How to Establish Your Seniority when You’re a Young Boss

In today’s crazy employment market, there’s no telling who might end up with the job. A person may have 25 years experience in your profession, but end up with a boss who’s 25 years old. If you’re a young boss, it can be hard to establish the right relationship with your older employees – how do you earn their respect without offending the seniority of those who have been around longer than you? How do you handle their errors or encourage and empower them if they just look at you as a youngster?

 

1. Hold regular reviews of skills and knowledge to address the gap.

While you can’t deny the value of experience, new technologies and methods are always happening, and so you need to ensure that your employees have the up-to-date knowledge that goes hand-in-hand with experience. Older employees are often eager to learn new things so that they can be ‘in the loop’ and belong with the rest of the group.

 

2. Maintain courtesy in all interactions with your older employees.

Respect for your elders is still important in our culture, and so courtesy and respect should be your buzzwords no matter what the interaction calls for. They will only respect you if you show them the same courtesy, and giving respect is also a part of generally being professional – which is important to anyone’s corporate wellness.

 

3. Agree on your working style.

If you reprimand an older employee, they may feel more embarrassed by the fact that you’re young than by the error itself. Establish with your employees that their input is invaluable, but sometimes there will be discords and errors and you will have to step up and pull rank. Ensure your employees know that what you say and do will be done with regard to the wellbeing of the company, as well as the careers of everyone involved.

 

4. Establish seniority

As we do have a culture in which elders are to be obeyed – and no one believes this more than older people – it can be hard to establish your seniority.  However, make sure that you quickly assert that you have more access to a broader vision and wider frame of information. Lay it out in logical terms, so that the confusion of having a young boss is eliminated.

Categories: employees, establish, older, Older Employees, respect, Seniority, Young Boss

You Have to Earn it: How to Command Respect at Work

If you expect to progress in your career, or even do your current job properly, you won’t manage it without respect from your boss or colleagues. However, even though respect is a huge part of corporate wellness, sometimes it gets demanded where it is not deserved. Your superiors may demand a certain level of respect from you, regardless of how competent they are, but shouldn’t respect be earned?

 

According to Manoj Khatri, author of What a thought!, a critically acclaimed book based on powerful ideas of some of the greatest thought leaders, ‘If you ask me, I would like to be respected only for my abilities and qualities, not because my position demands it. What perturbs me is that so many people are comfortable with fake respect. For example, I see so many subordinates who show respect to their superiors, whether or not they feel it inside. Usually they do so because they want to be politically correct. After all, they can’t afford to upset their boss!’

 

‘Showing respect is different from feeling respect,’ Khatri explains. ‘Genuine respect is felt inside. It is earned by living a life that inspires and motivates. It is objective and unbiased. But, it is not demanded. Yet, we find our elders, seniors, and superiors insisting that we respect them? The truth is that respect has nothing to do with age and seniority. In fact, it is possible that we may respect many people who are lesser than us in age, experience, or status. I respect many of my subordinates, not because they demand – they can’t! – but, because they command it through their work, their behaviour, and their attitude. On the other hand, I don’t feel respect for many of my seniors – because I find that they assert themselves needlessly, frequently to show their authority and feel in control.’

 

So then, how can you earn or command the respect of the people in your office, without demanding it? Khatri notes that, often, you reap what you sow in terms of respect in the workplace. ‘When we show genuine respect, the other respects us for our honesty and confidence,’ he says. ‘Yes, showing genuine respect to others implies that we are confident of ourselves to feel secure and therefore we can let the others know that we respect them. This brings us to self-respect…And we can’t expect others to respect us if we don’t respect ourselves.’

Categories: Command, Demand, feel, genuine, genuine respect, respect, superiors

It Won’t Make You Happy: Money Less Important than Respect

Do you care what people think, or is your emotional health more instilled in how much money you earn? According to a new article published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, overall happiness in life comes down to how much you are respected and admired by your peers, rather than your financial wellness.

Psychological scientist Cameron Anderson of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley explored the relationship between different types of status and wellbeing in the article with his co-authors. Anderson explained, ‘We got interested in this idea because there is abundant evidence that higher socioeconomic status – higher income or wealth, higher education – does not boost subjective wellbeing (or happiness) much at all. Yet at the same time, many theories suggest that higher status should boost happiness.’

Ok, so money and status doesn’t make you happy – but what does? Instead of happiness coming down to socioeconomic status, Anderson and his colleagues theorised that it was more of a question of higher sociometric status. That is, respect and admiration in your face-to-face groups, such as your friendship network, your neighbourhood, or your athletic team. Anderson commented, ‘Having high standing in your local ladder leads to receiving more respect, having more influence, and being more integrated into the group’s social fabric.’

In the first of four studies, the research team polled 80 students who participated in 12 different campus groups, such as sororities and ROTC. After accounting for gender and ethnicity, the researchers discovered that sociometric status predicted students’ social wellbeing scores. In the next study, the researchers surveyed a larger and more diverse sample of participants. They were able to at least partly explain the relationship between sociometric status and wellbeing; students felt a sense of power and social acceptance in their personal relationships.

Over the next two studies, the team looked at how this might be manipulated when sociometric status changed. Anderson noted, ‘I was surprised at how fluid these effects were – if someone’s standing in their local ladder went up or down, so did their happiness, even over the course of 9 months.’ He added, ‘One of the reasons why money doesn’t buy happiness is that people quickly adapt to the new level of income or wealth. Lottery winners, for example, are initially happy but then return to their original level of happiness quickly. It’s possible that being respected, having influence, and being socially integrated just never gets old.’

Categories: money, Research, respect