A Leader’s Response…

It can be frustrating enough when we hear “I’ll get back to you on that” from a friend or family member who we know likely won’t follow through, but how much more frustrating is it when it happens with someone in a leadership role?

Let’s be honest, we hold the folks in leadership positions to a higher standard - or at least we should! It’s one thing for my childhood friend to continually drop the ball on responding but it’s a whole different ball of wax when it’s someone we report to or someone who has accepted responsibility for providing us with some type of service, even if that service is in the form direction and guidance with how we do our job.

Cindy and I do a fair amount of work with teams that provide different types of services through their business model, rather than physical products. When we work with them, I always make the case that while they may not have positional authority with their customers and clients, they absolutely have a level of leadership (that comes with influence) with each individual or business they serve. We recently heard an example of how much responsiveness matters in cases like this where the individual providing the service thought everything was in good standing but hadn’t been in communication with the customer for a few weeks. That customer apparently felt like they were left hanging and found someone else to provide the same service. By the time the service provider contacted the customer to finalize the transaction they had been working on, that customer had closed a deal elsewhere. The business certainly lost revenue in that specific transaction but I’m guessing the lifetime value of that particular customer would have been far more than that single transaction…

So how does that translate to a scenario where we report to the person who isn’t responsive? In the nearly twenty years I worked in a manufacturing facility, I never had direct supervisory responsibility over anyone. I did, however, go out of my way on a routine basis to respond to and to support the majority of the folks I interacted with on a daily basis. Be it good or bad, that often resulted in a whole bunch of folks bypassing their supervisors altogether and coming straight to me when they had an issue. While I appreciated the trust and respect they showed me through doing that, it was often at times where I was already juggling more than I could handle… And although I didn’t have positional authority to force many people to follow my instructions, I rarely had trouble getting support from anyone when I asked for it!

With those two very different examples in mind, why do you think responsiveness is so important in leadership? And what message are we really sending someone on our team if we’re not responding at all? I believe that whether it’s our intention or not, we’re making a statement as to how much (or how little) value we place on the individual. Knowing that showing we don’t value someone on our team is rarely the goal, I believe there are some simple things we can do to avoid that - so that’s where we’ll pick up next time…