When You Don't Respond to Emails - Emerging Nurse Leader

By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN

One of my Millennial nurse leader students was upset because her Chief Nursing Officer had spoken to her about her lack of responsiveness on email. I don’t like email, she explained to me. I prefer to be texted. The challenge is that her organization uses email as their official communication mechanism so opting out is not really an option.

When nurse leaders don’t respond to their email or phone messages, it is frustrating for staff and colleagues. It conveys a message that this is not a priority for the leader and does not promote a positive work environment. It can also impact how you are perceived as a leader in a very negative way. Sometimes, leaders don’t respond to requests because they don’t want to answer negatively but in many respects no answer is far worse than a negative answer. It exacerbates conflict. Leadership expert, Margaret Hefferman, has noted that how responsive you are to email in today’s environment often defines your leadership. She also notes that the following are important to consider:

Your response time to email or phone message is a non-verbal cue about your leadership behavior. Research shows that the longer you take to respond, the more negatively you are viewed as a leader.
Replying to email or other messages is simple politeness; ignoring them suggests that you don’t care about the issue or the person who wrote to you. It’s virtually impossible to have good working relationships if your silence contains, or even hints at, contempt.
How you deal with requests or messages says something fundamental about how reliable you are. And that translates into trust.
Reputations are comprised of many such apparently minor details. It’s easy to think that they don’t matter and, individually, they might not. But cumulatively your daily behavior is what people notice and like or dislike, trust or distrust.
You can actually build an excellent reputation and even fame by just being responsive to requests from others.
Thinking that no response is the new no is in fact passive aggressive and rude. Most people can handle rejection far better than not knowing.

Nurse leaders should make responsiveness to messages and requests a priority even when it is not your own preferred way of communicating. Recognize that response time says volumes about your character. As I explained to my student, she is sending some very powerful non-verbal messages about her leadership by ignoring an official channel of communication in her organization. If you are busy, just acknowledge the email and let them know you will get back to them. If you miss an email, apologize and acknowledge it. Improving your email and phone etiquette will improve your leadership reputation in ways that you might not anticipate.

Read to Lead

Hefferman, M. (May 20th, 2013 CBS Money Watch Blog). How do leaders respond to email? Available at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-do-leaders-respond-to-email/