The author is owner/president of Sound Advantage Media. His commentaries appear here regularly.
Ultimately, employees value respect above all other qualities.
According to recent workplace research, employees ranked respect as the most important quality in an employer, placing it above recognition and appreciation.
More importantly, employees who felt respected by management reported much higher engagement and focus.
What is the ultimate cause of this disconnect?
In my years of experience as a consultant working with various types of individuals, I’ve seen a certain lack of awareness. It keeps management from seeing how their behavior affects others.
They tend to be self-absorbed.
If you want to improve, keep in mind what keeps you most efficient, then address your shortcomings by asking trusted colleagues for honest feedback on how you can build respect with others.
Have trusted colleagues hold you accountable. Choose an area of concentration, then seek out various team members to see if your focus on respectful behavior improves.
- Practice restraint. A manager who shows restraint can control their emotions and impulses, avoiding hurried decisions. If a team member screws up an assignment, a manager who shows self-control won’t be in a hurry to label and blame them.
- Show positive emotions. Exhibit more positive emotions than negative ones, and you’ll naturally defuse many situations right away.
- Obtain a leadership coach. Most managers are coached on how to act rather than how to be natural. The best managers are coached to increase their capacity to genuinely affect people and deliver business results. When you want to raise the respect meter, consultants can identify your weaknesses, fix them and stop disrespectful behavior. Next, let’s look at the underlying assumptions the station may have and work together to solve those issues.
Rethinking work design
Stop trying to motivate, and instead design more efficient work for employees.
What if the problem isn’t your employees but how you design their work? Research consistently shows that people can flourish without incentives, bonuses or psychological excitement when their workflow makes sense.
Research also shows that a room full of smart executives can still be a terrible team. Intelligent executives don’t automatically make for a great leadership group.
Specific behaviors separate high-performing executives from those who struggle with poor decisions, politics and other factors.
Marketing to the right audience
As for sales: Stop trying to sell to everyone.
Better marketing begins with understanding the customer. When you broaden your message, it becomes harder to make it feel relevant.
The days of being everything to everyone are over. Your content becomes easier to plan when you know what question the customer is trying to answer.
Here are three key stages of customer interaction:
- Educate. They’re interested, but they still don’t fully understand the problem, category or solution. Give them how-tos, explainers, guides and comparisons. The goal is to make the solution easy to understand.
- Prove. As they understand the solution, evidence is required. Give them case studies, results, demos and testimonials. The goal is to replace uncertainty with proof.
- Differentiate. You’re being compared with alternatives. Give them your unique mechanism, product advantages, expertise and a clear point of view. The goal is to give customers a reason to choose you, not just the category.
Most of your audience isn’t ready to buy, and ignoring that is the biggest marketing mistake brands make. They focus only on the people ready to convert right now.
The real game is building your brand before the moment of purchase. When the buyer finally feels the real pain or gets the budget, they’ll buy from the brand they already trust. That is why marketing isn’t just about capturing demand. It’s about demand creation.
Stay top of mind, stay relevant and stay in their world. Remember, sustainable growth comes from earning trust, not chasing quick wins.
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