What Would Make You Feel Respected?
Here is a question I have been sitting with.
If someone asked you to name ten things that would make you feel respected in your closest relationships, could you do it?
Ten specific things. Not general principles. Not “being valued” or “being heard.” Ten concrete behaviours. Ten actual moments. Ten specific asks.
I am a leader who has spent years teaching other leaders about respect. And when I sat down to answer this question for myself last week, I could not do it.
Not easily. Not clearly. Not in a way that felt honest rather than borrowed.
That is the moment I want to bring here today. Because I do not think I am the only one.
The question most of us have never been taught to answer
We were taught to name what others need from us. We were rarely taught to name what we need from them.
Especially the women reading this. Especially the people who grew up in households where their needs were treated as inconvenient. Especially the leaders who built their careers by anticipating what everyone else required and delivering it before being asked.
For those of us on that path, respect became a thing we gave, extracted, watched carefully, absorbed anxiously when it was missing. Rarely a thing we could name for ourselves.
Here is what I have started to understand.
You cannot ask for what you cannot name. You cannot notice what you cannot describe. You cannot build in others what you have never given yourself the words for.
That is a billion dollar blind spot in leadership. And it is sitting in most of the humans who are trying, right now, to build cultures of respect inside their organisations.
Why the wounds get in the way
The reason I could not answer the question is not that I do not care about respect. I care about it more than most things.
The reason is older than that.
Somewhere in the years that shaped me, I learned that naming what I needed was risky. That my needs might be too much. That the safer path was to be the one who did not need anything specific. Who could adapt. Who could work with what was in front of her.
That is a wound. And it is one of the most common wounds I meet in the leaders I work with.
We rarely name it because the leaders carrying it are usually high performers. We have been rewarded for our capacity to hold complexity, absorb difficulty, deliver outcomes. The wound has produced strengths. Naming the wound feels like betraying the strengths.
But the wound is doing something else too. It is quietly shaping how we lead. Because if I cannot name what respect feels like to me, I cannot recognise when it is present in my team. I cannot notice its absence in myself. I cannot ask for it in my relationships. And I cannot model it for the people who are learning what respect looks like from watching how I move through a room.
The wound is inheritable. And most of the leaders I work with are inheriting it from the ones who trained them.
What organisational psychology tells us about respect
Respect is one of the most researched and least understood concepts in leadership.
Baumeister and Leary’s classic work on belongingness identified being valued and respected as one of the most fundamental human needs. Not a preference. A biological requirement. The absence of respect activates the same neural circuits as physical pain.
Chris Argyris’s work on defensive routines shows that people who cannot ask for what they need learn to hide the need instead. The organisation becomes filled with silent asks and silent disappointments, none of which get named, all of which shape behaviour.
Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety builds on both. Safety is the precondition for people to name what they need without fearing the cost of naming it.
Every one of these researchers has been telling us the same thing from different angles for decades.
Human beings are wired to require respect. The organisations that build it thrive. The ones that starve their people of it hemorrhage talent, energy, and truth. And the leaders who cannot name what respect looks like to them personally are, by definition, incapable of building it for the people they lead.
Because you cannot give what you cannot name.
What behavioural psychology reveals about the pattern
Behaviour follows what gets reinforced.
If we grew up in environments where our needs were dismissed, minimised, or reframed as demands, we learned to stop naming them. The behaviour of not-asking got reinforced. The behaviour of taking-care-of-everyone got rewarded. And a person walked out of childhood with a nervous system that pre-empted their own needs before those needs could become visible.
That person often becomes a leader. Because the pattern is useful in early career. It looks like maturity. It looks like generosity. It looks like emotional intelligence.
But it is a debt. And the debt compounds.
By the time that person is running a team, they cannot access their own compass on respect. They cannot tell you what they need. They cannot tell when they are being disrespected because they have long since decided their read on it must be exaggerated. And the team they are building learns, quietly, that this environment is one where asking for what you need is not what senior leaders do.
The behavioural pattern becomes the culture. The leader wearing it teaches the whole organisation, without meaning to, that this is what leadership looks like.
That is another billion dollar blind spot. Sitting at the top of more organisations than anyone wants to name.
What positive psychology offers as the way through
This is where positive psychology becomes essential.
You cannot heal a wound by criticising the person who carries it. You cannot ask a leader to name what respect looks like to them from a place of shame about not knowing yet.
Kristin Neff’s research on self-compassion tells us that the capacity to face what we cannot yet do or say requires the internal conditions of warmth toward ourselves. Not softness. Not letting ourselves off the hook. The stable self-regard that lets us hold uncomfortable truths without needing to defend against them.
