When we are new to a role and trying to build our team members’ trust, we need to be responsive. We need to prove that we can manage everything given to us. Though over time we need to reduce the responsiveness to allow us to complete impactful work. Your manager and team members don’t expect you to be the best firefighter, they want to know you will not drop the ball. Making this transition will also reduce the frustration of regularly stopping what you are doing to address someone’s request.
There are potential negatives to responsiveness too. I have seen employees take advantage of a responsive coworker to reach their goals at the cost of the responsive coworker. Also, if you are too responsive the quality of your work may suffer either due to errors or a lack of proper problem solving which creates even more work for the team. In your attempt to respond to everything incoming immediately you are jumping between tasks and losing 30%-50% of your effectivity (you are getting less done).
As managers, we need to coach our team members to build that initial team trust and then reduce the responsiveness. We also need to put systems in place to reduce the need to respond immediately all of the time. There will still be cases that an immediate response is needed but this should be the exception.
As an employee, you need to be sure that you are developing that trust before you start reducing your responsiveness otherwise team members will regularly pester you to provide updates. If you have been in your role for a while and your manager or coworkers are regularly asking you to respond to something then you do not have that trust and this is a problem.
You cannot build a career solely by being responsive. Responsiveness is correlated with the time you have available and time is limited. Once you have developed the trust you need to start dialing back the responsiveness and dialing up the bigger responsibility.
Micromanaging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHrN5Mf5sgo