Michael Hyatt's post on responsiveness definitely struck a chord with me and I encourage all of you who are chasing success in your respective industries to have a read.

I have always strived to the utmost to be generally responsive in most matters as a matter of practice although I still know I have room for improvement.  I have had the pleasure and displeasure of working with people on both ends of the responsiveness spectrum.  The people who were the most responsive were obviously great to work with and people that I would recommend for any team.  I switched teams midway through one of my previous jobs and went from working with someone who oftentimes was unavailable or relatively unresponsive to working with someone who would try his best to respond to my questions immediately.  I don't even normally expect immediacy from people, but it was definitely a noticeable difference and I understood why he had gone much further in the company than my previous contact.

At another job, I had the misfortune of having an IT contact who was labelled (literally) as a "black hole" by pretty much everyone in the company.  This person took nearly 2 weeks just to set my office up with a phone, and in 2 months time was unable to even accomplish simple things like procuring a dual monitor cable.  Repeated follow-ups were given the response of "I'm looking into it", but really, after 60 days there's no excuse for something like that.  I found out later that he wasn't very well respected at the company, period; at this point he would need at least a year or two of solid behavior to build up a reputation to the point where people could actually trust him to accomplish anything significant.

In contrast, I have worked with some IT people, managers, team leads, and co-workers that are nothing short of amazing when it comes to  their responsiveness; it's small wonder that they've gone far in earning the respect and admiration of their peers and co-workers.  Responsiveness builds trust.  In a manager-team member relationship or a business-client relationship there are few things that are appreciated more.  It really is just common sense advice but I am always surprised at just how many people seem to be completely unaware of it.