If Your Goal Is To Be A Boss That People Actually Respect, Psychology Says To Set These 3 Examples
A small list for big results when it comes to being respected by your employees.
nensuria | Canva As a line worker, I was productive. I’d seek out issues to solve and relish the challenge of overcoming them. I liked being part of the team. And I liked learning to do new things or learn to do old things better.
Getting promoted seemed the logical next step. And at first, it was a blast. More learning, more responsibility, more challenges. I thrived. Or so I thought. What was stressing me out wasn’t all the work and pressure. It was how I was responding to it. So if I couldn’t change the work, I could change my approach. Sometimes it only takes little tweaks to go from being a good boss to a boss that people actually respect.
After years of working with managers and leaders of all levels of experience, I’ve managed to see for myself how some little changes can have a massive impact.
If your goal is to be a boss that people respect, set these examples:
1. Invite input
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Imagine if you had ten eyes and five brains. Well if you’re a leader with a team of four people answering to you then good news: you do! Sort of. Because the power of a team is its combined strength. Like Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, the compound capability exceeds the total of the individuals.
Lean on your team and trust them. Believe in them. Give them a brief, responsibilities, and the space to implement, then step back and let them dazzle you.
When people feel heard and listened to, they’ll be more likely to take responsibility and feel invested in what they do. This will drive innovation, as more eyeballs on projects mean more ideas. A downstream impact of this is you’ll be better at decision-making, as you’re getting better input and updates.
I had this with a coaching client a while back. They kept feeling pressure to figure everything out. As a result, theirs was the only brain working on solutions.
After one call we made a plan where they’d highlight a few individuals in the company who may have something to offer each problem, and to get their input. By our next call, they had a bunch of ideas and action plans. It’s so simple, yet so easy to miss.
I asked my client why they never thought of this. Their reply, I suspect, is a common reason why many don’t do this: “I felt guilty. I’m the manager, so I’m supposed to figure it out for them first. It never occurred to me to delegate that part of it before.”
It never occurred to them. How wild is that? They thought they should be pointing the way at every crossroads, when the best leaders ask the team “Which way’s best?”
An additional, often overlooked benefit of getting input is what it does for the future of management in the company. As this collaborative, dialogue-and-trust-heavy environment develops people’s approach to work, it also lays the foundations for future managers.
They now have a model example to follow, and a proven approach that maximizes their capability (by drawing from the greatest resource — the team), rather than minimizes it (through bottle-necking).
Not sure how to get more input? Use this simple three-pronged approach:
1. Before tasks
To avoid repeating issues that damaged a task or project last time, try a ‘friction forecast’. This is when you look at what systems and frameworks you have and see where these tend to clog up or slow down progress. How can they be sanded down or streamlined?
And to make sure you avoid critical errors and minimize failures, hold a ‘premortem’. Simply ask the team to imagine they’re in the future and the project has failed. What caused it? Now work backward and try to solve those issues or starve their causes.
The premortem approach primarily focuses on its ability to leverage prospective hindsight, a cognitive phenomenon in which imagining a future event as having already happened allows individuals to more accurately identify potential risks and issues by looking back on the situation from a hypothetical failed perspective.
This effectively mitigates overconfidence bias and improves decision-making in project planning. The premortem technique was developed by psychologist Gary Klein, who recognized the power of prospective hindsight in identifying potential flaws in a plan by imagining a future failure scenario.
2. During tasks
Check in regularly. Nip problems in the bud. Thank people for being open and honest, and giving you feedback (even if you disagree). You want to encourage open discussion and a culture of sharing.
Make sure you’re asking open questions that allow space for people to be frank. Instead of ‘Is everything okay?’, try:
- How’s the progress with X? Anything slowing you down?
- Do you need clarification on any of the objectives?
- What problems keep coming up? Where do you feel, if anywhere, that your effort isn’t being channeled effectively?
- Is there anything I can do to help? How about with task X?
3. After tasks
Make sure to debrief on anything major, especially if you face issues or things go awry. The focus is on transparency and learning, not blame. Keep that theme throughout.
And ask people what they think would improve the team, company, or environment moving forward. Or what they’d like to know more about, or where they’d like to develop. Then do what you can to provide it.
2. Stop trying to do it all
If you’re trying to get it all done you’re likely aiming too high, arrogant about your abilities, or deluded about what’s possible.
Your time is finite. Problems you face are not. If you’re always trying to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’ you’re never going to.
I’m willing to bet there’s a considerable portion of your upcoming tasks that are either non-essential right now, better off delegated to someone else, or worth deleting altogether. It’s on the essential, important, and urgent where your attention and energy are best placed. Especially anything that ticks all three of those boxes.
