As the spring holiday season draws closer and folks around the world embark on mad fits of spring cleaning, I thought this would be the perfect time to talk about “clean” management and corporate policy. I’m not talking about making your workplace raw, leaven/gluten free or eco-friendly (all admittedly great things), but rather managing a clean, wholesome, honest company run on sound business practices in today’s increasing dirty business world.

With a backdrop of hundred billion dollar IPOs and hacking, scamming and cheating scandals plaguing the twittersphere (my main source for news), many of us are left to ponder whether it is even possible to run a clean business anymore. Isn’t everyone just out to get everyone else, make another dollar, and sell you another broken widget? I don’t know the answer to most of that, but I do continue to believe that it is still possible (and preferable) to run a clean business.

What was once a given about the employee/employer relationship is no longer. Gone are the days when you spend your life at a company in pursuit of the gold watch and nice retirement package. Instead, here are the days where you hop, skip and jump through a long series of short tasks for smaller companies. Everyone is challenged with being fluid and adaptable, hungering for constant change. This is the world our consumerism driven desires and needs have created, a world where product is old after just a few weeks or months and everything changes all the time.  

As I was thinking about team motivation over the last few days, my 4-year-old daughter came to me with really sticky fingers and started a long treatise on why “sticky” is so hard to deal with. Suddenly, I realized that there was a brilliant management lesson right in front of me. Management and communication are usually a lot more like marshmallow fluff than we want them to be. Communication between team members, and especially between managers and employees, is normally sticky, tricky and hard to fix once broken. Looking back over relationships and projects that have not gone the way I wanted, the problems could usually be boiled down to the communication side of things.

In response to my Fixing Stupid blogs, many people have been writing to tell me that their managers don’t know how to communicate with them and wondering how to improve the situation. They claim their managers don’t appreciate, don’t understand and don’t express themselves well. But as technical communication leaders, the thing we should be really good at is communication. How and why can so many of us be failing so badly at our professional calling of being professional communicators with management responsibilities?

I think the easy answer is that explaining a process or a procedure on paper is a lot different than dealing with an employee, their work habits or the communication that surrounds employee management. That might all be true, but frankly that’s not the whole story.

In some companies, going above and beyond the customers’ expectations by producing a high quality product can result in a slap on the wrist by your manager. Add in excellent customer service and finishing within the deadline, and you are in serious trouble with senior management. Think I’m making this up? Not a chance.

A technical writer asked me for some advice the other day. He had just finished the enormous task of revamping a User Guide and an Installation Guide for one of the company’s main product lines. Even though it was not in the original request, the product manager asked for some PowerPoint slides. Not thinking twice about it, the writer spent a total of ten minutes putting together four slides. The product manager, thrilled with the guides and the slides, sent a glowing email up the management chain praising the quality and speed of the technical writer’s work and expressing his appreciation for hitting the deadline with efficiency while going above and beyond. The technical writer, cc’d on the email, quickly had the smile wiped off his face when he was called in to his boss’s office for a reprimand.

“Work slower,” he was told. “Why did you finish early? What will management think if you work fast and meet your deadlines? Do you really want your position to be cut to part-time?” That was followed by, “And if anyone from another department asks you to do anything, from now on you always say, ‘I’m too busy.’” As if this ten-minute lecture was not a ridiculous enough waste of time, it was followed by another 15 minutes spent crafting a reply to a higher-level manager’s crucifixion of the writer for not following protocol when filling documentation requests. (Of course, that email contained no mention of the great work the writer had done.)

Now that the new year is upon us, how do you go about kicking off that huge new technical writing project that just landed on your desk?

This week feels like kick-off week here at Tech-Tav. We have five writers starting on four new projects in the first half of this week alone. In between meetings, I thought I’d spend a few minutes sharing my take on the right way to get the ball rolling.

I hope this will be helpful for your next project launch:

Hire the Right Writers: To do this, you need to scope your team. Sometimes it is the chemistry between the personalities that makes or breaks a project. Even if it looks great on paper, the project won’t go anywhere unless people can effectively communicate and share ideas, so make sure you pick the right team. Keep in mind that since the SMEs are not exchangeable, you may  have to swap in/out members of your technical writing team to make it work.

Here are my top ten eleven management DO’s and DON'Ts. Let's start with the DOs:

1. Do keep in mind the old Yiddish proverb “Man plans, God laughs.” But you had better plan anyway. And make sure you have a contingency plan so the joke won’t be on you.

2. Do your homework, make offsite backups and don’t procrastinate…and then you won’t need to call us for help at 3AM from India because your laptop got stolen and you have no files for your customer delivery tomorrow. (Yeah, you. You know who you are.)

3. Do follow the rules of my first grade teacher:  Finish what you start and ask for help when you need it.

4. Do step up to the plate. In a place where there are no men, be the man (or woman). But whatever you do, check your attitude at the door and don’t let your ego get carried away.

5. Do put the Green Jello Theory into practice:  Make everyone an owner, not just a participant.

And now for the DON'Ts...

6. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. 

7. Don’t make people work on the weekends. Five-day work weeks make for happier employees.

8. Don’t try something new on opening night. When I was in drama club, the rule was “Be on time, know your lines, and don’t bump into the furniture.” The time to deploy a single-sourcing solution or move to new tool is not in the middle of a GA schedule.