Welcome to Dear HBR from Harvard Business Review.

I'm Dan McGinn.

And I'm Alison Beard.

Work can be frustrating, but it doesn't have to be.

We don't need to let the conflicts get us down.

That's where Dear HBR comes in.

We take your questions, look at the research,

talk to the experts, and help you move forward.

Today we're talking about situations where respect is missing with Blair DeSembrel. She's a career

expert at LinkedIn. Blair, thanks for coming on the show. Thank you both for having me. Great to be here.

So our listeners who wrote in today, each of them had an incident that caused them to feel

disrespected and man, it's really bothering them. They're having a big problem getting over it. How common is that?

It's very common when you think about, you know, we all take a lot of pride in what we do and put a lot of

passion into it. And as part of that, you want to feel like you have that respect in return from

your colleagues, your peers, your managers. Happiness at work is incredibly important to today's

workers. And respect is a big

part of that. And when you have lost respect, how easy is it to fix that situation?

You know, when you've lost respect, it really depends on the situation. You want to ask yourself

a bunch of different questions based on the circumstances to figure out if the situation is fixable.

Yeah, it seems like the repair efforts can be really hard. There's a sense that you're going to react defensively and that can kind of just make the situation worse.

Whatever the situation may be, you really want to think through how you're going to tackle it before you sit down with your manager or colleague and make a game plan and be thoughtful about it to ensure that, you know, you handle it in a way that doesn't come across as defensive and is constructive.

All right, first question.

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