Our necessity of social recognition meets halfway with the value given to us by other people.
There will always be a tendency to behave egalitarian in an effort to make people feel good. The level of hypocrisy involved makes it useless.
People feel the lie. If they are your employees they will despise you. If they are you superiors, you will get rejected. Your job is most times just a job. Define correctly your place, treat the other with respect and understand their place. Real value is real value. Even if people do not like you as a person, they will still respect you if you are true to yourself.
A team will evaluate its members based on two constructions: formal authority and informal status (respect).
The formal status is the etiquette used to make sense of the organization’s behavior. The value is given by the organization and is accepted by others based on the acceptance of their own status. An employee will listen to the manager that has a higher status because he perceives the higher value given by the company. Also his needs of moving up the company’s food chain is nourished by the existence of a superior position (hence motivation).
The informal status is a form of respect. It is given by the other team members only to those that are worthy and is mostly related to job performance.
Characterizations based on difference of gender are not a status. You will be surprised how easy a mentor can loose the attention of its followers only because she is a woman. The male employees have a beer-talk with the male boss who expressed his disappointed with woman getting pregnant and not performing. The little suck-ups node their empty heads in approval and behave accordingly.
Any employee has a tendency to communicate with peers or superiors. If the distance between the emitter and the receiver is perceived as too large, the communication process doesn’t happen.
A status barrier can be lifted in two ways:
- Create a grapevine communication system. The organization can be characterized as informal and this can be a disadvantage because it will affect the processes already in place.
- Define procedures for dealing with level of importance for issues and address them directly to the person that has the formal authority to say yes or no. That manager might not be your direct superior and you will have to take responsibility for the judgment call you make.
