Good managers write good

https://staysaasy.com/management/2022/07/10/Writing-Management.html

by gmays • 4 years ago

82 44 4 years ago

jacknews4• 4 years ago

LOL, I assume the title is irony, or perhaps a riff on sassy (a word derived from sarcastic), because the author correctly says "Good managers write well" throughout the rest of the text.

alexfromapex• 4 years ago

Glad I wasn’t the only one questioning this, it has to be intentional

m348e912• 4 years ago

Yup I think the author was taking a little poetic license there. I thought he made some good points but I don't think it's universal. Sometimes good managers are good because they have empathy, good temperament, care about the team, and work hard to enable his/her employees.

There are benefits to being able to write well and it helps with certain aspects of management, however there are a wide range of elements that makes someone an exceptional people leader.

rTX5CMRXIfFG• 4 years ago

It would be a contradiction for managers to have high empathy but to be unable to write well because the ability to write well is a necessary consequence of having high empathy, i.e. a sensitivity to how others’ comprehension might (or might not) work.

BLKNSLVR4• 4 years ago

"Well Managers write good" may have been a better play on words, but far less likely to reach a wider audience.

atesti• 4 years ago

Non Native speaker here: Has there been a recent change regarding good/well? e.g. in youtube videos about construction I hear it all the time: "works good", "runs good". Is it cool now to make this mistake?

DoreenMichele• 4 years ago

No. It's always acceptable, though, to play with words, be ironic, make in jokes, etc.

Mordisquitos• 4 years ago

It may be related to a contrast between American English an British English. American English speakers will often use adjectives in place of adverbs when speaking colloquially, e.g. "That tastes real nice" instead of "That tastes really nice". The same is the case with "good" and "well". This does not usually happen in British English, other than by modern American cultural influence.

ahartmetz• 4 years ago

What about "good paying job"? I have seen that several times now, is it some kind of fixed expression?

jacknews4• 4 years ago

I don't know if it's cool or not, but it is ungrammatical (LOL); 'good' is an adjective, 'well' is the adverb.

And also a state of health.

I'm always tempted, when someone answers my "How are you?" with "I'm good", to ask what it is they're good at, or if it's because they go to church every day, help old ladies across the road, etc.

urthor• 4 years ago

Absolutely not.

The author is being ironic.

Stick to "runs well."

sundvor• 4 years ago

I thought that was the clickbait, to be honest. It worked well to reel me in, at least. :)

Gordonjcp• 4 years ago

Writing it as "write good" when we know that's not proper English is a clever literary device known as a "joke".

Also, that's not what irony means.

jacknews4• 4 years ago

The message is contradicted by it's form. I think that counts as irony, perhaps with a tinge of sarcasm. Intentional, to make a joke, yes.

dfee• 4 years ago

The author is patting themselves on the back a bit, and with regard to the painter, discussed in the closing sentence, loses sight of other non-written communication. It’s the broad strokes - in any form - that drive the largest impact.

Indeed, the quality of writing does “taper with the level of interaction needed”, but in the opposite way described.

As a middle manager, writing is critical for conveying all the necessary information. Get the work done, this way is right, and at the highest speed! At the highest levels though, it’s less useful - though exceptions to the rules (e.g. Warren Buffet using his soapbox to great effect) do exist.

spookybones2• 4 years ago

Writing doesn’t require humility. There are plenty of egocentric writers who do not handle feedback well. Writing benefits from humility.

Clueed• 4 years ago

I agree. You can make a better case for “writing in a corporate context requires humility,“ e.g., someone choosing to post in public slack channel instead of talking to everyone individually.

BLKNSLVR4• 4 years ago

I think there's a "no true scotsman" fallacy lodged in there somewhere. The fact you even wrote that writing benefits from humility indicates an acknowledgment of good writing is made better by humility, and maybe then we just move the definition of "good" to be requiring of humility.

Someone may be able to write, and get a point across, but it's not just the wording and explanation, it's the capture of the context within the writing, and without humility the context is likely to be distorted, thus negatively effecting the goodness of the writing.

drewcoo2• 4 years ago

Agreed. Scotsmen are not known for their humility.

Clear communication does not depend on whether someone feels notably understated in their heart. I hope. Gad!

spookybones2• 4 years ago

Without humility, the context is likely to be distorted? What is this based on? Do you mean empathy? If only someone could have told Nabokov, he could have made something of himself…

l8rpeace• 4 years ago

I like these articles. But, what I'd really like are some examples of good and bad writing. This would actually help (as opposed to explaining the process behind it). Anyone have any examples?

BarryMilo• 4 years ago

It's hard to demonstrate good writing because it's mostly about structure. If something is well written, you won't notice. The trick isn't to write one piece well, it's to write all the pieces so they form a consistent and efficient whole.

dopeboy• 4 years ago

Here’s a simple tip that has improved my own style: use bullet points aggressively.

rafaele• 4 years ago

  * Use
  * bullet
  * points
  * aggressively

Fixed that for you

BLKNSLVR4• 4 years ago

If you can break a paragraph into bullet points do it!

