Return Home

Be an employee, think like a contractor

A conversation with Deborah Gill-Hesselgrave

by Gail Van Landingham

Contact Gail

When Deborah Gill-Hesselgrave (dgh) spoke to our local STC chapter about contracting in April, I saw a lot of relevance for my own work as an employee. I wanted to ask her a few questions about how to bring the perspective of a contractor to that of a full-time employee.

Question: How do you avoid becoming complacent?

You said that you became complacent after six months of contracting when the company treated you as an employee. What advice would you give to an employee about how to avoid becoming complacent?

dgh. Actually, the benchmark for me is about 18 months. For many years now, when a company wants me to become an employee, it is usually to fix some huge problem. I typically achieve the initial tactical goal within the first six months and then spend the next six months optimizing the various infrastructure issues I control.

Sitting back + cruising = complacency

By the 18-month mark, things are chugging along pretty well, and I find that I can tend to sit back and cruise. This is not a good use of me or the dollars being spent for me.

So, how do you avoid becoming complacent? I think the simple answer (the one that is actually hardest to act on) is to continuously see yourself and conduct yourself as a consultant. The minute you stop doing this, you begin down the path to complacency (the old "that's-not-my-job" view of the world).

Avoiding complacency

Avoiding complacency means:

Bottom line: the antidote to complacency is activism. Be an internal activist, and you will not and cannot become complacent.

Question: How do you balance multiple projects for one company?

I have five projects, emails, multiple interruptions, and requests for information. And my boss has one project that she wants in an hour. Any suggestions on how to prioritize all this?

dgh. The power of "no." If you aren't willing to exercise the power of no, plan on eventually becoming complacent and even sooner becoming burned out and dispirited.

Planning for 80-percent on-target production

Tip #1: The Project Management Institute did some studies a few years back, and they found that the actual amount of time available for a person to produce is about 75 percent of their standard work day. (These were folks in fields such as programming, contracts administration, and product development and others that have direct corollaries to what folks in technical communication fields do.) I never have worked for an organization that willingly accepted the 75-percent finding, but I know of quite a few that allow for 80 percent of on-target production when they develop schedules.

So, one of the first things you have to do is to allow for and accept tasking for only 80 percent of your day. This means that in an eight-hour day, you can really and truly be attentive to production tasks for six hours. The other two hours are for email, interruptions, non-project-specific phone calls, and the like. Additionally, in your planning you must factor in demands to attend meetings related to each project, production expectations of the folks downstream, and unexpected projects from your boss.

Negotiating on deadlines

This brings us back to those extra requests from the boss and others (especially if you are applying some of my tips on how to avoid complacency). When you review your project assignment and examine your master project list (you do have one, don't you?), you need to be able to tell your boss, "I'm not going to be able to do those 13 screen shots for your presentation next week unless I can slip the first draft date for the reference guide from this Thursday to this Friday afternoon. If that's okay with you, I'll send Sean in Marketing a note right now, and then I'll get busy on those screen shots for you. Do you want them as JPEGs or TIFs?"

Knowing your company's strategic plan

Now, as to prioritization, if you don't know or don't have access to your company's strategic plan for this fiscal year, you need to change that right now. Your priorities must be in direct alignment with what the company is trying to achieve. Are they intent on getting that old, archaic product retired? Then you probably need to be helping to get the new flagship product out the door. Is the company heading down the road to reduce help center calls by 25 percent? Then you'd better be not only minding the store in terms of writing exceptional user assistance, but you might want to check in with the sales and the training teams to see how else you can support them so they can better prepare the customers to be successful.

Alerting your boss to conflicts

Once you are smart and hip about your company's strategic priorities, you need to take your understanding of those priorities and your view of how you're going to be a part of achieving those priorities to your boss. You need to lay out your plan on how you're going to contribute to those priorities and elicit her feedback so that the two of you are on the same page. Then, the next time she has a just-in-time request, you two can look to see how her request directly supports the company's priorities; if it doesn't, your job is to gently ask, "I see this is important to you, Sharon, but I'm concerned that this might distract us from getting the beta product out on time. What do you think?"

