Great leaders are not always born that way.

Unfortunately, many management training programs don’t sufficiently emphasize leadership development, but instead focus on fundamentals and the day-to-day tasks that confront managers within the organization.

If you’re currently a manager or about to become one, you need to think about more than accomplishing tasks if you want to become a true leader.

As writer Kerri Harris points out in Fundamentals of Leadership: Communicating a Vision:

“Experts have long studied the subtle differences between general management, leadership, and truly great leaders. Thomas Cronin, author of, Thinking About Leadership observes, ‘Managers do things the right way, while leaders are more concerned with doing the right thing.’ “

Harris goes on to say:

“There are recognizable characteristics in great leaders and simple strategies anyone can adopt to improve employee performance and change the work environment for the better.”

Harris’ article takes a look at how having vision and then communicating it is the foundation of leadership and contributes to the makeup of a truly great leader.

What are some of the characteristics of true leaders that set them apart from other managers? We’d love to hear your thoughts!

Continue reading Fundamentals of Leadership: Communicating a Vision

Like any profession, becoming a technical writer requires a mastery of a certain set of skills. This skill set used to involve primarily writing and illustration skills, as large manuals for print publication were the standard in the profession.

The worlds of communications and technology have evolved dramatically in the latter part of the 20th century and the early part of this century. How has that evolution affected the skill set required for a technical writer?

Continue reading Which Skill Sets are Important in Hiring Technical Writers

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What skills do you feel are important for today’s technical communications professional? Leave a comment!

Being asked to take the reins of a brand new documentation department is a challenge that many professional technical writers relish, even though the training and development activities they participated in may never have prepared them for such a rewarding challenge. This article looks at forming a new documentation department, team or group and determining what’s needed, when it’s needed and what resources are available to help the new group carry out its mission.

Five Questions to Ask Yourself While Creating a New Documentation Department

by Eric Butow

Congratulations! You’re the manager of your company’s emerging documentation department — and your work has just begun. To create effective documentation for your customers, you not only have to build a sound team, but also build working relationships with all other departments in your company.

In my contracting travels, I’ve set up two new documentation departments in two very different settings. My first was a documentation department for a startup networking software company in 1999. The company’s only previous documentation was a slim manual written by a programmer.

In 2004, I helped set up a new documentation department at the financial aid division for a major bank. Over the years, this division had been passed along to different parent banks — the newest of which was shocked to find that no one had written documentation about financial-aid processes, and no documentation about the software they had used during the division’s last 20 years! As a result, the new parent organization decided that relying on the institutional memories of its employees was a major risk, so the documentation department was born.

When you create your own documentation department, you should ask yourself five simple questions that will help your new department show its value to the company as quickly as possible. These questions are similar to those that a good reporter must answer when documenting a story — who, what, where, why, and how? — and they are as important for a documentation department manager as they are for an ace journalist.

The questions are:

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by Steve Capri

So you’ve given it a lot of painstaking thought. It’s decided. It’s time. Time to move into management. After all, you’ve worked hard to get where you are. You’ve paid your dues working through the various levels of technical-writing jobs, and survived all the promotional requirements to get through each position, and so on. As a senior-level professional, you’re at a crossroads. How do you prepare and are you absolutely sure you want to make this transition?

Clearly, not everyone is cut out for management. For some, the thought of being responsible for more than one’s own work is unheard of….sometimes even frightening. For others, management is a logical stepping stone into an entirely new career.

This article is a collage of ideas and experiences from some people who’ve made the leap from writer to manager. Although it’s not a step-by-step guideline, it provides some compelling insight as to what individuals might expect as they transition into the management ranks. Even if you are an experienced manager, you might find these ideas helpful.

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by Robert King

When you first ventured into the tech writing ranks, marketing the department was likely the furthest thing from your mind. You already had work to do, so marketing was somebody else’s job.

