Responsiveness is the degree in which you get back to colleagues and foster progress.Your colleagues also do not have a lot of time. Their world is as frenetic as yours. When your colleagues do reach you, they need your help in order to keep moving forward.

Have you been labeled as unresponsive? Do your colleagues use the phrases “black hole,” “bottomless pit” or “it’s like pulling teeth” when describing you? Your colleagues are reaching out to you for a reason. Most of the time, your colleagues are contacting you to obtain something from you (i.e., information, an opinion) in order to make progress on whatever is important to them. Some colleagues may be reaching out just to say “hello,” yet even those colleagues are looking for something – opportunities to build a professional relationship with you. If you have been labeled as a black hole, you are injuring your visibility in two ways –

– Your unresponsiveness impacts negatively on the progress of others.
– Your unresponsiveness impacts the desire for others to reach out to you in the future.

These behaviors are visibility decelerators – your unresponsiveness creates frustration and damages relationships. You become an obstructionist of individual and organizational progress.

In the Raise Your Visibility model, the third visibility accelerator is responsiveness. Responsiveness is defined as is the degree in which you get back to colleagues and foster progress. It is the other side of the revolving door for the second visibility accelerator – accessibility.

Do any of the following characteristics seem familiar to you when you think about being responsive to others?

– You never return phone calls or respond to your email.

– You have to be caught “live” in your office or on the phone in order for your colleague to connect with you.

– You don’t recognize (and in some cases, don’t care) that you are unresponsive.

– When you do get back to your colleagues, you mask your behavior with self-effacing humor or by overusing happy face emoticons? For example “I totally forgot to get back to you on this! Another topic for me and my therapist …! Anyway, still working on it…”

Being responsive is not about always getting back to everyone instantly. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, “You can get back to some of your colleagues all of the time, and all of your colleagues some of the time, but you cannot get back to all of your colleagues all of the time.”