By Oluwole Dada
Respect is earned and not demanded by true leaders. This is a quote you may have seen before. However, you can put it on a motivational poster, you can say it in a meeting, you can believe it deeply, but until you live it, it means nothing. The moment you demand respect because of your title; you’ve already lost it. The moment you expect people to fall in line simply because you’re the boss, you’ve revealed that you don’t understand what real leadership is.
It is always said that “respect is reciprocal”. This does not mean you will bow to the whims and caprices of every team member. In fact, if you do that, you will fail in leadership. Earning respect doesn’t mean being a pushover. It doesn’t mean saying yes to every request, accepting every opinion as equally valid, or running your department like a democracy where everything gets voted on. That’s not leadership. That’s abdication of responsibility. When Reed Hastings built Netflix, he created a culture of freedom and responsibility.
He gave people enormous autonomy, but he also held them to high standards. He listened to ideas, he valued input, but he didn’t pretend that every voice carried equal weight on every decision. When engineers disagreed with product direction, he heard them out. But once a decision was made, execution wasn’t optional. That’s the balance. Respect flows both ways, but leadership still requires making tough calls. Earning the respect of your team members means giving ears to their opinions. Real listening is active. It’s uncomfortable. It means you might hear things that challenge your assumptions or expose your blind spots.
When Alan Mulally ran those Thursday morning Business Plan Review meetings at Ford, he didn’t just let people talk. He listened with the intent to understand, not to respond. Mulally kept asking questions, kept listening, and kept creating psychological safety. One day, Mark Fields admitted his launch of the Edge had issues. Instead of attacking him, Mulally applauded. The room went silent. The next week, the chart was full of yellow and red indicating more people opening up on their challenges. People started telling the truth because someone was actually listening.
Your team members are intelligent and sensible. You must show them that you value their contribution. Don’t look down on them. Don’t use derogatory words on them. With this, you will earn their respect and that will boost your personal power. I’ve seen some head of units destroy their credibility with comments that demean the dignity of their team members. Some go as far as cursing them. This has never achieved any reasonable result. These leaders thought they were being direct or maintaining standards. What they actually did was broadcast their own insecurity and kill any chance of earning genuine respect.
The above is in contrast with Satya Nadella’s approach at Microsoft. When he became CEO, one of his first moves was to shift the company from a culture of individual brilliance to one of collaborative learning. He didn’t talk down to people. He asked questions. He admitted what he didn’t know. In meetings, he would say things like, “Help me understand your thinking here.” The statement was not just rhetorics, but as a genuine request. That humility, combined with clear expectations, earned him respect across an organization of over 100,000 people.
Your team members aren’t stupid. They can tell when you value them and when you’re just faking it. They know the difference between a leader who sees them as resources to be extracted and one who sees them as partners in building something. When you focus on personal power much more than positional power, you are earning the right to be called a leader. Positional power is what the organization gives you. It’s the title on your business card, the corner office, the authority to approve budgets or sign off on decisions. It’s temporary. It disappears the moment you change roles or leave the company.
Personal power is what people give you. It’s the influence you have because of who you are, not what position you hold. It’s permanent, or at least it travels with you. It’s the reason people stay in touch with you after you’ve moved on. It is the reason they ask for your advice years later, and the reason they follow you to new opportunities. Think about Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo. Yes, she had positional power as CEO.
But her personal power came from something else entirely. She wrote letters to the parents of her senior executives, thanking them for raising children who became such valuable leaders. She remembered people’s birthdays. She invested time in understanding what mattered to them beyond work. When she spoke, people didn’t just listen because she was CEO. They listened because she had earned the right to be heard.
To the line managers and departmental heads reading this: Stop demanding respect. Start earning it. Listen more, insult less, and value the sensible intelligence of your people. That is the only path to becoming a leader who leaves a mark, rather than just a manager who fills a seat. Your team becomes more engaged, innovative, and resilient, knowing their leader isn’t just in charge but truly in tune with them.
Oluwole Dada is the General Manager at SecureID Limited, Africa’s largest smart card manufacturing plant in Lagos, Nigeria.
