Earn Your Respect: Understand Every Level
“Success is not about the end result; it's about what you learn along the way.”
- Vera Wang
Leadership often looks effortless from the outside. The decisions seem clear, the pace looks controlled, and the person in charge appears calm even when everyone else feels the pressure. Most people assume that calm is personality. In reality, calm is usually built on something far more practical. Understanding.
Early in my career as a strength coach, I thought I knew what “running a program” meant. Write training, coach the lifts, demand standards, drive effort, and get athletes ready to perform. That was the visible part. What I did not understand at first was how many difficult, unglamorous jobs surrounded my role and quietly determined whether my work succeeded or failed.
The higher I climbed, the clearer it became. You do not rise into leadership by mastering only your lane. You rise by understanding the lanes that intersect with yours, especially the ones most people overlook because they do not look impressive on a résumé. Those “hard jobs” are the backbone of a business. If you do not understand them, you can still get promoted. You just cannot lead well once you get there.
Most leaders do not get exposed by lack of ambition. They get exposed by lack of operational understanding. They inherit authority without context, then they try to lead through meetings, dashboards, and secondhand explanations. That is when decisions start landing wrong. It is also when trust begins to erode, because the people doing the real work can tell immediately when a leader does not understand what it actually takes to keep the place running.
You do not need to know every job to do it yourself. You need to know enough to respect it, communicate with it, resource it, and protect it. That is how leadership gets easier, not by lowering the standard, but by increasing your understanding of what the standard actually requires.
Why Understanding the Hard Jobs Is Critical Before You Move Up
Many people wait until they are promoted to learn how the organization truly works. By then, the truth is filtered. People manage up. Updates become polished. Problems get translated into safer language. The leader starts hearing versions instead of reality.
The reason is simple. Once authority changes, honesty becomes more expensive. People start protecting themselves. They speak carefully. They give you what is acceptable, not what is accurate. If you have not already learned the system from inside the system, you will lead from assumptions.
In coaching, I lived this lesson through interdepartment communication. My decisions did not end at the weight room door. Training affected the training room. It affected sports science. It affected practice schedules. It affected how sport coaches planned their week, their rotations, and their approach to performance. When I did not understand what they needed and why, I created friction without realizing it.
At first, I thought the solution was to talk more. I learned it was to understand more. Communication is not volume. It is accuracy. The moment I began learning how their jobs worked, my conversations improved because I stopped speaking from my perspective alone. I started speaking from the intersection where decisions actually lived.
That is the point most people miss. Leadership is not about having the loudest voice. It is about having the clearest understanding of what the work demands across the entire system.
The Hidden Advantage: Training Like the Job Is Already Yours
Not long ago, I was out for dinner and had one of those moments that stays with you because it teaches without trying to teach. Our waitress had a shadow with her, a second waiter who was following close, listening to everything, watching her timing, watching how she handled the table, watching how she navigated the pace of the night.
At one point, questions came up. Menu details. Wine details. Timing questions. The waitress answered fine, but not thoroughly. What caught my attention was that the shadow waiter knew the answers better than she did. Not in a show-off way, in a prepared way. He had the confidence of someone who had already done the work behind the scenes.
So I asked him, “When are you going to become a manager?”
He looked at me, paused for half a second, and said, “Is it that obvious?”
Then he explained it. He was in training. They had already put him in the kitchen for four weeks. Now he was on the floor learning service. Next was wine tasting and bar training for four weeks, because their expectation was that managers would understand every piece of the restaurant by doing the work, not by supervising it from a distance. They did not want leaders who gave orders. They wanted leaders who understood what they were asking of people.
That is the entire lesson. That is how you make a transition smooth. You train for the role before you get the title. You learn the hard parts while you still have access to the truth.
The Jobs That Keep the Place Alive
There is another category of hard jobs that most leaders ignore until something breaks. The people who run the physical plant. Janitors. Maintenance. Facility engineers. The men and women who keep the building functioning when no one is watching.
Most organizations do not feel their value until there is a problem. The heat goes out. A major system fails. A space becomes unusable. Something unsafe happens. Suddenly, everyone realizes how much the operation depends on the people who prevent those problems from happening in the first place.
A leader who does not understand the physical plant is leading with a blind spot that can cost time, money, safety, and trust. It is easy to respect the roles that sit at the conference table. It is leadership to respect the roles that make the conference table possible.
