LavaCon 2017 - Achieving the Extraordinary: Content Development Management Success

Achieving the Extraordinary:
Content Development
Management Success
With Barry Saiff and Dave Wilks Sunday, Nov. 5, 1:00 PM

@SaiffSolutions @davewilks #LavaCon #SaiffSolutions #techcomm
 About Your Presenters
 Getting to Know You
 Tailoring Your Workshop
 Three Contexts for Extraordinary Achievement
 Manager’s Toolkit: You’ve Got to Have CHARM
 Management: A Sacred Trust (The Soft Skills)- CARVE! THRIVE!
AGENDA

 Keys to Success: Motivation (SLAP!), Feedback
 Awareness, Bias, Culture: You, Your Organization, The World
 Improving Processes and Tools, Intrapreneurship
 Staffing: Changes, Additions
 Offshore Outsourcing
AGENDA

About The Speaker: Barry Saiff
Technical communications leader
33 years of experience in technical documentation
Led content development teams at Symantec,
Oracle, IBM, and GE
Founded Saiff Solutions, Inc. in 2011
Provides technical writing services to large
enterprises in Australia, Japan, Canada, and US
Twitter: @SaiffSolutions

About The Speaker: Dave Wilks
Technical Writer at Cloud Elements
Built a geographically dispersed team from
1-15 at Willis Towers Watson
Servant leader focus
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/davewilks
Twitter: @davewilks

#LavaCon #SaiffSolutions #techcomm
Let’s Get to Know Each Other
Please tell us your
country, city, role, and
why you are here.

What are Your Interests/Experiences
in Managing Technical Writers?
• Managing a team of writers?
• Leading a team, without management authority?
• Managing outsourced or offshore writers?
• Hiring? Firing?
• Working for a good manager?
• Working for a not-so-good manager?
• What else?
Have you experienced:

What Should We Focus on
1. What do you most want to get out of this workshop?
2. Where does your content team fit in your corporate structure?
3. What is your current/past management experience?
4. Which staff changes are you least experienced in: hiring, firing, transfers,
outsourcing, other?
5. What types of training does your team participate in?
6. Is your team geographically, culturally, or linguistically diverse?
7. What is your biggest challenge - Process? Team Issues? Staffing? Other?
Some of you received these questions via email:

Extraordinary Achievement
• Your staff (local, in-sourced)
• Your expanded team (remote, outsourced)
• Your organization
Enable excellence for:
How do we achieve extraordinary
results consistently across all of
these dimensions?

When facing any difficult situation,
start with:
Curiosity and
Humility, proceed with
Awareness,
Respect, and
Mastery
Manager’s Toolkit: CHARM

Management is a sacred trust. As a manager,
at any level, you have the power to:
• Destroy careers
• Destroy jobs
• Destroy morale
• Destroy the enterprise

• Build careers
• Achieve miracles
• Treat people fairly
• Develop lifelong relationships of trust

• Turn lives around
• Empower people to be more effective
and productive
• Enable people to learn things that make
them more successful
• Turn the enterprise around

Caring
• The enterprise
• The results
• The people
• The process
The fundamental way of being of a manager is caring.
A manager cares about:

Caring: Responsibility
• A manager is trusted with power, and
faces opportunities to abuse that power.
• A manager must, at times, be selfless,
and act against their own (narrowly
conceived) self-interest.

Caring: Bureaucracy
• A good manager is a creator of healthy administration, and an
enemy of bureaucratic corruption and inertia.
• The mission, the customers, the enterprise, the people, and
the results are more important than the rules.
• A good manager strives for continuous improvement, rational
administration, fairness, and productivity gains.

Caring: A New Idea?
Have you ever thought
about management in
terms of caring?
Yes? No?

Acess
Have you ever had difficulties or
stress at work because your
manager had no time for you?
Yes? No?
Your people need regular access to you, and
you need access to your management.

Being Respectful
Don’t accuse.
Remember CHARM.
Even if you don't think you
are accusing or blaming, if
the other person thinks you
are, you are responsible for
their perception.
This is particularly important
in Asian cultures.

Being Respectful
A manager knows how to manage
their emotions, without dumping
them on people in the workplace.
Understand the difference between
passion and emotion. Be responsible
for the impact of your actions.
A manager does not react. A manager
creates.

Being Respectful of Yourself
Expand the realm of what you consider
yourself responsible for.
Do not accept being treated with less
than full respect.
Give yourself a break.
You will make mistakes, in fact, you
must make some mistakes in order to
learn how to improve.
BALANCE Infographics: 7 Elements of Respect

Vision
Without vision, management is damaging. Be
inspired, and you will inspire others.
Keep the mission, vision, and values of the
organization alive, in everyone.
Make sure people understand how their
work forwards the whole.
Are you clear about the mission or
the vision of your organization?
Yes? No?

Expect Excellence
Dr. Wayne Dyer was well
known for the idea, based on
extensive research, that we
create what we expect.
Be aware of your expectations.
Choose them wisely.

