Management
As a documentation team manager, getting visibility for your team within the organization can be a challenge. Technical writers and doc teams aren’t generally seen as profit centers, so they are often relegated to second-class status.
Whether your documentation group is a solo technical writer or a team of 12, poor internal visibility for your group can mean it gets overlooked when promotions, bonuses and other company perks are handed out. It can also mean that team members may be more susceptible to staffing cutbacks.
This article by Whitney Potsus discusses ways you can get your documentation group some visibility. It contains a number of tips along with some good resources to get you on the right track.
Read: Raising Your Documentation Team’s Visibility
More from Whitney Potsus
The Life of a Lone Writer
Are You Dealing with Professional Burnout?
Editor’s Note: This was the feature article in this month’s TechCom Manager newsletter, reprinted here with permission. Click the previous link to subscribe to the newsletter.
Val Swisher
If your company is like most these days, you have been tasked with creating more (and more) content with fewer (and fewer) people. In the never-ending quest to cut expenses, many companies have laid-off content developers. At the same time, in the quest to drive revenue, companies are shipping more products, in more languages, and at a more rapid pace. That begs the question, “How do you get more out of the same resources when you create content?” Resources are both the people who create and edit the content, and the content itself. When it comes to increasing operational efficiency, companies can do several things to enhance their content output without adding more resources.
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Technical writers, as a group, communicate extremely well. They’re also used to working with diverse groups and negotiating to achieve their objectives to keep everyone satisfied and projects on schedule. So, it would seem, technical communicators such as technical writers would make very good managerial candidates.
However, as is often obvious only after the fact, not everyone is suited for management. Some perform better as individual contributors while others are great mentors. In fact, most organizations don’t really consider the difference between (more…)
The difference between a new team member and a seasoned team member is easy to see. One has energy and one does not.
Why is this? For many teams, it’s not a matter of the job situation, but rather it’s a lack of motivation. This is no one’s fault necessarily. Motivation is something that waxes and wanes, though you want to find ways to keep it high if you want productivity and creativity to be consistent.
1. Answering the Why
Though it might seem as though people should do the work they do because they should, this isn’t as simple as it sounds. Your team members might have days when they feel what they do isn’t important or that it doesn’t make a difference. You need to show them that it does.
When you can show your team that the things they do add up to real-life impact, they will see that their continued energy and motivation is for a good cause.
2. Recognition for a Job Well Done
Rewards and other forms of recognition are also going to help your team see that you are noticing their hard work and that their efforts aren’t going unnoticed. It might be a good idea to offer rewards after particularly hard projects, as well as recognition in team email or meetings when it is deserved.
Pointing out that one person did a particularly good job often has the effect of causing others to try to meet that standard as well.
3. Work as a True Team
Though it might seem easier to just assign tasks to your team and allow them to go about their day self-motivating, it’s actually a better idea to encourage your team to work together. When the team is interacting, they can creatively problem solve as well as spend their time finding ways to work as efficiently as possible. The team will work harder because they know they’re not the only person that matters. They have a team depending on them too.
Productivity has almost become a buzzword these days, but it still should be a priority. With the proper motivation in your office, you can increase the speed of the work to be done and have a team that’s willing to do it, even when they don’t want to.
If you manage a team, what techniques do you find particularly helpful in motivating them? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Please leave a comment.
Related topics
Fundamentals of Leadership: Communicating a Vision
Making the Transition from Technical Writer to Manager
Wearer of Many Hats: One Management Style Does Not Fit All
A Reduction-In-Force (RIF) or layoff is usually seen as the easiest, fastest way to cut costs as companies trade immediate, short-term gains for long-term growth and performance.
But the downside is that the negative effects on the company can be wide-spread and lasting. Yet, it seems, layoffs are the first things management considers, especially in a down economy. More and more companies have followed the crowd in believing this policy just makes good business sense. But, as Kerri Barber points out in Common Myths and Misconceptions About Layoffs, year after year, hard data and analysis disprove that theory.
While Kerri wrote the article quite some time ago, it’s a useful piece of information even today as the economy is hanging out in a trough of sorts. She not only methodically goes about debunking these myths, but offers some good employer alternatives to layoffs that deserve serious consideration.
In the article, Barber looks at three of the most common myths companies hold about layoffs:
- Layoffs are necessary to cut costs.
- Reducing costs through restructuring and downsizing results in higher stock prices.
- Layoffs help streamline the workforce, weeding out the poor performers and creating a more efficient employee base.
After you’ve read the article you’re likely to agree with her conclusion: “Successful leadership will be defined by those decisions made for the benefit of the company to preserve short- and long-term goals, not jeopardize them for the benefit of a few individuals at the top.”
What are your thoughts on layoffs or RIFs and how do you think employers can work to avoid them? We’d love to hear from you. Please leave a comment.
Read Common Myths and Misconceptions About Layoffs
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
More Articles on Technical Writers
Considerations for Hiring Technical Writers
How Technical Writers Add Value to Your Team
Need Technical Writing Services?. Just contact us and we’ll take it from there!
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:
Read the full article
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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