I have an ongoing conflict going on at work. It's really a simple issue of a problem that we received into our helpdesk a couple of weeks ago. The call came in that a program was missing on the network. This program is used to generate a report for our customers, but that is not what is important.

Being an IT Manger, at least for me, means that when one of my people is out, I fill in. It’s just how it works. I hate it as much as the next person to come back from being out to receive a mound of stuff to do. This is especially true when the users need to have something now as opposed to later.

So we worked for almost 2 hours and found out that the person whose shoes I was filling had moved the report to a different application. So okay, we found it, we communicated it to the users and all is good, right? No.

Then I get a email from the IT guy at the site, telling me that okay, he found a email that was sent to the user one month prior telling them that the report had been moved, please use it in its new location. This was sent to twelve people, only one had an issue. Then in that email, he proceeds to tell us, that this is all fine and good but we really did nothing to help the user and that he needed to be made aware of all the changes that we do in the corporate office.

Wrong. We did do something and we are not going to start notifying everyone of every little change that takes place.

So we start this little discussion going about how I don’t respect the users and they do. I was told that we have to address every little concern that our users face and ignore the fact that they are not doing their job. Users after all know what they are talking about and if they didn’t know about a change that we communicated to them, that this was our fault.

Wrong again.

So then I see this wonderful article by Alice In Texas

We have an extremely low collective understanding of respect. The word is associated with leftist minority-promotion. It's what you rightly give to everyone who is different than yourself; actually, respect should be paid- in the form of appreciation, politeness, and a distant kind of positive and extra-receptive expectation- according to how much it has been earned.

And a person does not earn respect by being perfect, still less by having their perfection understood by those with lesser knowledge and understanding than themselves. That would be crazy. A person earns respect by achieving real good things in the world, and by the wisdom they have acquired in that process.

And I agree, our understanding of respect is wrong. Respect is earned. However, it is not earned by what we do but by who we are. Let me explain.

A single act of achieving something good, does not emanate from someone who is evil. If they are evil, they will be doing something which seems good, for an evil purpose. We state that that single event is a reason to respect that person. However, eventually, an evil person will do more evil things by definition than a good person.

When you meet a person for the first time, you give them an initial bank account of respect. This respect comes not from something that they have accomplished, but because they are human and alive.

The respect bank account goes up or down based on collective respect. If you have a high value of respect for me, you may take respect from a third person away because my bank account of respect with that third person is overdrawn and I have no respect for them. In addition, I could have a high respect for another person and you may fill their bank account because of my high value of respect.

But then how do you show respect, well that is a matter of holding them to that level that you have placed upon them. Some people state clearly, “Please don’t pay me any special respect because I don’t want to be on that pedestal.” What they are saying is that they do not wish to live up to your value of respect and wish to be treated a little lower.

So my high respect for a user, is that the user will do their job and listen to changes about their world. My desire is that they will react and communicate problems with the changes that we give them.

When a user does not do their job, but expect me to do it for them, I do lose some respect for them and pay them back by asking them to correct their actions. By them doing something positive, like apologizing, I gain that respect that was lost.

If on the other hand, I treated users with no respect, I would not ask them to live up to their obligations, I would assume that they will not do what they are supposed to do.

So to say that I have less respect for them because I expect them to do their job, and this admin has more respect because he assumes they will not is wrong. This assumption is backwards from reality.

Respect is earned but it can also be granted.