Growth Edge
When You've Lost Respect for Someone on Your Team
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What Leading Asks of You
There is rarely a single moment when you stop believing in someone. It's a series of smaller ones — a pattern that solidifies gradually, largely outside your awareness, until one day you realise the belief has hardened into a settled verdict.
It might have started with a specific failure — a project that went badly, a conversation they handled poorly, something they said that landed wrong and never quite recovered. Or it might have been slower than that: a dozen small disappointments that added up over months, each one unremarkable on its own, until at some point you stopped expecting much and started managing your expectations downwards instead.
What makes this particularly hard to examine is that lost respect doesn't feel like a decision you made — it feels like something you observed. You didn't choose to stop believing in them. You just noticed that you had. And because it feels like observation rather than judgement, it's easy to treat it as settled fact rather than a position worth interrogating.
The hardest part of lost respect is not that you have it. It's that it convinces you that you're simply being realistic.
Here is what that shift costs — even before you've decided what to do about it:
There is a version of this guide that flatters you and a version that challenges you. The flattering version focuses on what to do about the other person. The challenging version starts with what is happening in you — because that is where this actually lives.
You cannot manage someone well when you've already decided they're not worth it. This guide will help you work out what is actually true — but only if you're willing to be honest about what you've been carrying.
Work through this as if the answer might surprise you. It sometimes does.
Lost respect is not one thing. It is a label for a complicated situation that could have several very different causes — and those causes need completely different responses. Getting this wrong is how managers end up making things worse.
The four sources below represent the most common roots of lost respect. Most situations involve more than one, but there is usually a primary driver — the one that, if addressed, would change everything. Read each one and assess honestly.
A note on source D: This is the one most people skip, or check briefly and move on from. It deserves more time than that. The fact that someone irritates you is not evidence that they are irritating — it is evidence that they irritate you. Those are different questions, and conflating them is one of the most common ways managers end up treating people unfairly.
Identifying the source is the starting point, not the destination. The questions below are designed to surface the specifics — because vague disrespect is much harder to act on, address, or own than named, specific concerns.
Not every person who has lost their manager's respect deserves to lose it. Some have been set up to fail by unclear expectations, insufficient support, or a manager whose opinion shifted before the person ever had a real chance to succeed. Others have been managed with diminishing investment for so long that their performance decline is as much a product of the environment as of themselves.
This does not mean the current situation is your fault. It means that before you decide what to do about another person, it is worth being honest about your own contribution to what has developed. That is not self-flagellation — it is accuracy. And accuracy is what you need to act well from here.
A leader who cannot interrogate their own perception is a leader whose judgements cannot be trusted — including by themselves.
Based on what the diagnostic surfaced, you now need to make a decision. Not about what to do in the next conversation — about the direction you are heading in. The three paths below represent the genuine options available to you. Read all three before you choose.
You will notice that "carry on as you are" is not one of them. That is because carrying on as you are is not a real option — it is the absence of leadership, and it has costs you have already started to count. One of the three paths is right for your situation. The work now is naming which one.
This path is for situations where you have identified that part of the problem sits with you — where your expectations have shifted without being communicated, where your investment in their development has quietly dried up, where the problem is more about perception or communication than about fundamental capability or character. It is also the right path when you have not yet had the clear, specific conversation that this situation actually requires — when you have been managing around the problem rather than addressing it.
Re-engaging does not mean pretending the loss of respect never happened. It means deciding, consciously, to give this relationship a genuinely fair chance — with clear expectations, honest feedback, and real investment — before arriving at any verdict. It means suspending the settled view long enough to find out what is actually possible.
This path requires: You must be willing to change how you manage them, not just how you think about them. If you select this path and then manage them in exactly the same way you have been, you have not chosen it — you have just deferred the inevitable while wasting everyone's time.
This path is for situations where there has been a genuine breakdown — in communication, in the working relationship, in the quality of their work — and where the gap has never been named directly. Where both people are aware that something is wrong, but neither has said it out loud. Where the problem is specific enough to be addressed but significant enough that it cannot just be walked around any more.
The conversation this path calls for is not a performance review. It is a frank, human exchange about what has changed, what the impact has been, and what needs to be different. It should be direct without being brutal, specific without being petty, and honest without using honesty as a vehicle for hostility. Done well, it is one of the most powerful things a manager can do. Done poorly, it confirms every fear the other person has about what you think of them.
This path requires: You must go into the conversation with an outcome you genuinely want, not with a case you are building against them. The moment this becomes about being right rather than about moving forward, it stops being a reset and becomes a prosecution.
