This is one of the important truths we should teach our children, employees, ourselves. The biggest client problems that I regularly have to fix at Lean Street Company stem from written communication.
Being a good writer means:
- writing tickets developers can understand
- providing reports that are concise and to the point — making information impossible to miss by the busiest of clients
- understanding the difference between what’s important and what’s in front of you — and communicating the important part with clarity
- responding with the right emotional tone, and avoiding workplace conflicts that stem from lazy thoughtless text-based communication.
I coach business competitions at UCI and I tell English majors — you have the advantage. You can have any job in business: sales, marketing, product, just about anything — and you already know how to write. All you need now is to pick the field you want to practice and pick up a few skills there.
Here is an example of writing gone bad — and a lesson I learned in the early days of Lean Street Company:
Person A: “Can you guys loop me in on the #pmmeet channel pls?
Person B: “what? its our PM channel”
Sigh. We are a global company. Every request-response cycle could take 24 hours. It was noon and Person A was fast asleep in his part of the world. What I saw was time — our most valuable asset — going down the drain. And people’s feelings — our most fragile business component, under threat. Just because it is slack doesn’t mean it’s time to throw away thinking.
I decided to expose what this kind of writing does by being purposefully obtuse.
Me: I will attempt to provide interpreting services here. What Person A probably meant to say is, I would like access to this private channel because reasons. The reasons I am sure are that he would like to engage with project management process as he should.
Me: Person B likely meant that she feels uncomfortable having person A there because reasons — or simply that she does not wish to grant access to her domain without knowing the purpose.
Me: Because of time zones, let us work on making our communication more explicit to ensure the next person has full context for making decisions.
Me: And let’s give person A access in the meantime.
During the problem-solving session that followed, it turned out that “loop me in” to the channel was misunderstood — so confusing in fact, the person B had no idea what could be meant by it. Both persons are native English speakers. How could this happen? Lack of thoughtfulness on the writer’s part? Or the reader’s? Likely both.
The impropriety of saying “What?” in a text message to a team mate who is currently asleep half way across the world turned out to be completely foreign to person B. This person went to a US college and majored… (drum roll please…) in marketing and advertising! She has had product jobs in well-known US startups. Yet, she had not mastered the basic manners of text-based communication.
It is my belief that our biggest problem in the US is the workforce that does not know how to write, how to think diligently — and will necessarily have trouble executing. I have often found that our foreign developers, having mastered accented fluency in English, do far better at expressing themselves. Their writing always requires thought as self-expression comes with difficulty. I have never had a Polish developer say “What?” and go to sleep.
To repeat Aytekin Tank’s article title,
!! everyone on your team should be a good writer !!
