Key Leadership Practices: Prompt Responses and One-On-One Conversations

Our team members must feel appreciated and valued, and we, as leaders, have a responsibility to help them succeed. This is a challenge in today’s crazy busy world with information coming at us continually. Yet, it is our responsibility.

When we do not respond as promptly as possible to voice calls, emails, texts, and other messages, people take this as a sign of disrespect, that they and their work is not important in our eyes. In facilitating 360 leadership assessments, I regularly hear good people lament that their manager does not value them, that they have to follow up, often repeatedly.

Not good! Remember, happy employees do better work!

If we are in a meeting, or in a vitally important conversation, or doing work that must be completed ASAP, which would be understood, we must, repeat must, let the person who left the message know that we are not available at the moment and will respond first chance. This honors the person.

There is another and equally important responsibility we have as a leader – initiating regular check ins with our people, asking, e.g.,

• How are you doing?
• Do you have what you need?
• What are your challenges?
• How may I help?

Ideally, these check ins should be a one-on-one conversation, not an email. Stop by a person’s office or desk, or if a different location, pick up the phone.

Try to speak with each of our team members weekly if we can, and certainly every two weeks if not weekly. After all, our responsibility as a leader is to help our people learn, grow, and be successful. This is what the most effective and successful leaders do.

There are so many insightful questions we can ask our people, and we will gain a wealth of rich ideas, for example:

• How can we improve?
• What should be our priorities going forward?
• What are we missing that would help us be a more effective team?
• What advice do you have for me?
• What have I not asked and that you would like to share with me?

Realize the helpful ideas we will gain, which should certainly help improve our productivity and relationships, there is another very fundamental reason for our regular conversations with our people – we are letting them know we value them and their ideas.

Leadership is not about our being great our self, it is about our helping others be great. 

In his wonderful, insightful quick read, The 100/0 Principle: The Secret of Great Relationships, the author, Al Ritter, offers that a leader must develop and maintain constructive relationships with each of her/his team members – and that the only way to do that is with one-on-one conversations. We must make the time to do that, and they need to be two-way conversations. We listen more than we speak. Not just hear, truly listen to learn and understand. Reflect back what we have heard, and take notes, which shows our appreciation and respect.

Everyone wants to do a good job and be successful. Our mentoring, teaching, encouraging, and coaching should and can be a difference maker for our people – each and every one of them. Our priority must be that we treat everyone, each team member and as many other colleagues as we reasonably can, with respect and dignity, and that means having constructive, helpful conversations with each of them ideally on a regular basis.

Our team members are our internal clients!