Timely Responsiveness in Leadership - Emerging Nurse Leader

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

Young leaders often ask me how they can stand out from the crowd and move their career forward in leadership. My advice is to be timely in responsiveness to requests and accountable with follow through. These qualities will make you stand out because they are not the norm. A recurring complaint that I hear from nurses is that their manager is not timely in responding to questions or requests. This is a significant problem. We are all very busy. But some leaders are very slow to respond to requests (voice mail, email, text or in person) from team members and other colleagues, which is frustrating and not fair.

This behavior can lead staff and colleagues to believe that they are not valued and their requests are not important. It can also impact how you are perceived as a leader in a very negative way. As leaders, we are responsible for helping our staff and peers. We need to prioritize responding to our team members and other colleagues. Our promptness enables them to better work, including serving our patients. It also sets the bar for what we expect from our staff in terms of customer service.

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. f you are busy, just acknowledge the message or email and let them know you will get back to them. If you miss a request, apologize and acknowledge it. Improving your email and phone etiquette will improve your leadership reputation in ways that you might not anticipate.

Read Rose Sherman’s new book available now – The Nurse Leader Coach: Become the Boss No One Wants to Leave

Read to Lead

Hefferman, M. (May 20th, 2013 CBS Money Watch Blog). How do leaders respond to email?