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May, 2006 |
Why We Don't Get No Respect
(Many thanks go to Kit Brown, President of the Snake River STC chapter, for her invaluable assistance and many contributions to this article.)
A popular complaint from technical communicators is "We don't get no respect!" Yup, that's frequently true. In this article, I'm going to tell you why this is so and I'll give you a few tips on what you can do to ameliorate this.
As technical communicators, we know. Many of us have the scars to prove it. While most other jobs are vertical, ours are horizontal. Our jobs take us throughout our companies and we talk to everyone. It's not hard to imagine a scenario where we might talk to a customer support group leader, a line engineer, the CEO, and someone in Shipping all in the same day for the same project. As a result, we hear that, while the engineers are creating something that stands upright and is painted blue, the marketers are planning a campaign for a product that lies on its side and is painted green.
The problem with all of this is that we inevitably become the bearers of bad news. And that brings us back to the Emperor's New Clothes. People do not take kindly to the bearers of bad news and we are often blamed for just doing our job (when someone else clearly wasn't doing theirs to have gotten the company into a mess like this). The underlying issue, is, of course, bad communication between the various vertical groups. Marketers and QA don't usually interact, nor do Training and Production, and engineers are legendary for not talking to anybody at all.
There are two ways you can not be the bearer of bad news. The first is to avoid bringing bad news from one group to another as best you can. This is possible some of the time: if you can get someone from Marketing to describe what they're doing within earshot of an engineering manager, you don't have to say a thing. (Machiavellian? You bet, but "better you than me!") However, people will catch on to you sooner or later and this could very easily backfire, so I wouldn't recommend it as a general policy.
A more proactive and positive way to deal with the problem is to do what
you can to facilitate everyone's knowledge of what's happening in other
parts of the company, at least the ones who are dealing with the project
you're focusing on. Perhaps the best way to do this is to send out a regular
newsletter or status report that compiles information about the project
for each of the sections. This is definitely added work and borders on
the dreaded "team secretary" role that most of us loathe, but
it's a great way of keeping people looking at the actual groups and not
the messenger. We can also gain a lot of personal respect for our performance
and how we deal with things that will slowly spread to the perceptions
of the jobs we do, but it's mostly uphill and can be a fragile reputation.
The things that developers and engineers tend to respect us for most is
our ability to come across as someone who has a technical background and
not like (as one of my favorite program managers used to put it) "an
artsy English major."
Other possible reasons for not getting respect on the job include:
You can defuse a lot of this by marketing what you're doing and showing how it's making everyone's life better to the people you work with. Show the engineers why having good product documentation is important. Dazzle everyone with the clarity of the redesigned product UI that you did versus the old one. Get data from the support technicians to show how calls about a previously hot issue have reduced since the latest help file went out. And be positive!
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