There’s a manager I once worked with who was convinced his door was always open. He said it in every team meeting. He meant it. He genuinely believed it.
Three people on his team told me, separately, that they’d stopped bringing things to him six months earlier.
Not because he was cruel. Not because he’d said no to something important. Because every time they’d walked in, he looked up from his laptop with a half-second of visible irritation before catching himself, and that half-second had added up.
This is the gap that defines approachability. It’s not what you intend. It’s what the person walking toward you actually experiences in the first two seconds.
Approachability is a skill, not a personality
Most advice on this topic is about posture. Smile more. Uncross your arms. Make eye contact. Keep your tone warm.
None of that is wrong. It’s just surface. A manager can do all of it and still be the person nobody wants to interrupt.
What actually makes someone approachable at work isn’t warmth in the abstract. It’s the behaviour they default to in three specific moments and those moments have almost nothing to do with body language. They have to do with how you handle being pulled out of what you were doing.
💡 Pro Tip: There’s a simple test. When someone on your team says “do you have a minute?”, pay attention to the first thing you say back. If it’s “is it quick?” or “what’s up” said while still typing, you’ve already given them the answer. People read speed, tone, and attention before they read words.
That’s the real skill. Not friendliness the willingness to stop.
The three moments where approachability is actually built
Approachability gets decided in interruptions, disagreements, and bad news. Get these three right and the rest takes care of itself.
When someone interrupts you. Most managers handle this badly because they split their attention half on the person, half on the thing they were in the middle of. The person feels it instantly. A better instinct: turn your body, close the laptop (or close the doc), and give them the full thirty seconds it takes to understand what they actually need. If you genuinely can’t right now, say so cleanly. “Give me twenty minutes and I’m yours” is approachable. “Yeah, what is it” while still typing is not.
When someone disagrees with you. The test is whether your first reaction is curiosity or defence. Managers who get this wrong don’t realise they’re doing it they just start explaining their reasoning more thoroughly, which reads to the team as “I’ve already decided, I’m just waiting for you to catch up.” The behaviour that changes this is almost embarrassingly simple: ask one question before you respond. “What are you seeing that I’m not?” Then actually wait for the answer.
When someone brings you bad news. This is the one that matters most, and the one most managers fail silently. The wrong move is to immediately problem-solve or, worse, visibly deflate. Both teach the team that bringing you bad news has a cost. The right move is to thank them for telling you first, ask what they need, and save the problem-solving for after they’ve finished talking. Teams remember who stayed calm when they were the messenger.
These aren’t soft skills. They’re the specific behaviours that decide whether people keep coming to you or quietly stop.
The “but I’m genuinely busy” problem
Here’s the honest objection most articles on this topic skip past.
You’re a manager. You’re running a team, shipping work, managing a client, trying to think. You cannot drop everything every time someone walks up to your desk. Pretending otherwise is a fantasy that leads straight to burnout.
The answer isn’t to be available constantly. It’s to make unavailability feel respectful instead of dismissive.
Three things do most of the work. First, be honest about your focus time if you’re in a block, say so: “I’m head-down until 2, can this hold?” Most of the time, yes. Second, close the loop yourself: “come find me at 2, I’ll be free” is a promise people remember you kept. Third, give people a low-friction way to raise things that don’t need a live conversation.
That last one is where structure helps. Somewhere in how your team works, there needs to be a surface where someone can log a question, a concern, or a half-formed observation without needing to schedule time or catch you between meetings. A comment on a task. A shared doc they can flag. A canvas the team thinks in together. In Skarya, the comment thread on a task and a shared doc both exist for exactly this reason a place to say something that isn’t urgent enough to interrupt but matters enough to capture. When the live channel isn’t available, the async channel has to be.
Managers who only offer real-time access end up with teams who save things up until they explode. Managers who offer both end up with teams who tell them things earlier, when they’re still small.
Why this matters more than it looks
The cost of unapproachability isn’t dramatic. It’s slow. Small issues become big ones because nobody mentioned them in week two. The best people on the team stop flagging concerns because it’s easier not to. Clients hear about problems before you do. Turnover happens for reasons that never quite made it into an exit interview.
By the time a team “doesn’t bring things up anymore,” the manager has already lost more than they realise. They’ve lost the early-warning system that good teams run on. And they almost never connect it back to how they responded to an interruption eight months ago.
That’s the part worth sitting with. Approachability isn’t a feeling. It’s a compounding input into how much truth your team tells you and how early they tell it.
The shift
Approachability isn’t something you broadcast. It’s something people experience, one interaction at a time, and it’s almost never the manager who gets to decide whether they have it.
The only person who can tell you whether you’re approachable is the person standing in front of your desk, deciding whether to knock.
Pay attention to how they look when they do.
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