Written by Nicola Richardson, Founder of The People Mentor.
With over 40 years of working with managers and leaders, Nicola works with employers, managers and leaders who are serious about leading well. That means tackling difficult conversations head-on, holding people accountable without losing them, and building the kind of quiet confidence that does not waver under pressure.
This article explores how to gain respect as a leader, what causes respect to erode, and what managers and senior leaders in small businesses can do when it is clearly missing. It is written for people who are serious about leading well, not just looking busy.
Key takeaways from The People Mentor
- Respect is earned through consistent behaviour, not job title or length of service.
- A Georgetown University study of 20,000 employees worldwide found respect is the single most important leadership quality.
- When respect breaks down, the signs show up in behaviour long before anyone says anything.
- Managers who avoid difficult conversations lose credibility faster than those who handle them imperfectly.
- The voice inside your head that tells you the conversation will go wrong is often what stops it from going right.
- Rebuilding respect after it has slipped requires honesty and patience, not a rebrand.
- People do not need you to be perfect. They need you to be fair, consistent, and straight with them.
The leadership quality most people forget to talk about
Most management development focuses on skills. Communication. Delegation. Performance conversations. Those things matter.
But beneath it all, there is one thing that determines whether any of those skills actually work. And that is whether your team genuinely respects you.
Respect is not the same as being liked. It is not the same as being feared, either. Over 40 years of working with managers, I have seen both of those mistaken for it. Neither lasts.
Respect is the quiet confidence a team has in you. In your judgement. In your fairness. In the fact that when something difficult needs to be said, you will say it. And when someone is struggling, you will notice.
A Georgetown University study involving around 20,000 employees worldwide found that respect is the single most important quality employees look for in a leader. Not vision, not charisma, but respect. It sits above everything else.
That finding does not surprise me at all. However, what I have seen repeatedly is that leaders are often the last to realise when it has started to slip.
What earning respect looks like day to day
Respect is not built in grand moments. It is built in hundreds of small ones.
It is built when you say you will do something and then you do it. When you give credit to the person who came up with the idea, even if you were the one who presented it upwards. And when you address a performance issue instead of quietly hoping it resolves itself.
It is also built when you are willing to say you got something wrong. That is a harder one for many managers. There is a persistent belief that admitting a mistake will make people think less of you. In practice, the opposite is almost always true. People respect a leader who owns their decisions, including the ones that did not go well.
Consistency matters more than most people realise. When your team cannot predict how you will react on any given day, they start to manage around you instead of working with you. That is not disrespect in a loud, obvious way. It is something quieter and, frankly, more damaging.
So if you want to earn respect as a leader, start with the basics. Do what you say. Be fair without being soft. Say the difficult thing when it needs to be said. And show up as the same person whether the pressure is on or not.
When respect is slipping: what to look for and what to do
| What you may notice | What it could mean | What to do |
| People stop updating you unless pushed | They do not feel safe bringing problems to you | Ask directly and listen without reacting |
| Team members wait for instructions rather than acting | They do not trust their own judgement or yours | Give them a decision to own, then back them up |
| Colleagues bypass your manager in your team | Respect for that manager has broken down | Have a one-to-one conversation about what has changed |
| Your feedback is met with silence or minimal response | People are not confident you will use it fairly | Start with genuine questions before drawing conclusions |
| High performers start pulling back | They are losing faith that effort is recognised | Name their contribution specifically, in the moment |
When respect is clearly missing
Sometimes it is not a gradual erosion. Sometimes you step into a team where respect for management has completely broken down. Or something has happened: a decision that was not handled well, a conversation that went badly, and you can feel the shift.
The signs are not always dramatic. People do not always challenge you openly. More often, they stop engaging. They go quiet in meetings. They complete their tasks but nothing more. The informal conversations dry up. Someone who used to come to you with ideas no longer does.
Daniel Goleman’s research on leadership and organisational climate shows that the working environment can account for nearly 30% of a company’s financial results and that climate is largely shaped by how leaders behave day-to-day. That is not a small number. It means that the atmosphere a manager creates is not a soft issue. It has a measurable impact on what the business produces.
If respect has broken down, the first thing to do is to be honest with yourself about why. That is uncomfortable work, but it is necessary. The temptation is to start with the team: why are they behaving this way, what has gone wrong with them? But in my experience, the more productive question is almost always what happened on your side first.
That is not about blame. It is about recognising where the shift started, because that is also where the rebuilding needs to start.
Why some managers lose respect without realising it
There are a handful of patterns I see repeatedly.
The first is avoiding difficult conversations. When a manager consistently sidesteps what needs to be said, whether to a team member who is underperforming or in a situation affecting the whole team, people notice. They draw conclusions. They start to wonder whether you have the capability or the willingness to lead properly.
The second is taking credit without giving it. This can be subtle. You do not have to do it deliberately for people to experience it that way. If someone on your team never hears their contribution named, they will eventually stop contributing beyond what is required.
The third is shutting down ideas without realising you are doing it. When someone brings you a suggestion and the response is always a reason why it will not work, or you immediately redirect to how you would do it instead, people stop bringing ideas. Not because they have run out of them, but because they have learned there is no point. That is a quiet but significant loss, and most managers who do it genuinely do not see it happening.
The fourth is inconsistency. When people cannot read you, they stop trusting you. Consistency does not mean being the same in every situation. It means your values and your standards stay steady, even when the situation changes.
The fifth is making promises you do not keep. This one compounds quickly. Each unkept commitment chips away at credibility in a way that is very difficult to repair without direct acknowledgement.
