Writing in Leadership
Writing in Leadership
In a leadership role, writing becomes a vital tool for setting vision, guiding teams, and providing feedback. I discovered this firsthand after transitioning from iOS development, where the shift in writing skills was crucial. Initially, as an individual contributor, my writing centered on enhancing personal skills and sharing knowledge through blog posts. However, the stakes changed dramatically with leadership, where writing became central to conveying direction and driving projects.
After transitioning to management, I quickly realized writing is a vital leadership tool for tasks like setting a vision, conveying direction, guiding projects, and giving feedback. On top of that, once in leadership the meetings took a lot of time and distractions were everywhere; it was hard to focus on writing without distractions.
The challenge just grew, and the preparation needed to evolve as well.
Preparation
This new reality in my management role demanded a more structured approach to writing. I found that this preparation could be divided into two major branches:
1. Learning how to write properly
Learning how to write in general: tips and tricks to better create introductions and conclusions, how to bridge ideas together, how to do proper research of the topics you want to expand, etc.
This is crucial for becoming a better writer in general, unfortunately most of us didn’t start there, or did spend some time in that domain, but early on in our lives and not necessarily recently.
2. Preparation for each piece
Before every written piece, regardless of it being major or not, preparing specifically for it is crucial to properly convey your ideas and maximize the possibility of accomplishing what you set out to do when you started writing your piece.
Knowing Your Audience
Understanding the needs and expectations of your readers is the first step. Particularly in leadership roles, you need to be very conscious of who your audience is.
As an Individual Contributor writing about iOS topics, for example, it was clear that my audience was going to be technical. I could focus on ideas without giving much context to many technical topics. This is in juxtaposition to my role in leadership, where I might deliver written communications to other engineers, managers, folks in customer support, finance, legal, or the C-Level team.
Discerning your target audience and adapting your writing style accordingly will maximize the chances of getting your message across. For example, you can explain a tech debt initiative to engineers by detailing how safely typed APIs will improve development; they will likely understand the benefits and be excited. In contrast, you would need to frame the same initiative differently for the Head of Product, connecting it directly to their quarterly product goals.
Understanding your target audience is crucial for effective writing. Always tailor your message for your readers; the piece is for them, not you. When you write for your audience, you maximize your chances of success and, in turn, achieve your own objectives.
To learn what topics are important to a specific group, you can use several techniques:
Investing time in this research helps you write for your audience, not just at them.
Research and Knowledge Gathering
Collecting and organizing information to support your writing is a critical part of many different pieces.
This one is more flexible, considering that you might be the subject’s expert, or the subject’s expert in your organization, and thus you speak from authority. That being said, it is always important to take some time to research about the topic you are about to expand, either to verify your claims or even to learn opposing points or to have more connecting points to make your topic stand out even more.
Investing time in researching and polishing your ideas against others will help refine your point, you can avoid repeating stuff that others have said multiple times before and focus on the most important parts of your message, the things that you bring that are a differentiator for you; and as an added benefit it will help you grow your domain expertise and prepare you for any follow-up questions that your audience might have.
Outline Development
Structuring your thoughts and creating a logical flow for your document. Here is where a lot of articles make it or break it. The order of your narration helps drive the point across. Sometimes you might start with the successful end result to grab the audience’s attention and then explain how you reached it. Other times, you might just tell the timeline of how events happened. You can also craft the story by manipulating time to make a bigger impact, not by changing the story but by reordering events to drive the message home (a technique from Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks). and having a clear outline to see the bigger picture and being able to re arrange this “squares” will help you craft the message in the best possible way.
Having the opportunity to work with editors, this is a big part of what they will help you with. They have been trained to identify this discrepancies or how to see where things would drive the bigger impact; they will tell you to grab a paragraph and move it at the top or a certain section should be the ending because it drive more impact, etc; it is very important that you seriously consider their feedback, especially if you disagree. Try to understand the ‘why’ behind their suggestion, as this is how you’ll learn what they are looking for and refine your craft. While the final decision remains yours, engaging critically with their perspective is a powerful learning tool.
Challenges
The challenges that come with writing in leadership are vast and wide but I will like to focus on only a few. The challenges are interconnected with the challenges of writing as an Individual Contributor or even for your own personal blog; while others might be very specific to the domain.
