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Use These 7 Forms of Respect to Transform Your Workplace with Dr. Julie Pham (Ep. #57)

The BetterManager Team
Building Better Managers Podcast Episode 57 - Dr. Julie Pham

Building Better Managers Podcast Episode #57: Use These 7 Forms of Respect to Transform Your Workplace with Dr. Julie Pham

Leaders, and particularly middle managers, are constantly being challenged. While it’s never been easy to navigate the needs of both the C-Suite and junior staff members, the past few years have created a slew of new priorities and pressures.

From managing remote and hybrid teams and effectively implementing and supporting company DEI priorities to rallying staff during times of crisis and reducing team burnout, the growing complexity of being a manager today can quickly feel overwhelming.

Now, more than ever, managers need to communicate clearly and strengthen workplace connections. And doing so, all starts with respect, according to Dr. Julie Pham. Dr. Pham, the best-selling author of 7 Forms of Respect: A Guide to Transforming Your Communication and Relationships at Work, and the founder of CuriosityBased, joins the podcast to explain how respect is communicated among individuals, teams, and organizations.

In this episode, Dr. Pham guides us through the 7 Forms of Respect framework and shares how it is being used around the world to create more dynamic and highly productive workplaces, and how it can be applied by managers and leaders to articulate priorities, compromise effectively, and reinforce behaviors that support the shared work and goals of the team.

In this episode:

Meet Dr. Julie Pham

  • Dr. Julie Pham is the founder and the CEO of CuriosityBased, an organizational development firm based in Seattle. She is the author of the #1 Amazon New Release and Bestseller 7 Forms of Respect: A Guide to Transforming Your Communication and Relationships at Work.
  • Dr. Pham has been recognized with numerous awards for her community leadership. She has applied her community building approach to building strong, collaborative and curious teams. 
  • She was born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Seattle. Dr. Pham earned her PhD in history at Cambridge University as a Gates Cambridge Scholar and she graduated magna cum laude from University of California, Berkeley as a Haas Scholar. She earned her real life MBA by running her family’s Vietnamese language newspaper during the 2008-2010 recession. She has worked as a journalist, historian, university lecturer, marketer, nonprofit executive, and management consultant.

The 7 Forms of Respect Framework

  • The 7 Forms of Respect is a framework for communicating what you need and to understand what other people need in terms of respect.
  • The intention is to spark conversation! The why is more important than the what.

The  7 Forms

  • Procedure: These individuals feel most natural demonstrating respect by adhering to the established formal processes as well as informal expectations, reading instructions, fulfilling requests as they asked, and they set clear expectations of how they would like their requests to be fulfilled.
  • Punctuality: These individuals feel most natural demonstrating respect by arriving at meetings on time or a little early. They let people know beforehand if they will be late or absent, even if they know others won’t mind.  They stay on schedule and end appointments on time.
  • Information: These individuals feel most natural demonstrating respect by sharing access to information, data, and intelligence, even to those who have no foreseeable need for it. They invite people to meetings just so they can stay informed. They give full updates and background information without being prompted.
  • Candor: These individuals feel most natural demonstrating respect by asking probing questions, offering constructive feedback, bringing up opposing viewpoints, and pointing out mistakes and errors. They may express their displeasure with someone to their face.
  • Consideration: These individuals feel most natural demonstrating respect by anticipating people’s wants and needs in choosing how to interact with them. When giving a gift, they prefer to surprise someone rather than ask what they would like. They avoid bringing up conversation topics to those they think they will find difficult to talk about such things.
  • Acknowledgement: These individuals feel most natural demonstrating respect by thanking people for their work. They like to give positive praise and recognize their contributions verbally. Whenever possible, they will acknowledge their requests, even if they can’t fulfill them.
  • Attention: These individuals feel most natural demonstrating respect by listening attentively, referring back to other people’s comments to indicate they heard, putting away possible distractions, and not interrupting except to ask clarifying questions. They do not multitask, even when they know others wouldn’t mind.

How The 7 Forms of Respect Help Managers

  • Articulating what are actual priorities, what actually matters, vs. what are nice to have
  • Understanding how to compromise
  • Determining the behaviors that are needed to support our shared work and purpose
  • Getting people to articulate culture more clearly, by describing behaviors instead of aspirations - people follow what leaders do, much more than what they say they do

The Benefits of Curiosity In the Workplace

  • It reflects resilience, resourceful, creativity & open mindedness
  • Asking questions is an indicator of psychological safety
  • Curiosity is contagious! It often uplifts the morale of a team
  • Asking questions opens up conversation instead of being defensive

Next Steps/Takeaways To Foster More Inclusive Environments

  • Practicing curiosity boils down to three elements:
    - Increase self-awareness
    - Build relationships across difference
    - Communicate clearly
  • As readers and consumers, we have power and influence too to choose who we read. Spend more reading authors who are women, people of color, differently abled. We have to think about demand, not just supply. Check out Julie's curated lists of books authored by underrepresented groups and more here.
  • Don't think about DEI as the training we get on unconscious bias and microaggressions. It's actually about culture and how to make our culture one that encourages not just multiple perspectives, but also multiple approaches.

Downloads & Resources

Follow Julie on LinkedIn, Twitter and at CuriosityBased.com.

Subscribe to our podcast on your favorite podcast platform!

Check out our blog articles on Leadership here.

Dr. Julie Pham

Dr. Julie Pham is the founder and the CEO of CuriosityBased, an organizational development firm based in Seattle. She is the author of the #1 Amazon New Release and Bestseller 7 Forms of Respect: A Guide to Transforming Your Communication and Relationships at Work.

Dr. Pham has been recognized with numerous awards for her community leadership. She has applied her community building approach to building strong, collaborative and curious teams. 

She was born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Seattle. Dr. Pham earned her PhD in history at Cambridge University as a Gates Cambridge Scholar and she graduated magna cum laude from University of California, Berkeley as a Haas Scholar. She earned her real life MBA by running her family’s Vietnamese language newspaper during the 2008-2010 recession. She has worked as a journalist, historian, university lecturer, marketer, nonprofit executive, and management consultant.

Episode Transcript
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