TRUST
Caring – Trust = Micromanagement
Trust is the currency of business success.
Without trust, nothing is possible.
You must calibrate trust for each person/situation.
What do you trust me for? Do you trust me to do my job well?
Would you trust me to protect your daughter from harm?
These are very different questions.

TRUST
Team (We are all on the same one.)
Relationships based upon
Understanding,
Sensitivity, and
Tolerance
Calibrate your level of trust in each
person wisely. Believe in people.

Being
Question for managers: Who am I being?
Get clear on who you are, as a manager and a leader. For
example, here is my statement:
I am an authentic, caring, challenging, dedicated mentor.
What is yours? (Feel free to steal from mine.)
To get clear on your statement:
• Notice, ask for feedback
• Envision (Whom do you aspire to be like?)

Being Authentic
An inauthentic manager is an ineffective manager.
To increase authenticity, clarify your inauthenticities.
Everyone has inauthenticities.
Ask for help: What don’t you believe? How would you not trust me?
Ask yourself: What do I really care about? What don’t I?
Separate the facts from your story.
Get training: Never stop learning about yourself.
Highly recommended: http://www.landmarkworldwide.com

Empower Excellence: Integrity
• Examine: How might I be the source of
the problem?
• Learn from failures and successes.
• Do not cut corners (deceive, break the
law, share information prematurely or
inappropriately).

Empower Excellence: Integrity
• Hold yourself accountable for the results
of your team, and for your impact on
their self-image & performance.
• Model behaviors and attitudes you want
to develop.
• Work at least as hard, and smart, as your
staff.

Integrity: The Power of Your Word
Why are promises important?
• Descriptive language vs Creative language
• Flowers
• Personal power: What is it? What is its source?
• Beyond keeping promises - Honoring your word:
o When you cannot, pro-actively take responsibility
for mitigating the impacts on others.
o Calibrate your promises: Not too much, not too
little either – expect great things!

CHARM, CARVE, THRIVE Review
CHARM:
Curiosity, Humility, Awareness,
Respect, and Mastery
CARVE:
Caring, Access, Respect, Vision,
and Expect Excellence
THRIVE:
Training, Heard, Respect,
Integrity, Vision, and Empower

Motivation: A, M, P, T, AF
Three Key Factors for Motivation:
1. Autonomy
2. Mastery
3. Purpose
Great 11-minute video on motivation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuF
Two Orientations of Motivation:
• Toward (things you want)
• Away from (things you don’t want)

Feedback
Frequent! Accurate! Clear! Specific!
Do not fail to tell someone that they made a
mistake.
Do not fail to praise someone, often.
Do have regular one-on-one meetings with
each person.
Do not fail to provide formal
performance reviews at least annually.
Remember CHARM! CARVE! THRIVE!

Enabling Excellence: Training – Why?
Imagine: Your boss tells you (for the first
time) that you are failing at x, y, and z, and
you are being demoted, or fired.
Would you rather have had a chance
to improve first?
Would you rather have had some
effective training?

Improve Processes and Tools
Are you using the best processes and tools?
Ask yourself three questions:
1. What is your purpose?
2. Who is your customer?
3. Is your customer happy?
Link: http://www.squawkpoint.com/tutorials/process-improvement/

Speak Management’s Language
Changing a process or a tool can be expensive.
Understand upper management’s priorities.
Present a business case:
• Short and long term benefits to customers, company.
• Impact to existing products or processes.
• Cost (time, licenses, training, etc.)
• Return on investment (payback time, cost savings.)

Be an Effective Intrapreneur
• http://saiffsolutions.com/home/tech-comm-intrapreneurship-5-
key-approaches-infographic
• https://www.slideshare.net/SaiffSolutionsInc/content-leadership-
forum-how-to-be-an-effective-tech-comm-intrapreneur
• https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/9273/271827

Awareness, Bias, and Culture
• A changing world = Diverse styles/contexts
• Cross-cultural teams: Aware leadership
• Each culture has strengths, and challenges

The World is Changing
Companies market their
products internationally.
Users are diverse.
Localization of products and
supporting documentation
requires cultural awareness.

• Between company strategy and their employees.
• Between team members who may be in many locations.
• Between past practices and future possibilities
Managers are at the Interface
Between company strategy and their employees.
Between team members who may be in many locations.
Between past practices and future possibilities

Managing Cross-Cultural Teams
Three Key Success Factors:
1. Mix cultures and locations.
Having a mix of cultures in one
location makes a huge difference.
2. Ensure editing, quality control,
and inclusion.
Make all writers have the
advantages they need to succeed.

A key success factor for Saiff Solutions:
Our writers in the Philippines work with
American, Canadian, Indian, and Filipino
editors and managers (local and remote).
Our editors each have at least 10 years of
technical writing/editing experience.

3. Embrace differences by increasing your awareness!
Understanding cultural differences – between countries, professions,
departments, companies – is crucial to your success. Consider:
• How do these people learn best?
• How do they typically handle conflict?
• What does “Yes” mean to them?

