Your most valuable career strategy is not to be popular, but to be effective. Human Resource Manager, SAM LEONG says, with respect… job success can be yours.
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ane was part of a team that had struggled hard to finish a difficult assignment. “I wanted to call it a day and get home as much as anyone,” she recalls. Instead, she found herself saying, “I’m sorry, but we need to do some more work on this.” Suddenly she became the most unpopular person in the room.
No one agreed with her, and some were openly angry that she was rocking the boat. “But I stuck to my guns,” she says. “And when the report was presented we were particularly commended for picking up on the very thing I said we’d missed. So I was right, after all, and everyone had to respect that.”
Respect versus popularity ‑ this is a dilemma we all have to face at work sooner or later.
It’s the old conflict between being professional and being personal. We want to do a good job, but we want to be friends with everyone, too. The truth is, though, you can’t always be liked if you do your job properly. And the desire to keep everyone happy can become a weakness, even an Achilles heel.
“At best,” says management consultant Jennie Lee, “worrying about what others think makes us reactive when we need to be proactive. At worst, we’re so busy playing Pollyanna we lose sight of the demands of the job and our own needs.”
At work the task is not to be liked, but to be effective, says computer sales executive Andrea Bong. ‘This is possibly the single most important lesson we can learn. Progress depends on having your own ideas and sticking to them. And that means having the guts to make difficult decisions when you have to.’
The soft decision is never a real option in the long run, as many find. Patrick had been at the head of his team for a short time when he had to deal with a colleague who had repeatedly been warned about his absenteeism, and now had to be told to go. But when Patrick tried to fire him, the offender became so distraught, Patrick said he’d give him one more chance.
It turned out to be a disaster. “I had fired him. I’d used the ultimate deterrent, and he’d walked away from it. The result was that my colleagues were resentful because he’d got off scot‑free. I lost their respect, the respect of my bosses, and my own. And I still had to deal with him in the end!”
Winning the respect of colleagues, opting for professionalism over personal preference, starts at the very beginning.
Respect is never given for nothing; every shred of it has to be earned and you earn it by how well you do your work.
The result: Winning respect enhances all you do. A proposal for change is more likely to be listened to and well received; an application for a rise in your salary or a request for promotion is more likely to succeed.
As a psychologist explains, “The more you give away, the more you can deepen bonds of intimacy. But the price you pay is over‑familiarity and the loss of the formal structure of the relationship between you.”
Your criterion must always be: Do I need this to get the job done? Then make the decision and take the consequences.
And don’t expect it to get easier as you go on. The further you progress, the more difficult these dilemmas can become, says civil servant, Dina Hussain. “When you’re a boss, you aren’t the same as you were before, and you aren’t the same as the people around you.”
If you’re doing your job properly you’ll seldom be everyone’s favourite person. But the payoff comes in the form of a deeper liking and admiration. Don’t worry about popularity; work on respect – that will take you a lot further in the long run.
COUNTDOWN TO RESPECT
