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There are two types of "troublesome writers".
- The writer who brings no additional value.
- The writer who retains a unique skill that make him work the
trouble. (A unique skill is something that gets or keeps a customer
because they cannot find it on their own).
The first one is easy. As long as the writer REALLY doesn't bring
anything unique to the table, dump him. He will end up being a drain
on the limited available resources. Just like in sales when you have
an account who is causing damage to your attention to other accounts,
that writer is no longer an asset and you cut both loose.
The second one is tougher. OK, she is a pain, she argues over
everything, she sometimes doesn't follow orders, she forgets to place
verbs in her sentences. But, she has a unique skill that nobody else
has and that skill commands big bucks (she can create greate user
documentation, though without verbs, from machine level code.
I was at a position in a prior profession where I was the second
instance. I had my boss come up to me and tell me that I had so many
people in the shop mad at me that if I was on fire, they wouldn't pee
on me. However, I was in sales and my billing was 40% of the entire 5
person sales force.
Sometimes there is a reason for this lousy attitude and sometimes the
person just has a lousy attitude. The former may be that she KNOWS
she has that skill and isn't being recognized publicly and sometimes
that recognition isn't just money. Maybe she doesn't KNOW why she has
this attitude. Just something is missing that she needs.
However, it still boils down to she needs to earn her keep somehow
and if she doesn't, she is simply to expensive to stick around. It
would be interesting to find out if she has joined any place where
she is happy, then find out what she is being givent o make her that
way.
> Okay, lets try a new topic. How to handle troublesome writers.
>
> Yesterday I was thinking about this writer who worked at our firm a
> few years
> back and what a pain she was. No matter what I asked her to do, she
> always went
> off and did something else. She was always fighting with me over
> every little
> sentence. It was a never-ending struggle to edit her documents.
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