Some more thoughts from my trip round central Europe... I was watching Bill Amelio on CNN. Bill has the wonderful job or merging the former IBM PC Company (one of my former employers) with Lenovo. When questioned about how to get the two sides to play together, he mentioned "respect" as a key behavior that people needed to bring to meetings, "you have got to be willing to compromise and if you are able to do that on a regular basis and respect who each person is and respect their intentions." I hear this "respect" word a lot in the workplace and in the agile community. "If only people would respect each other we'd all get along better." "I think your people don't respect mine enough." and so on. For example, the agile development team doesn't show respect to the unreformed PMs or vice-versa ... and so it goes.

Spending some time in the Tirol reminded me of the problem with all of this. Respect isn't offered or given, it is earned! In business and management literature we are too often confusing courtesy with respect. Courtesy is something I find offered to the tourists of the Tirol by the locals ungrudgingly and always with a smile. [No wonder - more than 90% of their economy depends on revenues from tourists.] However, to earn the respect of the locals you need to earn it by for example, taking the cable car to the top of the mountain and skiing the whole hill to the bottom in time to catch the same car again less than 15 minutes later, or by biking up a series of switchback turns to a peak normally only reached by tourists via a gondola or chair lift, or by hiking up a valley tourists rarely visit and sleeping out a few nights in alpine huts and not coming down below the snow line for a week. Once you've earned this respect, you see courtesy for what it is.

So, if you feel you've got colleagues who aren't showing enough respect, ask yourself this... Are my colleagues being courteous? Do they listen and give of their time reasonably? If so, and you still don't feel they respect you, then you need to look in the mirror. What would it take to earn their respect? Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson