I have a boss who harps on his staff about how we are showing him disrespect all the time. “We don’t respect him or show him respect.”

I can deeply admire someone, be rather indifferent and just co-exist productively with someone (neither admire nor dislike), and I can intensely dislike someone without ever “disrespecting” the person in the courtesy sense.

I tried having a crucial conversation with him (our boss) several times. He knows we don’t like him or his style/actions in being a boss. But, we don’t insult, cut off or deny him courtesies. However, every time he took the conversation as us attacking him and yet again “showing him disrespect”. He will say we must start respecting him or else and that he is just that kind of boss and we need to get used to it.

In our case it came down to slowly one by one seeking the HR department when we were at our emotional limit under the pressure. It is scary to have HR’s attention on us now, but thankfully HR did come down on him in some ways. He is attending management styles training and even a Crucial Conversations course which I find ironic.

Haven’t had the courage or energy to try and start up a new crucial conversation followup with him yet. Feels like it would be just opening a new can of worms. We don’t seem to see much difference in him yet. Our company is planning a reorganization this fall and I have to be honest that I hope I have a different supervisor out of it.

Without detracting from the main points, let me go on to explore your last line “P.S. For simplicity, I did not qualify my response to include figures of pure evil. I believe they exist. I do not respect them. But I think they are very few in number.”

That is also true, if hard to objectively describe. But you omit a less rare category, individuals with mental illness or personality disorder. Those conditions can prevent the individual from responding to the techniques of Crucial Skills in a rational manner, or even in a manner that would be in their own self interest.

For example, individuals with borderline personality disorder often have remarkable skills in manipulating others, that are confusing, infuriating, and require enormous discipline, if not training, to resist. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borderline_personality_disorder for an accessible but very well documented discussion. You may see someone you know in that description — prevalence is estimated at almost 6% of the population. ‘Working for and Oaf’ and Donna may be unfortunate to have a boss with a condition like this.

Have you all at VitalSmarts ever teamed up with a talented clinician to explore how your skills apply to these problems? For example, identify strategies that do not require amatuer diagnosis, and are based on equal parts compassion and very clear minded recognition of behaviors. To pick up on Donna’s comment, with this special subset of people, I think “compassion” would work better for me than “respect”.

Respect:
1. a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements.
2. admire (someone or something) deeply, as a result of their abilities, qualities, or achievements.

When I don’t feel respect for a supervisor/boss/manager, I can feel compassion, sympathy, empathy, etc. I have always been civil, able to do the work, and “give” respect, but I don’t always “feel” respect.

As far as removing yourself from the influence, for some, that’s not always an option.

i think we should somehow manage to make textbooks out of content like this:
“You are sustaining [disrespect] by maintaining a distorted story of the other person.”
and
“You will know you have graduated from telling a Villain Story to telling a healthy one when … your moral certainty is replaced with curiosity, and your disgust gives way to compassion.”

and stevec with the self-accountability!

what have i done to deserve this lavishing of knowledge?! i feel the love!

What comes to mind is a scale of justice. If we pile a person’s faults on one side and only focus on the parts we dislike, we get out of balance and it feels impossible to treat them with respect. But when we look at the whole person and pile their good points on the other side of the scale, our attitude comes back into balance.

I do agree that often people do have some redeeming qualities that we should not overlook and they are God’s creatures which in and of itself should entitle them to a certain amount of respect. I have to say though that I thought this time you were very one sided. There are people that may not be pure evil but still may not deserve respect in the workplace.

Being in a position to watch my boss lie time after time to almost everyone he speaks to from the clerical staff all the way to the president of our company as well as individuals outside our organization makes it very hard to respect him at least as a coworker/boss. I am a keen observer of people and have tried for several years to give him the benefit of the doubt realizing that none of us, especially me, are perfect. I realize there are some times that there could be a reason that he might not be able to be completely truthful. This isn’t the type situations I am talking about.

I am talking about pervasive lying, him lying in at least 70% of his conversations for no apparent reason. Simple things like telling people what he is going to do on a Sunday afternoon (telling three different stories to three different people in a matter of only a few minutes) all the way to telling the company president that he advertised a job and is interviewing candidates for it when it was never advertised and he told the HR person that he has no intention of filling it. To me this is his lack of respect for everyone he lies to. Watching as he belittles people in numerous other ways daily, watching as he falsifies paperwork, watching him as he lies about his education, watching as he writes up staff for something that he caused, etc. makes it really hard to respect any part of his work.

I can say that he seems to love his children, parents, and siblings. He appears to have an appreciation for his church and love the Lord which makes his ongoing lies harder to understand. I guess I can’t say I disrespect everything about him, but so far every thing work related seems to take away any respect that I could possibly have. It is hard to respect someone you can’t trust. Sometimes people need to earn your respect!

As Peter Drucker said, if a new boss comes in, he will bring his team with him, and chances are you will not be part of that team, since your boss does not like you either.