But now that you’re in a position where you are reading newsletters like TechCom Manager , you probably have some concern about marketing. You might even need to be a tech comm marketer to ensure your documentation department survives. To have internal and external customers solicit your services is not always a given, even within the same corporation. At the company where I am Tech Comm Manager, we have a decidedly free-market economy, where the business units can either use our services to provide manuals to their end customers or not. Consequently, marketing our department is actually in my position description. How we market our services to our internal and external customers is the focus of this article.
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by Christy Simard

At first glance, technical communication (techcom) and technical marketing communication (marcom) appear to be very different genres. Where traditional techcom strives to help people use products, marcom seeks to make people realize they need products. Techcom instructs, while marcom persuades, and this distinction affects everything from the genre’s focus, to its content, and medium.

On the other hand, when executed well, these two genres share important similarities. They both deal with technical, complex subject matter. They both pay close attention to their target audiences, and they both benefit from a concise, accessible writing style.

Given these similarities, it makes sense that many organizations get technical communicators involved in marketing work. But what are you getting into when the marketing department looks to your techcom team for help? And what do you do when a writer on your team expresses an interest in marcom?

In reality, it can be tricky to distinguish the opportunities from the risks. This article examines two challenging situations for techcom managers, pointing to the risks you are likely to face and the opportunities you might realize.

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By Kerri Harris

Effective communication is a manager’s greatest tool in rallying groups toward a common cause. From the annual department address to daily email, careful audience consideration is vital in determining how accurately audiences receive messages. Even the most engaging statements lose meaning when barriers to effective communication foster misconception and confusion.

While many managers typically hold listeners solely responsible for how they receive or interpret information, true leaders are more cognizant about potential communication barriers. As a result, leaders often question their assumptions about the “right” way to communicate and strive to better understand the ways their subordinates interact with one another.

For many years, scholars have studied barriers to effective communication based in simplified terms, putting culture and gender among the greatest inhibitors. While no individual is bound to set generalizations, specific characteristics can impact personal interaction and business objectives.

Through this article we’ll examine:

• Global Communication Barriers
• Gender Communication Barriers
• Tools for Managers to Overcome Barriers

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by Kerri Harris

Today’s business climate of outsourcing, in-sourcing, virtual teams, and ROI-driven objectives can leave a manager at any level feeling powerless. Yet, we often see examples of those who can elicit unwavering support from their teams, driving highly effective projects, and getting the best performance from employees despite ever-increasing workloads. What is it about these individuals that makes them stand out as great leaders? Generally, the answer is the difference between a strict management model and one that includes basic principals of leadership. There are recognizable characteristics in great leaders and simple strategies anyone can adopt to improve employee performance and change the work environment for the better.

Experts have long studied the subtle differences between general management, leadership, and truly great leaders. Thomas Cronin, author of, “ Thinking About Leadership ” observes, “Managers do things the right way , while leaders are more concerned with doing the right thing. ” A focus on managing projects and deadlines leaves little room for leadership activities, but it can be done in a step-by-step approach beginning with awareness and a little common sense.

The remainder of this article addresses the following areas:

• Personal Evaluation
• Creating a Shared Vision
• The Collaborative Process
• Communicating the Vision

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by Aparna Datta

With our economy still on the down slope, it is difficult for technical managers to justify keeping an excessive amount of technical writers on their staffs, let alone hiring new ones. In many cases, managers feel they don’t even need writers, arguing that everyone has writing ability. Of course, today’s technical writers not only write, they also perform many other tasks: programming, web development, training, and so on. Add to that the fact that many are also highly trained and certified in other areas besides writing.

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by Karen O’Keefe

The technical communications profession involves a unique mix of technical and communication skills, which is not easy to find. Most managers have had the experience of interviewing and subsequently hiring a candidate who later turns out not to be the right person for the job. This situation begs the question of how to identify which candidate is a good fit for a given position. The answer is that there are five key activities that make the difference between a successful hiring decision and a not-so-successful one. We have all been on both sides of the interview, and this article will attempt to make you, the interviewer, more successful.

This article covers five key activities, including:

• Writing a Detailed Job Description
• Making Sure the Setting/Environment is Conducive
• Conducting a Programmed Interview
• Using Multiple Interviewers
• Considering Testing

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