Lessons in Leadership: How’s My Response Time?

 In leadership

There are many Facebook updates that have left me frustrated over the years. I remember the day there was a massive system upgrade and suddenly everything changed. Even just this past month there was suddenly the option to add flowers to a status? Like, for all those times you’ve read someone’s status and thought, “Man, I just want to give this status a flower” I guess? There have been updates, however, that I’ve loved. One such feature is the small, green-lettered highlight at the top of a company’s page that always you to see how fast and responsive they are to messages.

I love this feature because it allows me to see what kind of company I’m dealing with before I even contemplate doing business with them. It speaks well of a business when I see a green line of text reading “Very responsive to messages.” It gives me a sense of comfort that I’ll be taken care of by that particular group. The truth is that if I were to come across a page that listed an incredibly unresponsive interaction time it’s very unlikely that I’d do business with them.

In leadership, we all have our own, unpublished, non-tangible “pages” that display our response times. How quick are you to respond when someone calls you for help? How long does it take you to return a text, Facebook message, or email? Can people count on you for a good response time when they need you most?

Let’s try to live like we are wearing the stamp of our response time for all to see. We need to remember that, while someone’s pressing issue may be just one of many that we are being called upon to answer, to that person, that issue is everything. We can’t do it all and we can’t be in multiple places at once. We can, however, remember to treat those we lead as a priority. Let’s make those around us feel valued by giving them one of our greatest resources: our time.

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