Clarity and Conciseness: A Balancing Act
In Leadership, for better or for worse, your words carry a lot more power than in other positions. The role carries authority and thus, your words need to be measured and carefully delivered; particularly in written format where tone and expression will be missing. We need to strike a balance between being overly verbose and not providing enough context for the appropriate audience.
For example, imagine a new initiative to migrate from Jenkins to GitHub Actions. When writing to engineers, you can state this directly and explain the reason (e.g., faster CI times), and they’ll understand due to their domain knowledge. However, this message may not be clear to a C-Level or Product audience, risking their buy-in. For this audience, it’s better to provide context about what a Continuous Integration (CI) provider is and explain that changing vendors will help deliver products faster and allow for quicker feature iteration, while being careful not to omit critical trade-offs.
Conciseness is a powerful partner to clarity; while both are essential, they serve different functions in making a message effective. They could be the day & night of the writing challenges. If clarity is required and context needs to exist, conciseness is there to avoid going too deep into one topic, distracting the audience from the main message.
Continuing with the previous example of switching CI providers, the balance is there (in this very sterile and constrained example) where we provide context to explain what it is on a high level perspective, how the change will benefit the audience and thus hoping to get the buy in. We don’t need to expand on what each of the vendors are, what differences they have, etc; that would be too much context and will just dilute the message.
Readers greatly appreciate conciseness in this day and age; unfortunately everyone is always busy and do not have a lot of time to spend on many different topics; the ability to transmit a message concisely is a great skill to possess.
Feedback
In order to improve any skill one needs to have repetition, consistency and most importantly, feedback. Without a clear direction of what’s correct, incorrect or could be improved, you are doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.
For piece writing there are a few available techniques and tools that one can use to improve, this list is by no means exhaustive but is a good start for people that want to improve their writing skills.
Self-Review
As someone with a background in engineering this is both the easiest and hardest of them. On one side one is used to check the code we write to verify correctness, but it is also a well know fact that engineers tend to be bad at testing their own code because we know, consciously or subconsciously where the code will break, and when we run our tests we tend to avoid the thinned ice areas of the code.
Self-Reviewing a written piece requires being very honest with ourselves and treating it as if we were providing feedback to someone else; don’t be afraid to “destroy” your own piece, if there are inconsistencies or the message could be better delivered, don’t hesitate on undoing and redoing certain sections.
Reading it aloud or even having someone or something read your own piece to you will help you find the parts where the history doesn’t flow as you would have expected or liked; be sure to pay attention at the sections or parts that don’t ring correct, make notes and then go back and address them.
Peer Networks
This is arguably one of the most important ways to improve your pieces and yourself as a writer. Reach out to your network of peers, the experts on the domain you are writing or even just as externals if you are trying to explain technical topics for non-technical audiences.
Having an external view on your ideas will help you identify where the message is not clear. When writing technical pieces we have a inherent background that allow us to assume certain topics and explanations that might not be clear for people with the same walk of life as us; this is why it is very important to have a network of peers that can help you.
Take their feedback seriously and respectfully, this doesn’t mean to agree 100% with everything, but definitely process it and understand where they are coming from, oftentimes you will learn a lot about your writing style and about assumptions that you make about the topic you are writing about.
Writing Tools and Apps
There are some tools and applications already available in the market to help you get feedback, like requesting comments to others, there are tools that will read aloud texts to you and some tools that will highlight some inconsistencies with your text.
If you have access to some or all of these tools, take full advantage of them, as with anything, this tools will help you grow and perfect your craft; some tools will be self contained and help you improve by themselves, others will allow you the ability to reach out to your peers.
I took all of this into consideration and came to the realization that there aren’t many tools that provide most or all of these requirements, which is what led the team to build BlueTip.
Our goal was to make sure there was yet another tool out there to help folks improve their writing, as I believe it is one of the best mediums to communicate and maintain knowledge, we identified that having a place to do research, set up the outline, enter focus mode, Pomodoro timers and automated reviewers in a centralized tool was a key for our own success at writing, based on the things we learned and gathered from seeing how others write, we tried to build something versatile that addressed the majority of different kinds of people, without making it too clunky or overcrowded with tools.
Ultimately, our aim with BlueTip is to contribute to this ecosystem of improvement. Whether our tool is the right fit for you or you find another, the commitment to refining your own communication is what matters most. Every step taken to write more clearly is a step toward better sharing of knowledge, and that is a goal worth pursuing.
Made with BlueTip 🦋 (https://www.bluetip.ai)