How To Command Respect At Work

If you feel like your colleagues don’t appreciate the hard work that you do, or if your boss doesn’t understand or care about your achievements (but will point out your failures in an instant), you may not be as well-respected at the office as you would like. So how do you fix that? Here are some ideas.Photo by Martin Abegglen

One of the best ways to make sure you’re well-respected at the office are to make sure you’re well liked as well. Don’t gossip or spread rumours about your colleagues, and don’t waste other people’s time: those are great ways to make sure that you’re liked, and appreciated by managers or supervisors.

It also doesn’t hurt to make sure that when you’re presented with real feedback, you always take it well and accept it with open arms, even if you have no plans on taking it in the back of your head.

Over at The Art of Manliness, there’s a wealth of great ideas to make sure that your coworkers and your managers not only appreciate you, but grow to respect you both personally and professionally. Oh, and here’s the kicker: very few of them have anything to do with the quality of your work – most of them have to do with how you present yourself at the office. Like this one, for example:

Care… less. Don’t go all Peter Gibbons in Office Space and stop caring at all. You don’t want to be reckless and disrespectful, but just loosen your grip. Shedding the natural terror that comes with the thought of losing your job is enormously powerful.

I once worked with a manager that said the happiest and best employees he had were the ones he knew had other job offers in their back pocket at all times. They knew they were skilled and marketable, and he knew they stayed because he appreciated their work, paid them well, and respected them personally. Of course, there’s also a lot to be said for just making sure you work hard, churn out great work, and are dependable at the office. Those things garner respect too, some of them just as much as putting on the right face every day.

Respect is earned, after all, not given. What do you do to make sure that your colleagues respect you and the work that you do? If they don’t respect you, what do you do then? Share your tips in the comments.

How to Get The Respect You Deserve at Work [Art of Manliness]