Recently, while renegotiatiing a contract, the customer was nickel-and-diming me over the price of one of the writers who had done a miraculous job for them under impossible deadlines. While they were busy negotiating, I had to take the writer off the job for 3 days, and put someone cheaper into the position. Oh, did I mention this was 5 days before the deadline of a 3-month contract?

Yes, that's right. I had to put in someone who didn't know the product, didn't know the people, and was an inferior writer, because they insisted on a lower price – the week of the deadline. Needless to say, by the third day they were begging for the original writer. But guess what? The day after the deadline they were back arguing about the price and number of hours needed for the next job.

The writer just laughed and told me an even better story from a former employer. The company had registered her and another person to a 2-day seminar in San Diego. They were not going to be able to return her to Israel before the Sabbath because Wednesday night in San Diego is halfway through Thursday in Israel. For an entire week, 5 VPs and C-level managers were arguing about whether they would pay her per-diem for the Friday and Saturday she would have to stay over. She wasn't even asking for a hotel; she wanted to stay with friends. After a week of arguing over $80 in per-diem, they decided to cancel her participation in the conference, which they had decided was critical for lead generation, and just send the other person who agreed to travel on the weekend. The clincher? The airline ticket would have been $500 cheaper if she stayed over the Saturday. So 10 e-mails between 5 VPs for 1 week where they unanimously agreed that saving $400 was a bad idea.

WHAT?

If you have been reading this blog without knowing I’m in Israel, then apologies that this post might seem political. I’m not sure how I can avoid being political right now though, since I can’t work today. Schools are closed due to rocket and missile fire on southern Israel where I live and where Tech-Tav’s service office is located.

So Karen and I will be in and out of the office today, and our kids are suffering from some siren and missile anxiety.

Yesterday, thinking things were calming down and knowing that kids were still in school and would be escorted into a shelter if anything happened, I kept a meeting at a potential customer that is further north. While I was out, there were two more missile attacks near my home and the kids were ushered into safe rooms in an unbelievably organized fashion.

Thank you to the work of Israel’s Home Front Command for working so hard to keep our kids safe!

While all of that was going on, I was meeting with a customer who – for the first time in my 20+ years of sales – offered the normal water and coffee and then spiced up the offer with cookies as we arrived at his office. This guy may be the smartest VP Product I have ever met. Cookies! I know I have blogged about this is the past, but one of our writers is known to bring homemade baked goods when she is trying to hunt down specific SMEs that normally avoid her. In her experience it works every time, which is why she has been so successful at turning her SMEs into tame information sharing resource centers in one short meeting!

Are you stuck with a stupid boss or a boss that makes stupid decisions? Maybe I can help.

In Israel, where there seems to still be a tremendous lack of professional management experience, technical writers are often managed by self-made managers or R&D people with no formal management experience and little or no experience managing technical writers or technical writing teams. What that means is that they might know how to program in X or Y language, or run an Agile process, but they know next to nothing about managing people and even less about how to control their own tempers. There’s no excuse for managers who blow their top and take out their misguided anger on undeserving employees.  But unfortunately, it happens all too often.  Let me give you some insights that might help the next time this situation arises.

Yesterday started out like any other Monday, or at least I thought it did. I had a few urgent emails from technical writers and customers, a sick daughter, and another kid who requested a gourmet packed lunch that included macadamia nuts, and to wear purple shoes which we don’t have…you know, a typical Monday morning. And of course, Sunday night I was up until way past midnight closing a contract with a new customer (start-up nation Israel never sleeps).

But at about 9:30, everything suddenly fell apart. Our weekly staff meeting was interrupted by my sick daughter asking a million questions ranging from how we could be talking into the computer without seeing each other, to wanting to know where the glue was for her art project. I am pretty good at multi-tasking and switching from mommy to manager, but when my team started to discuss a project that was not heading in the right direction, all of a sudden I realized that I said the wrong thing. Crash, bang, boom. I blew the whole thing up.

It happens. People say really stupid things that are regretted as soon as they come out of our mouths. Having been on both sides (I’ve been the hurt employee as well as the stupid manager), I could immediately relate to the hurt that my employee must have felt at that moment.

Today - September 11 - is such an important day on so many levels. I have so many things to say, and much of it ties into technical writing. There are so many messages and takeaways from 9-11, making it impossible to touch on every aspect. So I will focus on just one:  LOVE. Love for yourself, love for your team and love your users.

Love your self

Selflessness is the mark of a great leader. So how can you balance that with loving yourself?

The managers who take care of their team and do not take care of themselves are not being selfless, but rather oddly selfish. We all know what happens to managers who work 24/7, never take a break and take every hit for the team. One day they break, they lose it in a spectacular fashion, or they G-d forbid get very ill. The reason managers exist is to try to help a team of people achieve greatness together by bringing the individual pieces together into a sum that is greater than the individual parts. Sadly, as managers, we sometimes get lost and stuck in the details and forget the bigger picture. Whether the goal is about how to truly inspire and achieve greatness as a team, or about how to treat ourselves in this process, losing yourself in the job by bearing the brunt of the hardship for the entire team is not sustainable long-term.

I know, because I am a reformed management crisis endorphin junkie.

Chances are that between email, smart phones, instant messages, SMSs and company cell phones, your employees are essentially available to you 24/7. But that doesn’t mean, as managers, that we should be taking advantage of modern technological advances to invade people’s private time.

I promise you that there never was and never will be a true documentation emergency. Nobody will die, no lives will be ruined and no major documentation disaster will occur between Friday evening and Monday morning (or for those of us in Israel, between Thursday night and Sunday morning). We have a 40-45 hour workweek for a simple reason and that is because that’s all most people can handle and still be happy and productive.