When you understand what it takes to keep the lights on, the doors functioning, the environment safe, and the facility operating, you stop treating those roles as background noise. You start treating them as operational leverage. You plan better. You budget smarter. You schedule with more realism. You stop making promises that depend on systems you do not understand.
The people who keep the building alive are not “support staff.” They are stability staff. If you are serious about leadership, you learn their world, because when pressure hits, their world becomes your world.
Area One: Cross-Department Communication
One of the first hard skills I had to develop as a strength coach was communication across departments. The training room, sports science, and sport coaches were all pursuing the same end goal, but they approached it with different priorities and different constraints. When I failed to understand those constraints, my communication created tension. When I learned them, communication became alignment.
In business, this is one of the quickest ways to expose leadership maturity. Some leaders talk only in their own language and assume everyone else should adapt. Strong leaders translate. They understand that departments do not resist change because they are difficult. They resist because they can see the downstream consequences that the leader does not yet see.
When you learn how other departments operate, you stop sending messages that create confusion. You start sending messages that create clarity.
Area Two: Workflow and Invisible Labor
Every organization runs on work that rarely gets recognized. Scheduling, preparation, inventory, compliance, maintenance, follow-ups, and the unending list of tasks that make everything else possible. Leaders who do not understand invisible labor demand speed without appreciating effort. They make timelines that look good on paper and collapse in practice.
Once I understood how much work happened before athletes ever touched a barbell, I stopped treating preparation as an afterthought. I also stopped assuming that my priorities automatically deserved to be everyone else’s emergencies. That shift made me better at planning, better at collaborating, and better at building trust.
In business, leaders who understand workflow do not talk down to people. They do not oversimplify. They improve the system because they know where the system actually breaks.
Area Three: Teaching as the Foundation of Delegation
As my role grew, delegation became unavoidable. That exposed a hard truth. The quality of your delegation is limited by the quality of your teaching. If assistants cannot execute at a high level, the first place to look is not at their ability. It is at your clarity.
I learned I could not keep holding onto tasks just because I liked control. That was not standard. That was insecurity dressed up as perfectionism. When I became a better teacher, I became a better delegator. When I became a better delegator, the operation became stronger than me, which is the only kind of operation worth building.
Businesses do not scale because leaders work harder. They scale because leaders build other people.
Area Four: Understanding Decision Impact
Every decision has ripple effects. Leaders who do not understand the hard jobs make changes that look smart but cause unintended damage. They shift deadlines without understanding capacity. They add initiatives without understanding what must be removed. They demand urgency without understanding what urgency costs.
In coaching, one adjustment in training could influence recovery, practice quality, and injury risk. In business, one adjustment in priorities can influence morale, customer experience, and retention. Leaders who understand impact do not become indecisive. They become precise.
Precision is what makes leadership calm. It is also what makes leadership trusted.
Area Five: Knowing Where the Truth Lives
Every organization has people who quietly keep it afloat and people who quietly drain it. You do not learn that from a report. You learn it by watching patterns over time and by being close enough to the work that reality cannot be hidden.
This is why learning the hard jobs early matters. It gives you unfiltered awareness. It shows you who is dependable under pressure, where systems fail consistently, and what problems are real versus what problems are noise.
When you take a leadership role without that awareness, you lead by guesswork. When you take it with that awareness, you lead with accuracy.
The Payoff
Leaders who learn the hard jobs do not walk into new roles with fear. They walk in with familiarity. They understand the system, the people, the pressure points, and the invisible work that keeps everything functioning.
They also earn something that cannot be demanded. Respect. Not because they talk about respect, but because their decisions reflect it. People feel it when a leader understands what they do. People feel it when a leader protects the work instead of exploiting it.
That is what makes transition smooth. Not confidence. Competence. Not position. Understanding.
CoachC Insight
If you want leadership to feel calm, learn the hard jobs while you still have access to the truth.
Teachable Reminders
• The higher you rise, the more filtered the truth becomes
• Learning the system early turns promotion into transition, not reinvention
• Janitors, maintenance, and facility engineers are operational stability, not background support
• Delegation is only as strong as your ability to teach
• Leaders earn calm through understanding, not personality
Application Questions
· Where in your organization are you making decisions without understanding how the work is actually done?
· Which department or role do you depend on most but understand least?
· What hard job do you need to learn now so your next step up is smoother?
· Who keeps your operation stable, that rarely receives visible respect, and how do your decisions show that respect?
· If you were promoted tomorrow, what part of the business would you need to understand immediately to avoid leading by assumption?