At The People Mentor, I often say that respect is not lost in one big moment. It erodes in a series of small ones that nobody mentioned at the time.
The voice inside your head that is quietly getting in the way
There is something else that lies beneath all of this, and it is not talked about enough in the context of respect and leadership.
It is the internal running commentary that many managers carry. The voice that says this will go badly. They will get defensive. I will make it worse. They already do not respect me, so what is the point?
That voice is not unique to you. I have worked with managers at every level, in every sector, and almost all of them have some version of it. The trouble is, it does not always sound the same. It takes a different shape depending on the person carrying it.
For some managers, it is the voice that says if you want something done properly, do it yourself. So they hold on to everything, delegate nothing, and quietly undermine the very people they are supposed to develop. The team stops trying because they know the manager will just take it back or redo it anyway. Respect erodes on both sides.
For others, it is the voice of the perfectionist. Nothing is ever quite ready. The report needs one more pass. The conversation can wait until the situation is clearer. The standard is so high that nothing moves, and the team begins to wonder whether their best will ever be good enough.
And then there is the voice that reframes everything as something happening to the manager rather than as something they have any part in shaping. The team is difficult, or the organisation does not support them. The timing is never right. That framing might feel true in the moment, but to the people watching, it appears to be an absence of ownership. And ownership is one of the qualities people most respect in a leader.
The avoider is perhaps the most common. The conversation keeps getting postponed. The issue sits there, visible to everyone, while the manager finds reasons to wait a little longer. Research on self-criticism shows that when we are under pressure, that internal voice tends to take over. It threatens, monitors and judges. And when we listen to it, we often do the very things that erode respect: we avoid, we delay, we deflect. If you recognize this pattern, this piece on the conversations you are avoiding is worth reading.
The problem is not having that voice. Most people who care about doing their job well have it. The problem is mistaking it for accurate information about how things will go.
That voice told a manager I worked with that addressing a performance issue would destroy the relationship with his team member. So, he avoided it for months. By the time he finally had the conversation, the rest of the team had noticed the inconsistency and drawn their own conclusions. The relationship he was trying to protect had already been damaged, and his standing with everyone else had taken a hit too.
When you notice that internal hesitation before a difficult moment, it is worth pausing to ask yourself: is this voice giving me useful caution, or is it talking me out of something I already know I need to do?
Because in my experience, the thing the voice tells you to avoid is usually the thing that would build the most respect if you did it.
How to rebuild respect when it has slipped
You cannot announce your way back to respect. Telling people you are going to be different does not work on its own. They need to see the evidence, repeatedly, before they start to trust it.
However, that does not mean you cannot name what has happened. In fact, I think a direct, honest conversation is often the most powerful place to start. Not a speech. Not a team meeting with a slide deck. A straightforward acknowledgement that things have not been working as well as they should, and a genuine desire to change that.
From there, it is about behaviour. Specifically, doing the things that build respect consistently enough that the team starts to believe it is real.
Keep your commitments. Even the small ones. Especially the small ones. Address issues when they arise rather than leaving them to fester.
Give credit specifically and in the moment. When someone brings you an idea, engage with it properly. You do not have to say yes to everything, but dismissing it without genuine consideration, or worse, recycling it later as your own, will cost you more than you realise. If you cannot use the whole idea, say so honestly and name the parts that have merit. People can accept a no far more easily when they feel they have genuinely been heard.
Be predictable in your values even when the situation is unpredictable. And when you get something wrong, say so clearly without over-explaining it.
Part of rebuilding is also learning to manage your own internal critic and emotions, in the moments when it tries to talk you out of the right thing. That does not mean silencing it. It means learning to notice it, question it, and act despite it.
Rebuilding takes longer than losing does. That is worth accepting at the start, so you do not give up when progress feels slow. Some team members will come round quickly. Others will take longer. That is normal. The important thing is to stay consistent enough that, eventually, there is nothing left to be sceptical about.
One thing that is often overlooked
Leadership culture is shaped by what gets tolerated as much as what gets celebrated. If disrespectful behaviour in a team goes unaddressed, it signals to everyone else that it is acceptable. That applies to behaviour between colleagues and to how people speak about management.
I spent a significant part of my early career working across large and small organisations, and the teams that ran best were never the ones with the nicest offices or the biggest budgets. They were the ones where people trusted that standards applied consistently. Where the manager dealt with things instead of looking the other way. Where people felt safe enough to raise a concern without it rebounding on them.
That kind of team does not happen by accident. It is the result of leadership that takes respect seriously as a daily practice, not as a one-off initiative.
If you are leading a team right now and something feels off, trust that instinct. The absence of overt conflict does not mean everything is fine. Sometimes the quietest teams are the most disengaged.
Final thought
Respect is not something you can demand. But it is absolutely something you can earn. And it is something you can rebuild if you have lost it, if you are willing to be honest about what has gone wrong and patient enough to do the work to put it right.
People do not expect you to be perfect. They expect you to be straight with them. To do what you say. To treat them fairly. That is the foundation on which everything else sits.
The voice that tells you it will go wrong is not always right. Often, protecting an easier version of leadership costs you far more in the long run.
At The People Mentor, I work with managers who are doing their best with very little support. Respect is usually at the heart of what we are trying to rebuild or protect. It is rarely complicated. But it does require consistency.
If you are working through challenges like this right now, The Manager’s Academy gives you the practical tools, frameworks and community to lead with more confidence. Find out more at thepeoplementor.co.uk.