People don't want to read what looks like a wall of text, but will happily jump to a nice convenient list of things.

People that enjoy Pynchon are a trivial percentage of the population. Good communication requires understanding what the target audience will actually pay attention to. It's a tightrope.

rozenmd• 4 years ago

Here are tips (specifically for blogging/article writing) that I learned while working at a blog company: https://maxrozen.com/blogging-lessons

I use them everywhere now, and bring in significantly more traffic as a result (writing more often also helps)

topkai22• 4 years ago

This doesn't match up with my career. The worst manager I ever had was one of the better writers. One of the better managers I've had rarely wrote and when he did it was solidly mediocre. The difference between them was what that the terrible manager was focused only on the interests of his superiors and peers, thinking it would advance him; the good manager obsessively worked to create alignment between thier subordinates interests and that of the greater organization.

The good manager has advanced and been successful as a 1st level manager. The terrible manager's goodbye letter was well written.

Writing well is an important skill that and all the good executive level (100+ report) managers I've had write well, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient for 1st level managers.

alvperez82• 4 years ago

That's my experience too

drewcoo2• 4 years ago

Why Are Good Managers Good Writers?
[Every trivial thing except commmunication.]

It's the communication, dude!

You know what else they're great at? Presenting. Public speaking. Ad hoc improv because that is management - making sure everything will be ok no matter what happens.

I agree with the title-ish, in ways the author would not assert, though.

I claim "Good Managers Write Goodly." Not well. If they did that, they'd be tech writers or speech writers or . . . any kind of writer, really. The point is to communicate what you have to and not sweat the rest.

nxpnsv• 4 years ago

some good managers write well, done bad managers too, and sone good managers write poorly. Possibly there are some correlations, but I’m certainly not convinced

bjornsing• 4 years ago

Writing Is Thinking

This is pretty much it, IMHO. If you can produce original writing then you are capable of original thought. That’s a good starting point for any human endeavor, management included.

Note though that this capacity to think is just a necessary but not sufficient condition to be a good manager.

oofnik• 4 years ago

I'm not sure there's anything special about writing in the context of managing that can't be claimed for communication in general. The ability to form words and sentences to convey ideas, meaning, and intent should be expected to correlate positively with management skill.

I suppose there's something to be said for the durability of writing, which makes it quite a lot harder to say something and then claim later to never have said it, or to have said something completely different.

Well, I guess I just undermined my own point.

takahisah• 4 years ago

I think this is why modern day politicians are so bad. They need to be so good at rewriting history that they cannot put their thinking in clear writing. I read letters and essays written by Abraham Lincoln and was struck by the clarity of thought and the power of his words. I don't think I've read any writings of recent politicians that make me feel the same way.

bagels• 4 years ago

Do they even do their own writing in modern times?

willcipriano• 4 years ago

"Repeat the line"

bradwood• 4 years ago

The title reminds me of that classic grammar Nazi quip:

Me: hi, how are you?

You: I'm doing good thanks. How are you?

Me: (facepalm). Mother Theresa did good, I'm merely doing _well_.

xenonite• 4 years ago

well, that's all good, but in German one can actually say "I feel good".

pritambaral• 4 years ago

but in German one can actually say "I feel good".

As you can in English. "I feel good" is not incorrect; "I'm doing good" is. 'To feel' is different from 'to do'.

nunorbatista• 4 years ago

Professor Patrick Wilson from the MIT [1] once wrote that:

"Your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas, in that order."

I think that's true. When I did my masters a few years ago, I enjoyed more the process of writing and editing than the research itself. I resonated with the thinking process behind the chain of ideas necessary to build a research document and this was surprising for me.

Writing has been something I left aside for some time until I decided to start my Cybersecurity newsletter [2], which has been a pleasure to write. Having the time to do it is the challenge.

[1] https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/emotional-intelligence-mit... [2] https://cyb3rsecurity.tips/

iLemming• 4 years ago

I feel that the well-written prose is falling out of fashion. With the informational overload, people no longer enjoy writing and reading paragraphs of text. Even on YouTube, increasing the playback speed is probably the most used feature today. Sometimes, I feel this trend is becoming generational. Who knows, maybe a few decades from now, anyone who copiously writes and reads a couple of books every week would be considered a genius.

Maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy, but it feels to me that these days, beginner programmers tend to focus on learning programming languages, and only later (sometimes) they realize - to be a successful software developer, one has to focus on learning a human language - English et al.

I think we (techy people) could reverse this trend by creating a culture of writing. It becomes even more important with the remote working style and distributed teams. It should become a norm - for when to ship three lines of code, there would be a page or two, explaining the change in English.

Then who knows, maybe a few decades from now, anyone who copiously writes and reads a couple of books every week would be considered "a smart person working in tech".

Good managers write good

Related Stories