You don’t respect me…

You don’t respect me…

Lately I have been thinking about respect.
Whether it is earned, given, demanded or simply expected. Who decides what respect looks like? Whether what I experience as disrespect is what you intended. And how some of the rules about respect that many of us grew up with have changed completely – or perhaps never made that much sense in the first place.

It is something that comes up surprisingly often in mediation.

People may arrive talking about workload, communication, management style, exclusion, tone, recognition, responsibilities or a colleague who is “impossible to work with”. But somewhere underneath the detail there is often another message:

I don’t feel respected.

And that matters more than we sometimes realise.

Recent research by Acas found that 44% of working-age adults in Great Britain had experienced conflict at work during the previous 12 months. In the United States, SHRM found that 66% of employees had experienced or witnessed workplace incivility in just the previous month. The most common behaviour reported was people addressing others disrespectfully. ( I can vouch for that in my own workplace mediations.)

Perhaps none of this should surprise us.

Years ago, I facilitated conflict resolution sessions at a retirement home in Bishop Lavis near Cape Town. Most of the residents were not wealthy and many relied on SASSA grants as their only source of income.

Before I started, I thought I knew what would emerge.
Shared living. Loneliness. Boredom. The loss of independence that can accompany ageing. Perhaps residual anger at some of the injustices life had dealt them.

I was wrong.

Respect – or rather the lack of it – dominated the conversation.

People felt ignored. Excluded. Not greeted. Not consulted. Spoken about rather than spoken to. They believed others were deliberately overlooking them or treating them as though they no longer mattered.
The smallest slight could be experienced as disrespect. And once that happened, a vicious circle began.

You don’t greet me, so tomorrow I don’t greet you. You exclude me, so I exclude you. Nobody actually asks what happened. Assumptions become facts. Direct communication disappears. Gossip takes its place.
Eventually people were ignoring one another to such an extent that someone might not call for assistance when another resident needed help. By then, nobody was arguing about a greeting anymore. They were arguing about whether they mattered enough to be treated with respect.

That experience has stayed with me because I see versions of the same pattern in workplaces. The details are different, but the underlying experience can be remarkably similar.
My manager never acknowledges the work I do.
Decisions affecting me are made without me.
My colleague continually interrupts me in meetings.
Nobody responds to my emails.
I’m given instructions without explanation.
She takes credit for my ideas.
He speaks to me as though I am incompetent.
I am always the last person to know.
These may look like small things from the outside. But repeated over time, they accumulate meaning.

Research into the everyday behaviours that irritate people at work found that 52% were annoyed by being micromanaged. Another survey found that 44% of employees identified someone else taking credit for their work as something that would make them particularly angry, while 37% identified rude colleagues or customers. Seemingly minor behaviours can have a cumulative effect on workplace relationships and eventually escalate into conflict.

And this is where respect becomes complicated.Because respect is an abstract concept.

Two people can both say, with absolute conviction, “I just want to be treated with respect” – and mean completely different things.

For one person, respect means being consulted before a decision is made. For another, it means being trusted to get on with their work without being constantly checked. It might mean punctuality, recognition, being greeted in the morning, not being interrupted, being given honest feedback, having your experience acknowledged or simply being spoken to in a particular way.

The intention and the experience may also be completely different.
“I was just being direct.”
“She humiliated me.”
“I was checking whether the work was on track.”
“He doesn’t trust me.”
“I didn’t think it was necessary to include her.”
“They deliberately excluded me.”
This is often where workplace conflict becomes stuck. We argue about whether someone was disrespectful, rather than becoming curious about the behaviour that was experienced as disrespectful. That distinction matters.

Back in Bishop Lavis, we eventually stopped talking about respect as an idea and started talking about what respect looks like.
We developed practical guidelines together.

One was extraordinarily simple.
If you greet someone and they don’t respond, don’t immediately decide they are ignoring you. They may not have heard you. Walk towards them, look them in the eye and say, “Good morning.”
No resentment.
No assumptions.
No story about what their behaviour means.
Try again.

It sounds almost ridiculously simple. But it changed something, because respect needs to be made visible if we want to change behaviour and ensure that intention and experience are more closely aligned.

The same principle applies at work.
Instead of saying, “he doesn’t respect me”, we can begin to say:
“When I am speaking in a meeting, please allow me to finish before responding.”
“If a decision directly affects my work, I would like to be consulted beforehand.”
“If you are concerned about my performance, please raise it directly with me rather than discussing it with other members of the team.”

Those are conversations people can actually have.

So the next time you feel disrespected at work – or someone tells you that they feel disrespected by you – it may be worth resisting the temptation to argue immediately about who is right.
Instead, ask:
• What happened?
• What behaviour did I experience as disrespectful?
• What meaning did I attach to it?
• Is there another possible explanation?
And, perhaps most importantly:

What would respect actually look like here?

It is a useful question for individuals, teams and organisations.
Because behind many conflicts about communication, recognition, exclusion, hierarchy or behaviour is a very human need:
See me. Hear me. Acknowledge that I matter.
Sometimes changing a conflict starts there.

Image credit: Inner conflict – G. Wagner Granizio