In “Answering the Cry for Help,” chapter twelve of What’s KILLING Your Profitability? (It ALL Boils Down to Leadership!), I cited an article I found from Forbes.com called “Good Leaders Are Invaluable to a Company, Bad Leaders Will Destroy It” by sharing, “Corporate culture becomes a meaningless term where leaders claim it exists while employees shake their heads in frustration.” Shortly after that in the same chapter, I shared something from “The Impact of Positive Leadership” by Tom Rath on Gallup.com saying that “Positive leaders don’t sit back and wait for things to get better on their own.”
Cindy and I recently had a conversation with a mid-level manager in a large organization who contacted us to provide training for the supervisors and managers at his facility. As we talked with him, he alluded (but didn’t directly quote) that first statement I shared above about corporate culture being a meaningless term in explaining that many of the folks we’d be working with had been through a session on their corporate values but were not able to connect it with the behaviors they saw from the executive team. As concerning as that is, this isn’t even close to the first organization we’ve worked with where we’ve been told about a disconnect between the values written in the handbook or on the wall in the main lobby and what the folks with leadership responsibility display daily! And in one specific case, the written value defined a maximum of how much time could pass before any team member responded to someone; internally or externally. Unfortunately, the executive team in that organization had developed a reputation for responding very slowly – if at all – to their direct reports.
Since this column is focused on how communication impacts our personal relationships, I won’t continue down that path. I will however challenge you to consider the cost of not responding, or just responding slowly, to the folks we care about; our family and friends. Before I go on, I need to be clear in saying, “but I’ve been really busy” is a BS excuse. In my now close to fifty years on this ball of mud, I have yet to see anyone who doesn’t MAKE time for whatever is important to them. If I tell you I was too busy to respond in a timely manner, I’m really saying you weren’t important enough for my time…
Now let’s think about the second statement I shared above, “Positive leaders don’t sit back and wait for things to get better on their own.” For nearly a year, Cindy and I dealt with intermittent issues from our business email server where messages were not delivered, and we received no notification. After a time or two when some of our most responsive clients hadn’t replied, we followed up with a text or phone call to make sure they had received the email – and they had not! One of our biggest concerns through that was that someone wouldn’t receive a reply we had sent them and get the impression we didn’t value them.
With all that in mind, I want you to think about how you feel when you don’t hear back from someone you’ve contacted. (I shared some statistics on acceptable response times for text messages, emails, and voicemails in a recent lesson I shared with a group; it’s apparently a big issue…) For me, routinely not hearing back from someone sends a very loud message. What I’ve realized is that this isn’t always the message they’ve intended to send. I’ve shared before that Fred Dove has often told me that I’ll get more patient as I get older, but only one of those things has happened, so I won’t ask you to be more patient with those who don’t respond. What I will ask you to do is to take on more of that responsibility of positive leader and “don’t sit back and wait for things to get better on their own.” If we want strong relationships with our friends and family, even the ones who aren’t timely in their replies, we can be more intentional in initiating communication. We can also address it directly, but we need to be sure to do it with a balance of candor and care!
