Leading with the Respect People Deserve

I have worked in technology and led people for many years. I've been at banks and large traditional companies, where structure is solid and process carries weight. I've been at companies that move at extreme speed, like iFood, where pace is the rule and the market waits for no one. Today I have the privilege of working at Familhão, a high-impact company, where I lead 53 people across back-end, front-end and mobile.

Everywhere I went, I learned the same lesson in different ways: technology is a pillar, but it is a tool. It exists to solve problems. The ones who solve the problems, who decide which problems are worth solving, and who keep the solution running when it breaks at three in the morning are people.

The people pillar is what truly moves an entire organization. Without people, we build absolutely nothing.

This essay is about one word that, in my experience, explains more results than any framework: respect.

It's not a cliché. It's the most technical problem there is

"People first" has become a slogan on office walls. That's why so many of us roll our eyes when we hear it. But let me be clear: it is not a cliché. It is something software engineering itself has been saying for almost 40 years.

In 1987, Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister published Peopleware, one of the most cited books in our field. Its central argument is uncomfortable for those of us who love technology: the major problems of our work are not technological, they are sociological. Projects rarely fail because of the language someone picked. They fail because of poor communication, misaligned expectations, exhausted people, and people who stopped caring.

More recent evidence points the same way:

• Google's Project Aristotle (2015). Google studied hundreds of teams to understand what made a team effective. The conclusion: who is on the team matters less than how the team works together. The number one factor was psychological safety.
• DORA and Accelerate (Forsgren, Humble and Kim, 2018). Years of research with thousands of practitioners showed that organizational culture predicts software delivery performance. Generative cultures, in Ron Westrum's model, outperform bureaucratic and power-oriented ones.
• Gallup. Gallup's research on management points to the direct manager as the factor that explains most of the variance in team engagement. People don't engage with a company in the abstract. They engage with the person who leads them every day.

In other words: caring for people is not the "soft" side of engineering. It is the variable that weighs most on the outcome.

Architecture changes. People remain

I've worked with giant monoliths, with service-oriented architectures in many languages, with migrations that seemed to have no end. Now we live in the age of AI, with assistants that write code, review pull requests and speed up delivery.

All of that matters. But none of those choices holds up on its own.

In 1968, Melvin Conway observed that systems end up mirroring the communication structure of the organizations that build them. Conway's Law is a powerful reminder: your architecture is a portrait of your relationships. Teams that don't talk produce services that don't integrate. Teams that are afraid produce defensive systems, full of patches nobody had the courage to question.

Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais took this further in Team Topologies (2019), putting people's cognitive load at the center of organizational design. An overloaded team without clear boundaries can't truly own anything.

AI makes this even more visible. When a machine generates code in seconds, the differentiator becomes what only people do well: judgment, business context, the courage to say "this isn't right," and accountability for what goes to production. A powerful tool in the hands of a team that doesn't feel safe to push back just produces mistakes faster.

Technology is the means. People are the system that makes the means work.

Five pillars of respect in engineering

Respect is not about being nice. It is a set of concrete practices that, when missing, no elegant architecture can make up for. Over my career, I've arrived at five.

1. Knowing what drives each person

In Drive (2009), Daniel Pink sums up motivation in knowledge work as three forces: autonomy, mastery and purpose. But the mix changes from person to person. One engineer wants to go deep into architecture. Another wants to lead people. Another needs stability because she is caring for someone at home.

Respecting individuality starts with asking, listening and remembering. A 1:1 that only covers task status is a check-in meeting, not a conversation about the person.

2. Frequent, honest, caring feedback

In Radical Candor (2017), Kim Scott describes good feedback as the combination of two axes: caring personally and challenging directly. Managers who only care end up hiding problems. Managers who only challenge become aggressive. Respect means doing both at once.

Nobody deserves to learn in an annual review something they could have heard in a conversation six months earlier.

3. Psychological safety

Harvard professor Amy Edmondson defined psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. In The Fearless Organization (2018), she shows that safe teams don't make fewer mistakes; they talk about them more, and so they learn faster.

