Everyone you work with has one thing in common

They’re all chronically under-trained in the skill they use most often.

I have good news and bad news.

First, good news: you might think you’re a recruiter, marketer or engineer — but you’d be wrong. You’re a writer, and so is everyone you work with. Congratulations!

In fact, the company you work for produces more words than anything else. All day every day, everyone is writing. Emails, instant messaging, reports, commit messages, webpages, app copy, Ts&Cs, brochures, ads, etc.

Here’s the bad news: even though everyone you work with is a writer, most of them have never been trained to write.

Sure, they learnt some things at school and university — but lots of those things were either not useful or just downright wrong. Like the misleading notion that complex language makes you sound smarter, or the totally mythical idea that you can’t start a sentence with the words And or But.

“So what?” you might ask. “I produce a lot of words, but that’s not the product I’m selling.”

More bad news. As noted smart person Daniel Kahneman says:

People don’t choose between things, they choose between descriptions of things.

How you talk about what you’re selling heavily influences whether anyone will want it. How you communicate with your customers has a huge impact on whether they feel like you’re helping, or trying to fleece them.

It’s the same internally: how you talk about your business influences whether people want to work there. How you communicate with your employees influences whether they feel supported and happy.

Obviously what you actually do is enormously important too. But if you don’t invest in training people in the thing they spend most time doing, you’re missing a very obvious trick.

To finish on good news: almost everyone is missing this trick. Take advantage, and you’ll be lightyears ahead of the rest.

In my next post, I’ll explain how we think about writing training at Monzo.