PASSIVE ACCESSIBILITY & LEADERSHIP
It should come as no surprise to you that accessibility is one of the things the people who look to you for leadership expect from you. A good way for you to get your arms around how important accessibility is to them is by thinking of how important it is to you.
For example, all of us rely on services like telephone, cable, internet and utilities. How important is it for you to have access to people in those companies when you lose—or have questions about—the services they provide? And what sort of feelings do you have when you experience problems or have questions and do not have access to someone who can help you? You expect to have access to them, and the people you lead expect to have access to you. That accessibility will generally take one of two forms: Passive or Active. Let’s begin with the more common.
Passive Accessibility
This is probably the more widely-practiced, and it often takes the form of an “open door policy”. Why do I refer to it as passive? Because the people behind those open doors—the people occupying the leadership positions—rely on others to initiate contact.
Open Door Policy for Dissatisfied Customers
It would be like a company telling all its customers that if they have problems with the products or services they’ve purchased they should feel free to bring them to the company’s attention – an organizational variation on the “open door policy”. So, you say, what’s wrong with that? I’m glad you asked. Study after study of consumer behavior has proven beyond any doubt that the overwhelming majority of dissatisfied customers will not initiate such contacts. The figure most often cited is 3%, so if a company has 100 dissatisfied customers, only 3 of them will bring their complaints or questions to that company’s attention. But that doesn’t mean that the other 97 will remain silent; they’ll tell plenty of other people.
Most Will Not Come Through Your Open Door
The same phenomenon applies inside organizations. If you occupy a leadership position, and if you rely on the people you lead to come into your office when they have something to say, or a question or a complaint, you’ll never hear many of them. But others will. There will always be chatter among members of an organization, and some of it will be divisive and damaging to morale and performance. If the people who occupy leadership positions in those organizations were more actively accessible, the employees who look to them for leadership might use more appropriate forums for addressing the issues they otherwise discuss “around the water cooler”.
The Costs of What You Don’t Hear
Passive accessibility also comes with a high opportunity cost. Effective leaders have long understood that members of their staffs are quite capable of participating productively in collaborative efforts to improve the processes and techniques that drive organizational success. The only way leaders can ever gain access to those ideas is through contact with their staff members People in leadership positions who are only passively accessible not only limit employees’ access to them, they limit their access to problems before they become crises and to ideas that could translate into better ways.
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