In engineering, this translates directly: blameless postmortems, questions asked in the open without embarrassment, a junior engineer free to say they didn't understand the architecture diagram.

4. Clear roles and responsibilities

Ambiguity is a quiet form of disrespect. When nobody knows who decides, people spend energy on politics instead of product. Camille Fournier in The Manager's Path (2017) and Will Larson in An Elegant Puzzle (2019) make the same point: clarity of scope, expectations and growth criteria is part of a manager's job, not an HR detail.

Brené Brown captures it in Dare to Lead (2018) with an idea I live by: clear is kind.

5. Managers who set boundaries

Respect is also about limits. It's the manager who shields the team from requests that arrive with no priority. Who says no to an impossible deadline before it turns into chronic overtime. Who makes clear what behavior is acceptable and what isn't.

In Resilient Management (2019), Lara Hogan reminds us that a manager's role includes creating structure so the team doesn't have to guess where the edges are. Without boundaries, kindness becomes neglect.

Careers that fit each season of life

One of the things I enjoy most as a leader is shaping each person's career around the season of life they're in.

A career is not a straight ladder. Some people are coming back from parental leave. Some are finishing a degree at night. Some want to accelerate toward Staff, and some, for a while, just need predictability. Holding everyone to the same yardstick looks fair, but it isn't. Fairness is giving each person what they need to grow sustainably.

In practice, that means:

• Career conversations kept separate from delivery conversations.
• Development plans the person helps write, not just receives.
• Technical and management tracks valued equally, so nobody has to become a manager just to grow.
• Real flexibility when life gets hard, without it turning into a mark against them in reviews.

When people feel that the company respects the stage of life they're in, they give it back in loyalty, in quality, and in wanting to stay.

Difficult conversations in safe spaces

There's a myth that respectful leadership avoids conflict. It's the opposite. If you respect someone, you have the hard conversation; if you don't, you let them fail alone until it's too late.

Crucial Conversations (Patterson, Grenny, McMillan and Switzler) shows that the conversations that matter most are the ones with high stakes, opposing opinions and strong emotions. The secret isn't softening the message. It's keeping the space safe enough for the message to be heard.

In my own difficult conversations, I try to follow a few principles:

1. Separate the person from the behavior. I talk about what I observed, not about labels.
2. Start with intent. I make it clear I'm there because I want the person to grow.
3. Listen before concluding. A delivery problem is often a life problem, a context problem, or a poorly defined role.
4. Leave with an agreement. A hard conversation with no next step is just discomfort.
5. Come back to it. Following up shows the conversation was serious, and so was the care.

The goal of a difficult conversation is not to win. It's to find, together, a better challenge.

What NPS taught me

In the most recent evaluation at my company, I had the great pleasure of receiving an excellent NPS from my team. I don't share this out of vanity. I share it because, when I looked at the result, the explanation fit in one word: respect.

It wasn't a benefits program or a team offsite. It was hundreds of small, everyday decisions:

• The 1:1 that wasn't canceled during crisis week.
• The feedback given at the right time, in private.
• The deadline renegotiated before it turned into late nights.
• The question "how are you?" asked while actually waiting for the answer.
• The public recognition for whoever held the line during the incident.

Respect seems intangible, but it leaves measurable traces: engagement, retention, delivery quality and the confidence to innovate. NPS was just the thermometer. What it measured was trust built over months.

Engineering with Purpose

For me, leading with respect is a joy. Loving what you do, loving people and taking a real interest in their problems is what lets me see value in every piece of software I ship, every MVP, every feature.

Because behind systems, migrations and results there is something no dashboard fully captures: the pleasure of working alongside people, learning, and leading them with respect. Listening. Having hard conversations in safe spaces. Looking for the next challenge together.

That is what I call Engineering with Purpose.

Technology will keep changing. Today it's AI; tomorrow it will be something else. What doesn't change is that every system is built by people, for people. And that's why I believe people deserve to be led with respect.