Learn to listen newly: hear what you
are missing.
Learn to speak newly: add what you
assume and others do not.
Continually expand your awareness
to new levels.
You cannot succeed in this without
getting to know people well.

Management entails awesome responsibility and awesome
opportunity. Both are magnified by a mixture of cultures.
They may hide from you the impact of how you are being.
Many Americans, Japanese, and others regularly raise their
voices, or interpret silence as a sign of agreement and support.

Many Asians are socialized to defer to authority figures, and
foreigners, even those not in positions of authority. They may be
unwilling to say “no” or disagree with you, to ask questions or ask
for help, especially if you (even unknowingly) raise your voice or
exhibit frustration or anger.

Seek Out The Strengths
To be successful with people in other cultures, you need to be
sensitive. You need to be willing to change. You need to give up
the idea that your culture is better. All cultures have strengths
and weaknesses. Learn the strengths and weaknesses of your
culture and other cultures.

Asking Questions
Why aren’t they asking enough questions?
How do you* respond to questions that seem
pointless? Stupid?
Are you* open to people who think differently?
Are all questions welcome? Really?
Why aren’t they asking enough questions?
What does respect mean to you? To them?
*Anyone in authority

Respect
Respect in the Philippines (and some other Asian cultures):
• Defer to authority/role, age, whiteness, experience, wealth.
• Be quiet. Appear attentive. Agree. Do what you are told.
• Do not challenge or question authority. Support leaders.
Respect in the USA (and many non-Asian cultures):
• Tell the truth, respectfully. Do not withhold key information.
• Ask questions, appropriately. Contribute. Speak up.
• Do what you say you will. Do not lie. Support the team.

Conflict/Culture Clash
Some Common US approaches to conflict:
• Discuss. Argue. Raise voices. Blame. Apologize. Resolve/Not.
• Challenge. Brainstorm together. Resolve/Not.
Some Common Filipino approaches to conflict:
• Avoid. Work around. Await opportunity to resolve.
Some Common Filipino responses to US approaches:
• Withdraw. Resent. Sabotage. Leave.
Some Common US responses to Filipino approaches:
• Give up on the Asians. Blame. Assume stupidity/incompetence.

Management Style
Management in Asia is frequently “Command and Control:”
• Management as supervision
• Intensely hierarchical
• “The manager always knows best”
This management style does not encourage:
• Collaboration
• Asking questions
• Prioritizing quality over deference to authority
All over the world, people frequently leave jobs because of their managers.
This may also explain why they don’t ask questions.

In Summary: Things Are Not Always
What They Seem
Mistakes
...could be due to incompetence. But also think about:
• The clarity of your expectations
• Your communication style
• Your openness to questions
• Differences in display of respect
• All the “authorities” involved and the above issues for each of them

Staff Changes - Firing
• Do your homework: Follow processes, document
• Has the person received specific, actionable feedback? Have
they been given a chance to improve? Have you considered
various viewpoints?
• Is the person a negative influence? A bad cultural fit? Or
someone different who contributes something valuable?
• Not being able to fire people can destroy an organization.
• Firing the wrong people can destroy morale.
• Once you decide, act with authority.

Staff Changes - Transfers
Transfers into your team:
• Orientation, inclusion
• Team cohesion, team building
• Are they a good fit? What are their
career goals?
Transfers out of your team:
• Understand their goals
• Support their ambitions
• Make it work for your team

Staff Changes - Hiring
Hire for attitude (89%) and skills (11%)
• Know your culture, seek a good fit
• Value and encourage diversity
• More heads are better
• When needed, test
• After hiring: orientation, team-building, inclusion
Do you have a good onboarding process? Orientation?
What if you cannot get hiring authority/budget?
Can you outsource/offshore while maintaining/improving quality?

Staff Changes – How to Make
Outsourcing Work
Assess process maturity and content strategy first,
and improve if needed.
• Include Tech Comm in planning.
• Ensure a realistic financial analysis.
• Identify & communicate vision & benefits.
• Incorporate team feedback.
• Focus on career development.

Staff Changes - How to Make
Outsourcing Work
Carefully choose country:
• Consider language, infrastructure, labor pool.
• #1 country in business English: Philippines
Link: http://www.globalenglish.com/business_english_index
Carefully choose provider.
Start with a low-risk pilot project.

Understand and accommodate
the differences:
• Time zone
• Language
• Culture
• Expertise
• Background, context
Outsourcing Work

Include all tech writers in meetings,
reviews, scrums, defect tracking,
wiki/intranet, email list, etc.
Document testing, review = key
parts of the project schedule
Outsourcing Work

Can We Help You?
What are your greatest challenges?
 Staff changes
 Resources/capacity/constraints
 Team/personnel
 Bureaucracy/management support
 Cross-cultural/geographic issues
 Other?
If Saiff Solutions could assist you in
overcoming your challenges, would you
be interested in a free consultation?
 Yes, please contact me directly.
 Not right now, possibly later
 No, thank you.

LavaCon 2017 - Achieving the Extraordinary: Content Development Management Success

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LavaCon 2017 - Achieving the Extraordinary: Content Development Management Success