I struggled with this when I started. My stubbornness to let things go was rooted in both a need to feel in control (as it was my neck on the line), and the illusion that as a manager it was my job to do it all.
I quickly learned that some tasks are better for others to do. After all, you’re not the only one who needs to learn and develop. Plus, this builds independence, agency, and ownership in your team. All of which are essential for a culture of higher standards and long-term growth.
Luckily, I had a mentor share with me some sage advice I try to live by to this day: “Do what only you can do. Delegate the rest.”
There will inevitably be times when you’re tempted to dive into day-to-day stuff — and you’ll be able to convince yourself it is an essential task for you — but the reality is you’ve got a team for a reason. So use them.
NBA coaches don’t run on at halftime and dunk some buckets (or however it works… Brit here — not a big B-ball player, in case you’re wondering). Nor are teachers finishing students' homework. And new parents don’t sit on the potty for their toddlers during toilet training.
In everything in life, there are things we must do alone. As a leader, get good at recognizing these, then provide the support but also the space for people to grow.
And when you’re focused on the essentials, you’re better placed to deliver quality results you can be proud of. Even Jeff Bezos only aims to get three important things done a day. And he’s made a few dollars. He must be onto something.
So stop trying to do it all. It’s robbing your best ideas and projects of the bandwidth and energy to do them justice. And for what? A little more average? You’re better than that.
“No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself, or to get all the credit for doing it.” — Andrew Carnegie
3. Become a finisher
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At the end of the day, work is about results. So once you’ve mastered letting things go and not trying to do it all, now you’re free to finish what you started and see things through.
There is only upside to being a serial finisher. You learn so much more from getting things done than waiting for the right time to start. Or once you’ve started, trying to get things perfect.
Because pssst, I’ve got some bad news — both are an illusion. They don’t exist.
There’ll never be a right time. And perfection exists only in your mind. Hold fire on a project for too long while you chase your standards, then release it and watch the world tear it to shreds. If you’ve even got the luxury to wait that long!
Start imperfectly. Because motion is the lotion: it’s through doing that you accumulate the skills, experience, and know-how that will make you better. And it’s a lot easier to tweak and fix things when you’ve got something in front of you.
For the perfectionists out there, I see you. Believe it or not, I was you. I had these insane ideas of what excellence looked like. However, after a few late projects, I realized consistent success doesn’t tend to come from repeating perfection again and again. Maybe in a Michelin-star restaurant. But for most managers, it’s about consistent effort, output, and quality.
Perfection adds a layer of pressure as the standards it expects are unrealistic. If you’re only satisfied with being perfect, you’re not allowing for the bumps and bruises of imperfection that build the skills and experience that ultimately lead to leveling up.
It can be easy to spend too much time on planning and editing (depending on your industry), and not enough on action. Or the right kind of action. This leads to stagnation. Because while you’re busy trying to be perfect, the world moves on.
A client of mine had exactly this problem. They’d tried to develop an employee handbook that would solve every issue. They were sick of standards slipping.
But guess what? Trying to create this perfect manual was a Sisyphean task because there will always be exceptions. You can’t cover every eventuality in one document. But you know what you can do? Develop a culture of ownership and resilience founded on growing and learning.
So we worked instead on drafting an employee handbook heavy on values and principles, and light on strict rules. The result? A team who aimed for consistent excellence, but also relished empowerment from navigating challenges using their wits and nous within policy parameters.
I’ve worked in companies that set incredibly high standards but then don’t provide the resources or support to get there. So you have a bunch of perfectionists getting constantly upset about how low-quality the work is. Or they just get less stuff done and take longer to do it (so by the time it’s finished people are annoyed they had to wait or still have other things to focus on).
Now I’m not advocating for no or low standards. But instead to be realistic. Maybe call it pragmatic perfectionism. Think about what’s possible, then consider setting expectations a little above that to drive people towards great results without burning them out.
As you and your team/company grow, the bar will be raised. Confidence will grow. People will feel invested, trusted, and like their time is being spent on things that are worthwhile.
And oh what wonderful things are achieved when this happens. Like many things in life, it’s often about little changes rather than grand, sweeping upheaval.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater — evolution, not revolution. Tweak your approach to sharpen your focus towards those things that give you the chance to have the biggest impact. Utilize the tools you have — your team — to spread the work, but also spread the growth and development.
Tobias C. Shaw is a writer, leadership coach, and corporate executive. He's had articles featured in Medium and Business Insider, as well as many other sites, and has been working in and around leadership for the best part of two decades.