It’s fine once in a while to call upon your team to go the extra mile and put in overtime during the weekend or late at night. But please, do not do it too often or your employees will resent both you and the job. In my time in this industry, the majority of the people I have seen burn out of a job have done so from the extra hours and non-stop “emergencies” dumped on their heads. Many leave the field or take extended breaks between jobs just to recover from a bad management experience. The added expense to a company of recruiting, hiring and training a new employee (not to mention total time lost) in place of keeping an existing writer happy and productive has got to be at least equivalent to 3-4 months of a yearly salary. Wouldn’t it be easier and more cost effective to simply respect boundaries and encourage your people to take vacations and time off? I am not suggesting that all burnout victims and all job hunters are overworked, but I do know that a good number of them are. Why are they looking for new jobs instead of taking breaks and taking vacations or just setting limits on extra work and night hours? It’s a question that we, as managers, need to be asking ourselves.

Wouldn’t it be nice if all deadlines were met, all work was done well and right the first time and everyone always showed up on time? Sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t have a magical formula to make that happen. But when things do go wrong and you find yourself in the position of needing to give less than positive feedback to an employee, there is a right way to go about it:

Most people who read my blog regularly will probably have a pretty good sense of who I am by now. If you are a technical writer or doc manager and this is your first time reading one of my mid-week brain dumps, let me start by saying that over the last 10 years, I have sat in hundreds of meeting rooms, listened to lots of company pitches, watched a lot of companies succeed and even more fail. In all of that time, I learned to trust my instincts and some basic business principles I learned way back in high school. I have also acquired a number of great mentors (and friends) along the way. If you don’t have a mentor or someone you look up to, I recommend finding one ASAP.

Michael Eisenberg (one of my mentors) has published a Hummus Manifesto. Inspired by his take on things, I’ve come up with my own version -- one that I like to call “the banana manifesto.”

Many years ago, the original founder of Tech-Tav (another one of my mentors) remarked that “if a company is selling bananas, they better make sure they protect and nurture those bananas.” If they don’t, the company won’t last very long. Companies who operate according to the banana manifesto usually succeed, and if they don’t, at least they usually go down in style.

There are few, if any, people in the world like my rabbi, teacher and friend, Rabbi Ahron Batt (may his memory be a blessing). This past Friday, Rabbi Batt passed away  in the presence of his beloved wife, Ayelet, and his wonderful children. To my way of thinking, one’s true value in life can be measured by what one has left behind. Rabbi Batt’s legacy - his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren - all stand as a testament to the truly remarkable gift he left to humanity. Rabbi Batt was a man of amazing humility, compassion, knowledge and joie de’vive that made him the rare combination of wonderful. He has left an entire nation at a loss with his death.

Full disclosure: This is not a religious post. I do not intend to change your religious views in any way, but I will talk about religion and God. If that offends you, I am sorry.

What does any of this have to do with documentation management? I promise I’ll get to that in just a few more lines…

Is efficiency a dirty word in your company? If so, it’s time to start cleaning up. Highly driven and highly efficient workers are too-often told to slow down and stop working so hard. This may sound like a crazy idea, but it happens more often than you can imagine (and my friend Rose Zadik can back me up here).

Some managers explain that a too-efficient writer will destroy the morale of a team by making the others look bad. They claim that one superstar standout will raise the bar, skew the metrics and create undue and unnecessary pressure on the team. And it goes without saying that the boss is probably getting worried that his eager beaver may be out for his job.

If you find yourself managing one or more of these employees, consider yourself lucky to have found such motivated and intelligent workers. Manage them right and they can be your best assets. But manage them wrong and they will either find a new job or take yours. Harness their strengths, challenge them with higher level, more complex assignments. Give them opportunities to learn and master new skills and technologies. Imagine a sprinter swimming in the slow lane…he’ll have a less satisfying workout and probably annoy the slow swimmers around him. But in the fast lane with other competitive swimmers, he’ll rise to new levels of accomplishment without kicking anyone in the face. It’s no different for your employees.

I promise you that the ROI from your overachiever will be well worth the investment.

I would like to take this opportunity to also wish a heartfelt Mazal Tov to Rose on her upcoming move to lead the doc department at Discretix. She is one lady who really knows how to clean up a lack of efficiency mess!

So my vacation could have gone one of two ways: I could have spent 3 weeks in Southern California with my family sans cellphone and with intermittent email access and hated it, or I could have done it and loved every minute of it. I chose the latter.

For years now, my motto has been “work hard, play harder.” I am the first to admit that I don’t do it enough, but the truth is that all of us need to. Whether it is practicing an instrument, getting up at 5 AM for an early-morning run, twirling your kids around the living room to lively music before dinner or sitting near a fountain at your favorite park or outdoor mall and tuning the world out for 15 minutes while you catch some Vitamin D, I am convinced that the world would be a much happier and more fulfilling and productive place if we all spent a little bit more time doing the little things we enjoy.

I admit to having been that boss (before I had kids) who didn’t understand people’s innate need to take a great family vacation at least once a year and disappear for a solid week or two. I would always take a day off here and there and that would be enough for me. This summer’s adventure was our first family vacation (where I didn’t really work) in 10 years! Nightly family dinners are great, but a family vacation can be your recharge station away from the crazy world around us.

I am not a phone maniac anyway and don’t ever plan to have “Blackberry thumb,” but the past 3 weeks gave me perspective, rejuvenated my work drive and renewed my resolve for the things I love to do and those that I don’t (but that I must do anyway).