Episode 4 - Being Liked vs. Being Respected: How it Affects Women's Career Growth

Listen to Episode 4 - Being Liked vs. Being Respected: How it Affects Women's Career Growth

Before I get into the meat of this article, I want to ask you a question:

Would you rather be the person everyone likes, or the person everyone respects?

I ask this because I hear it from women in my coaching practice pretty frequently. It's usually some version of ‘I just want people to like me,’ and look, that is a completely human thing to want. Nobody wakes up hoping to be the person that people avoid in the break room.

I used to feel the same way until I received feedback from a previous manager while I was working in a sales role. He said that he felt I was more concerned with being liked versus being respected, and at the time I was like, ‘what's the difference? Are they not the same thing?’ Turns out, they're not the same, and they're not interchangeable either.

As I got older, and as I got farther in my career, I started to see why understanding the difference matters so much. It turns out that mixing them up, or thinking that one will get you the same results as the other is actually one of the more common ways that women stall their careers. So today I'm going to highlight the difference between being liked and being respected, why respect is the thing you really need if you want to advance your career, and why one particular combination of like and respect will sink your career faster than a weighed-down dead body in a lake (I know that’s an aggressive comparison, but it makes the point, no?). I'll also touch on research that specifically highlights what women deal with in this regard, because as with most things, it's not a level playing field, and this is a much smaller issue for men.

I'm sharing all this with you because I don't want it to take until you reach a certain age, or until you've been in the workforce a certain number of years, to come to this realization. I want you to know it now so you can start using it to your advantage now.

Let's start with the difference between being liked and being respected because I do think a lot of us use liked and respected interchangeably. I definitely used to do that, and like I said previously, they're not interchangeable. There's a well-established framework for this that was created by Susan Fisk and Amy Cuddy at Harvard, and their research found that when we size someone up, we're unconsciously running two separate assessments.

The first is related to warmth, which is basically, are you friend or foe? Do I trust this person's intentions towards me? That's the being liked factor.

The second is related to competence, and that's a question of can this person actually do what they say they're going to do? That's the being respected factor.

Amy Cuddy's research suggests that the results of these two assessments account for the vast majority of whether we view someone positively or negatively overall. So, when I say liked versus respected, what I'm really talking about is warmth versus competence. You can score high on one and low on the other. Plenty of people do. The rarest and most valuable thing, though, is scoring high on both. Being both warm and competent.

But why does respect matter more for your career than being liked? Because respect is what lets people know that you can be handed something, and not only will it get done, but it'll get done right. Liking someone tells people that you enjoy their company. Those are two totally different things when a person is deciding who's getting assigned a big project, who's next in line for a promotion, or even who's just going to be given a chance to prove themselves in some other way.

Now, let's think about it from the other side for a second. If you needed someone to run a high-stakes, super-visible initiative, would you pick your office bestie, your work wife/husband, or maybe the person who always brings in treats for the office? Or would you pick the person whose work you really trust? Thinking about things from that angle, most of us would pick the person who does the reliable work, even if we wouldn't necessarily want to hang out with them to talk about it.

Now, this is where the four combinations of like and respect come in, and I'll go through all of them because they're all important.

First, if you're disliked but effective, meaning people don't necessarily enjoy being around you, but they know you get results, you can still build a career. It likely won’t be comfortable for you (or the people working with you), and you'll probably have to work harder to get people on your side, but your effectiveness carries weight despite the fact that you're pretty unlikable. People will still route work to someone they don't love chatting with as long as that person consistently delivers results.

The second one is the easiest trap to fall into, and it's often really hard to know you're in the trap when you're in it. It's the one that I've fallen into myself, and that's being liked but not necessarily respected. You're pleasant, people like being around you, you're probably a ton of fun, and every so often someone will throw you a bone because they like you. You'll get a decent assignment, someone will say something nice about you in a meeting, they'll give you a little grace if you miss a deadline, and they'll probably be a little more patient with you through all of it because of who you are as a person…Because they like you. But you're not necessarily going to get the projects that everyone has their eyes on. You're probably not going to be assigned the high touch account. You likely won’t get the dregs that no one wants, but you won't get the best options either. Being liked earns you goodwill, but it doesn't necessarily earn you trust with something that's super important.

Then there's option three, which is the combo that does the most damage, and it's the one you want to avoid like the plague: Being both disliked and not respected. You need to do your absolute best to actively avoid being both disliked and not respected, because this combo won't just stall your career, it will end it. If people don't enjoy working with you and they don't trust your work, there is no goodwill bank to draw from and no results to point to. You have nothing working in your favor.

Best case, obviously, is option four, which is being both liked and respected, and like I mentioned earlier, this is the rarest combo of all.

If you can only work on one of these traits, let it be the respect. Respect is transferable across projects, respect survives a bad week or a bad meeting. Someone liking you can change much more quickly than someone respecting you. Someone liking you can disappear in an instant.

And now I'll get into why this is super important for women, specifically, and that is because, as with most things in corporate America, men and women are not on an even playing field when it comes to the concept of like versus respect.

A study from Stanford and UC Berkeley used a Harvard Business School case study about a Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Heidi Roizen and split their own study participants into two groups. One group read the case study with Heidi's real name. The other group read the exact same case study with the name changed to Howard Roizen. Despite the only difference between the two groups being the name of the entrepreneur, readers rated Howard Roizen as more likable and someone they'd want to work for. They felt that Heidi Roizen came across as selfish and less trustworthy.

This supports exactly what double-bind researchers like Madeline Heilman have documented for years. Women who succeed in roles that tend to skew male (like leadership roles) are often seen as competent, but they get penalized when it comes to likability. In addition, research also found that women could offset some of that “likability penalty” by visibly showing warmth. I guess that kind of sounds like good news that you can offset the penalty, except what it actually means is that women are often doing extra invisible work just to maintain the same standing that a man gets by default just because he's a man. There is no likability penalty for men in typically male roles.

As with most things, there is some nuance that I'll point out because I don't want anyone to think that I'm saying that being liked doesn't matter for women, or that women have to choose between being liked and being respected. There's research from Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, who I mentioned in a previous episode, that found likability and success are positively correlated for women's leaders. So, it's not a strict either-or. Women can be liked and respected. It's the path women have to take in order to get to being both liked and respected that tends to require more deliberate work than it does for men.

If you're reading this and thinking, ‘okay, so where do I even start?’ Here's my honest advice: lead with warmth first, but make sure it's genuine. You can't do performative niceness and get the same benefit. You'll need to show actual interest in the people around you. Amy Cuddy's research found that trust develops through warmth before anyone has a chance to evaluate whether or not you're competent. People will decide if you're a threat before they'll decide if you have skill. So, what you need to do is show up as someone who is genuinely invested in the people you work with, then back it up with follow-through. Do what you say, deliver what you promise, and let your results speak for themselves instead of over-explaining or apologizing for taking up space.

You don't have to choose between being someone people want in the room and someone people trust with the hard stuff. You don't have to choose between being liked and being respected. But if there ever comes a time where you do have to pick one, or prioritize one, prioritize respect. It's the thing that will carry you further in your career, and without it, you will stall out no matter how much people might like you.

I hope you found this content useful. I'm Lauren. This is Glass Ceiling Smashed. Go grab your hammer and let's break something together.

You can find the sources used to write this episode/article in the show notes for this episode linked at the beginning of this post.