Poor management causes damage to everyone including clients, staff, creditors, and shareholders and reduces the pie which leads to everyone fighting for a bigger slice of the pie.
Good management of staff and clients increases the pie for everyone. However, everyone thinks they can manage. This is not true when one looks at the statistics of businesses that fail.
Everyone has an opinion about what good management is. Your statistics will tell you whether you are managing well or poorly. Are your statistics trending up or are they trending down?
Are you retaining staff or are you losing them? People leave their managers; they don’t leave companies. Are you getting clients referring you to their friends?
One important area of management is how responsive you are to your clients and staff.
As the leader of your team, you determine the level of responsiveness by your own behaviour.
If you are slow, your team will emulate you. This is the one area that defines your effectiveness and whether you are managing well or poorly.
At Chan & Naylor, we have the policy to handle emails and phone messages which is as follows:
- Respond on the same day you receive the email/phone message but at the latest the next morning but no later than that.
- If you are unable to respond in that time period ask an assistant to call the client to find out if they can help otherwise let them know when you can respond.
Why?
Because it shows we care.
However, let’s see how some of the greatest leaders of the world who run massive businesses respond to their emails:
Most impressive is Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, who responds straight away to email.
“Most of the best and busiest people we know act quickly on their emails, not just to us or to a select few senders, but to everyone,” he said in his book How Google Works.
Schmidt adds that being responsive establishes a positive communication loop “Response is important even if the answer is a simple ‘got it’,”
“There are people who can be relied upon to respond promptly to emails, and those who can’t, strive to be one of the former,” he said.