Hey Morris, my manager won’t respond to my messages on time. Often I have an important decision that needs to be made and it urgently needs her input but she takes a long time to get back, sometimes not at all, even when I repeat my request. This really stresses me out. I try to respond to her requests as soon as possible, but she hasn’t caught on to my speed, and it’s starting to bum me out because I feel like I’m not a priority. What can I do to get her to respond in a timely manner?
-Feeling Neglected
Hey Feeling Neglected,
I have to admit, I laughed when I read what you wrote because I think I could have been your manager. So I had to think why I was unresponsive to some people at times, and what would have gotten me to change?
To start with, I guess what classifies as important and urgent differ by individuals and by roles. Something that’s important to you may be of a lesser importance to your manager simply because her manager has assigned other higher priorities that you don’t know about; the same goes for urgent as well. When there’s a mismatch in responsiveness, often it’s due to a communications breakdown — namely, your manager hasn’t explained where your priorities rank on her list. And sometimes, she actually can’t share because she has been asked to work on something in confidence. Without that context, it’s easy for you to take the lack of response personally. However, continual reminders for her to respond makes you look like an attention seeking adult-child, which at some point may cause her to actually avoid you. Not a good outcome!
To get out of this mode, you will need to change the way you communicate. In the past, when I was really busy, there were 2 types of messages that I never ignored from my direct reports:
- Messages that offered something relevant
- Messages from trusted sources in the inner circle that consistently delivered on the previous point
Obviously, when you become a trusted source, the responsiveness won’t be an issue. But to become a trusted source requires you to become an expert at offering something relevant, which means… you need to stop thinking about your needs and start thinking about your manager’s needs.
The higher your manager is in the organization, the more responsibilities she has. Those responsibilities require her to make informed decisions and get most of it right, most of the time. To have gotten as far as she has, she must already have an efficient process for information gathering and decision-making. Her process influences what she looks for, who she listens to, and the maximum allowable time she gives herself before taking an action, including responding to or ignoring you.
To get into the inner circle, you must understand her process and find ways to provide something of value in a way that she understands. Einstein said that ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’ You don’t want to go insane, so you’ve got to change to get a different outcome.
A few simple things go a long ways. For example:
- If you’re using email to communicate, make the title meaningful — most busy people will scan the title of emails in the Inbox before deciding which ones to dive into
- Make sure your opening line is engaging in whatever channel you use — not in a ‘hey wassup?’ social media way, but in a ‘pushing the business forward’ way. For example, when forwarding a report, you can provide a one sentence summary at the top. When seeking approval on a decision, you can start with ‘I recommend we do …’ — in other words, push the important points upfront and be specific
- Make your message accurate, precise, and concise
- Use non-digital channels (like face to face, phone calls) to either prime that a message is coming or remind that a message has been sent, and be prepared to summarize your message in 30 seconds or less if she happens to ask you to quickly tell her what you need
The above may still not work simply because what you’re working on is simply too low on her priority list, in which case you need to change your strategy to have autonomy.
What this means is that you should seek approval to do your work without requiring explicit approvals from her most of the time. Schedule regular 1:1s that you’re both comfortable with and then do your thing, and do it well, so that your news about your accomplishments becomes welcomed messages to her and also moves you closer to the inner circle, and hopefully, with more high-priority responsibilities.
But most importantly, accept that the communications tempo between you and your manager is conducted by her, not you. So kvetching about her unresponsiveness will lead nowhere, except likely leading you out the door due to your own frustrations. But changing expectations and seeing things from her point of view will more likely get you the responsiveness you’re seeking.
In the meantime, to not feel bummed by all this, stop deriving validation of your importance to the company via her response rate; instead, focus on getting stuff done the best you can and let the validation come from (the recognition of) your accomplishments and the subsequent autonomy or higher-priority responsibilities that you get.
Is there something on your mind?
Please send it to questions@heymorris.com and I’ll do my best to be helpful in a future post.
Hey Morris 