This path is for situations where you have genuinely tried, the conversation has been had, the expectations have been clear — and the gap remains. Or where the mismatch is fundamental enough that no amount of effort will close it: a values conflict that cannot be worked around, a capability gap that the role genuinely cannot accommodate, a relationship breakdown that has passed the point where either party can work in it well.
A managed exit does not mean ending their career. It means being honest — with them and with yourself — that this situation, in this role, is not working and is not going to work. Handled well, it is one of the most respectful things you can do: giving someone the chance to find a situation where they can actually succeed, rather than holding them in one where they are quietly failing while you manage around them.
This path requires: You must be honest about whether this is a genuine conclusion based on evidence — or whether it is the easier path dressed up as the harder one. Exiting someone requires clear evidence, a fair process, and the willingness to tell them directly what the situation is. If you are not willing to do that, you are not ready for this path.
Whatever path you chose, a conversation is required. This section is about having it well — which means being prepared for what it actually is, not what you wish it were.
Most managers who arrive at this point have already had some version of the conversation — but they have had the comfortable version. The one where the concern is wrapped in enough qualifications that the other person can't be entirely sure what is being said. The one where the manager leaves feeling they've addressed it, and the other person leaves feeling vaguely criticised but unclear about what they are supposed to do differently. That conversation changes nothing. What follows is how to have the one that does.
The conversation will go wrong in predictable ways if you go in without clarity on three things. Work these out before you sit down with them.
What is the specific problem? Not "your attitude," not "the way you engage with the team." What happened, what was the impact, and what is the concrete behaviour or outcome that needs to change? If you cannot state this in two sentences, you are not ready to have the conversation.
What outcome are you actually looking for? Not a vague hope that things will improve. A specific, observable change that you can track. This is the difference between a conversation and a performance process — and it matters, because it changes the tone of everything you say.
What are you willing to offer? If you are asking them to change something significant, it is worth being clear on what support, resources, or changes in your own management you are bringing to the table. A conversation that is entirely about their failings and entirely devoid of your own commitment is harder to deliver well and harder to receive honestly.
The opening matters more than most managers think, because it sets the frame for the entire conversation. There are two ways to open this badly and one way to open it well.
This opening gives the other person nothing to orient to. It signals discomfort without content, and makes everything that follows harder to land because there is no clear frame for why this conversation is happening.
This opening puts them immediately on the defensive and positions the conversation as a verdict being delivered. You may leave having said what you needed to say — but they will leave unable to hear it.
This opening names that there is something real to discuss, signals honesty without hostility, and — critically — creates the conditions for a two-way conversation rather than a monologue. The other person knows something significant is coming, but they are not yet in full defensive mode.
Name the actual behaviour, the actual situation, and the actual impact — not the character judgement you have made from it. "In the last three months, I've noticed X" is different from "You never take ownership." One is observable. The other is a verdict. They need the observable version if they are going to be able to do anything with what you are saying.
This is the part most managers soften so much it disappears. If the impact is that you have lost confidence in their judgment, say that. Not brutally — but directly. If the impact is that the team has noticed and you are fielding questions, say that. The impact is what gives the conversation weight. Without it, you are describing a problem but not conveying why it matters.
Not as a procedural gesture. As genuine inquiry. There is a version of this conversation where what they say changes what you do next — and you need to go in as if that might be true. If you are going through the motions of listening while waiting to land the next point, they will know it, and the conversation will close down. The question to ask is simple: "What's your read on what I've just described?"
End the conversation with something specific: what you need to see, over what timeframe, and what it will mean for the relationship if you see it (or don't). This is not a threat — it is a contract. It is the difference between a conversation that clears the air and one that creates the basis for something different going forward. Without it, nothing changes.
Not every case of lost respect is a one-to-one problem. Some are — and the earlier sections of this guide are built for those. But occasionally, what presents as a manager's loss of respect for an individual is actually a signal about the team's conditions, the system around them, or the way the work is structured.
This section is short, because if it applies to your situation you probably already suspect it. It exists to name the pattern so you can examine it honestly rather than proceeding with a one-to-one intervention that is unlikely to address the real problem.
If you ticked two or more of these, it is worth stepping back from the individual before acting. The Team Reality Check — another resource in the Growth Edge library — works through the conditions around your team systematically, and may surface the fuller picture faster than any one-to-one intervention.
The fact that you have worked through this guide says something. It would have been easier to keep managing around the problem, waiting for it to resolve itself or for the person to leave. Most managers take that path — not because they are lazy, but because naming the problem honestly feels like it will make things worse before it gets better. They are usually right about that. It usually does.
But what comes after that temporary worse is almost always better than what was happening before — for you, for the person you manage, and for the people on your team who have been watching how you handle this.
You know what needs to happen now. The question is whether you will do it.
