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What Keeps You Awake at Night?
Being Respected Versus Being Liked
“I firmly believe that respect is a lot more important, and a lot greater, than popularity.” Julius Erving
I managed many people during my career.
One in particular stands out when it comes to the matter of whether it is better to be liked than respected.
This individual was my tooling engineer. In that regard, he was responsible for the building and maintenance of all of the injection and blow mold tooling owned by the company, whether used internally or run at an outside molding house.
Ron was very knowledgeable about tooling.
He knew what needed to be done and when it needed to be done. But, he wanted to be liked by everyone he worked with. It was a passion of his and because of this he had trouble being decisive regarding certain decisions such as who should or shouldn’t run certain tooling or when maintenance was needed on a particular mold.
Because of this, certain individuals within and outside the company would take advantage of Ron. They knew they could play the like card to get him to do things he didn’t agree with. Then, when a problem occurred because of something he did or didn’t do, they were there to blame him for…