Martin Seligman’s PERMA framework adds the wider architecture. Positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, accomplishment. The leader who has these in their own life can hold the discomfort of not-yet-knowing what respect feels like to them. The leader who is depleted cannot even ask the question.
I am doing this work myself right now. Slowly. With patience. With the recognition that the reason I cannot yet name the ten things is old. I have been running on someone else’s template of what respect looks like for a very long time. And templates cannot generate their own answers. They can only echo the answer they were given.
Positive psychology gives me permission to hold that with warmth instead of criticism. To be curious about what I do not yet know. To trust that the naming will come when I have built enough internal safety to hear my own answer.
Where Respect Equality lives in this conversation
I want to say this clearly, because it is the heart of what I keep coming back to.
I have written before about the Respect Equality Model. Respect is not a value you hang on the wall. It is a behaviour under pressure.
And at the centre of it sits one sentence.
Your humanity matters as much as mine.
That sentence sounds simple. It is not.
Living inside it changes how you show up in every meeting. It means the quiet voice in the room carries the same weight as the loud one. It means the frontline worker carries the same weight as the executive. It means the truth inconvenient to you carries the same weight as the truth that flatters you.
But it also means something else, and this is the part that has taken me the longest to understand.
Your humanity matters as much as mine also means your humanity matters. Yours. The one you have been quietly discounting because you have been rewarded for discounting it. The one that has never been asked what it needs. The one that has learned to be the last name on the list of humans in the room.
You cannot practise Respect Equality outward if you have not practised it inward.
You cannot build a culture where the humans in your organisation are respected as fully as you are, if you are quietly not respecting yourself at the same level.
The two are the same movement. They cannot be separated.
Why this connects to financial success
I have to name this, because leaders often do not act on the human argument alone.
Gallup estimates disengaged employees cost the global economy 8.8 trillion dollars a year. The single largest driver of disengagement in study after study is the experience of feeling unrespected by direct managers.
Turnover, absenteeism, quality failures, innovation loss, brand damage. All of them trace back to environments where humans do not feel respected. All of them show up as costs on someone’s dashboard.
Respect is the infrastructure of commercial performance. And the failure to build it is the billion dollar blind spot most CEOs cannot see when they read their engagement scores and blame the team for not being motivated enough.
Here is the deeper claim I want to make.
The leaders who build respect in their organisations are, almost without exception, leaders who have done the work of building respect for themselves. Not because they were told to. Because they came home to the truth that their own humanity mattered too.
And when they came home to it, they could see, for the first time, what respect looks like when it lands in a human body.
Once you can see it, you can build it. You can notice its absence. You can protect it in others because you have finally protected it in yourself.
Three practices for the leader sitting with this
If you are a leader reading this and the question I opened with landed uncomfortably, three practices to consider.
Try to name the ten things. Sit with a pen. Not for the article. Not for anyone else. For yourself. Ask what would make you feel respected in your closest relationship. Notice what comes easily. Notice what feels forbidden to name. The gap between the two is where the work lives.
Notice how you respond when someone tells you what they need. Watch yourself in real time. If your first instinct is to renegotiate their need, minimise it, or explain why it is too much, you are seeing the pattern your team has been learning from. That pattern is the one you need to change first in yourself.
Ask your team what would make them feel respected. Then listen without defending. The answers will teach you something about them. They will also teach you something about you. Because the things they ask for are often the things you have been quietly unable to ask for on your own behalf.
The leadership this moment is asking for
We are past the era when leaders could pretend they had it figured out.
The people doing the work now can see through polished authority. They can feel the difference between a leader who is genuinely doing the internal work and a leader who has learned to talk about it convincingly.
The most respected leaders of the next decade are going to be the ones who did the ordinary, unglamorous work of coming home to their own humanity. Naming what respect feels like to them. Ceasing to discount their own needs. Practising Respect Equality inward first, so that when it lands outward in their organisation, it lands as something they know from the inside.
I am doing this work right now. Publicly, in this article. Privately, in ways only the people closest to me will ever see.
I cannot yet name ten things that would make me feel respected in my closest relationships. Not honestly. Not without borrowing someone else’s language.
But I am going to. Because I owe it to the people I lead. And because I owe it to me. My humanity matters. As much as anyone else’s.
Yours does too.
And the culture you are trying to build in your organisation depends on you knowing that from the inside, not only naming it from the outside.
That is the work. It is worth doing. And I believe the leaders reading this are capable of it.
Hacia Atherton is the author of The Billion Dollar Blind$pot, a three-time Amazon bestseller in Strategic Management and Behavioural Psychology. She works with leaders and organisations to build the behavioural clarity that drives both psychological safety and commercial performance.
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You do not get the culture you want. You get the culture your behavior creates.