both to those above and below you in a hierarchy); it's necessary in order to have fruitful debate about strategy and tactics; more generally, it's necessary in order to promote a healthy environment where people like to be.

But closely related to this is that you have to respect *yourself* first. Self-respect is not arrogance -- it doesn't mean assuming that you have all the answers. But the thing is, the more comfortable you are in your own skin, the easier it is to have honest discussion in all directions. Arrogance usually comes from insecurity: people pull rank and resort to intellectual bullying when they are *not* genuinely sure of themselves. The more secure you are in yourself, the easier it is to pull your ego out of the discussion, and engage honestly with those around you. That in turn tends to gain you respect from other people, and promotes a virtuous cycle.

Thoughts? The topic of effective leadership has been somewhat on my mind lately, so talking about it explicitly at work has kind of sent the wheels turning...

Comments

[the-nita.livejournal.com]

I'm going to wind up using a local friend's line here - part of it is getting those definitions that you're being explicit about here in use where you're leading/working.

Mutual lexicons means there's less potential for misunderstandings.

[jducoeur]

Yaas. A very large fraction of annoying arguments turn out to mainly be about differences of semantics, rather than anything substantive.

We've actually spent quite a bit of effort at work over the past year getting everyone's terminology lined up, from Development to Sales: it's a key step in making sure that the whole company is moving in the same direction. In one case, simply changing the name of a product has had radical effects in how people *think* about the product, and done much to improve its focus...

[sharrainchains.livejournal.com]

Self-respect also seems to me to be a key component in people's perception of how they are being treated. That is, insecurity may also cause people to feel that they have been attacked or treated disrespectfully -- when others have simply disagreed with them or failed to treat them with (subjectively-defined) "adequate deference."

This discussion has made me think, because expressing disagreement with someone and being willing to discuss controversial subjects with them are marks of my respect for people. Now, I understand why that experience is often less than satisfying [/end understatement] for us both. Thank you for the insight.

[gardenfey.livejournal.com]

Can I come work for you? :) I think you're the antithesis of my previous boss.

[jducoeur]

Heh; thanks. I've been growing into leadership positions gradually over the past several jobs, so I've had a lot of time to think about it. I also tend to prefer to be a team lead or co-lead instead of line management, which probably colors my thinking a lot. And honestly, I think I've learned a lot simply from observing what does and doesn't work in the SCA. (Which has lots of examples of both really good and really bad leadership...)

[hfcougar.livejournal.com]

Oh, I have many many thoughts, most of them related to the third paragraph and probably things I shouldn't write about in public.