Okay, you asked a really big question, and, as you can see, the answers to it can be complex. You need to know:

Remember, you must be in charge of ensuring that you and your boss are always on the same page. You have one boss; she has more than one you.

Question: How do you keep the company's success as your number one focus?

Your goal is to make the company successful. How do you keep this as the main objective, especially when you're bogged down in the details?

dgh. If the details are not going to directly contribute to the big picture, they are the wrong details. Again, just as I noted above, you must know what the company's priorities are.

Knowing the company values

Additionally, you must know the company values.

Does it value time to market? If so, then elements of quality take a back seat. (I swear on everything right and holy in this world that this is a true statement as much as technical communication professionals hate to hear this!)

If customer satisfaction is truly a value that your company supports, then slipping a schedule in order to measurably improve a deliverable will be accommodated.

But no matter what the core value of the company (note that inherent in "core" is the notion of a singular value, not a laundry list of righteous wishings), your contributions must directly influence that core value.

At a nutrition company. My nutrition company client's core value was making a positive difference in the lives of customers who bought the product. Therefore, it was important to make sure that we had accurate information that was easy to access. But even more important was our being able to provide professional support by phone and email to help customers through the necessary lifestyle changes.

For the nutrition company, a fight occurred because the investors were negative when we told them we were going to staff a help center. (They wanted that stuff to go to an outsourced call center.) Once I explained that what differentiated us from the competition was our commitment to partner with and coach our customers, they backed off and gave us the support we needed.

At a medical device company. My medical device client's core value was accuracy. We held up a release because we got some weird results on a final validation run through QA. This impacted my part of the project and, knowing that lives could be affected, it was a given to hold the help system and the manuals until we had everything sorted out. With the med device folks, all I had to do was remind the product manager (who was a first-to-market kind of guy) that, by not pressing us to meet a date but, rather, by supporting us to write the right tips, alerts, and so on into the product, he would be a hero when it came time to demo the product to the legal department and to the company's most important (and most fussy) customer.

Keeping in focus—like a research scientist

So, keeping your focus on the company's success is like being a research scientist. Do not engage in any activity that does not directly influence the research question (or, in this case, the company's strategic plan, its priorities, and its core values).

Question: How do you become a better listener?

You said that you ask questions about your client's needs and objectives, and then you just listen. You do this instead of giving the client a long-winded dissertation on your skills and experience. So what suggestions do you have on becoming a more receptive listener on the job?

dgh. Please know that I'm not being sassy with this answer. The way to become a better, more receptive listener is to just be quiet. People will tell you what they need and what they expect.

I won't go on about the skills and traits of an active listener. There are plenty of articles on that. Your job is to hear what your customer's pain is. You need to understand what the effect of that pain is. This comes from asking the right questions, listening, and asking more right questions.

Asking the right questions

The "right questions" are those that are in the customer's language and are taken from the customer's perspective. Your job is to be smart enough to be able to translate their experiences, their viewpoints, and their expectations into your language and to create actionable solutions from all of it.

You will restate a lot of what the speaker just said. You will be asking questions like, "Is that what you meant?" And when you think you've got it all figured out, you will then offer something like, "You said 'thus and such.' As I said earlier, this sounds to me like 'this and that.' If you still agree that I have the right take on all of this, then it seems to me that we [key word] should [whatever you think the solution is]. Don't you agree?"

Through this exercise, you have demonstrated you listened to them, you heard them, and you are keen to partner with them on taking their pain away. People want you to listen for just a couple of reasons: to keep them from talking to themselves (in which case you don't have to come up with any solutions) or to help them with a solution.

Question: How do you market your skills?

You said that contractors need to be their own sales and marketing staff. As an employee, how do you market your skills within the company to do work that you think is important but may not be on the top of your manager's priority list, such as assisting with the company training videos?

dgh. See my answer to how not to be complacent. Look at what I say about knowing what your company's priorities and core value are. Also, read my article in the April newsletter. And listen. (Kind of neat how all this stuff ties together, huh?)

Making your manager look like a hero

The quickest way to get something high on your manager's list is to understand her priorities and her pain and look for ways to meet her priorities and take away her pain.

It's not about you. It's about her. It's about making her look like a hero to her manager. (Among the things I do regardless of whether I'm an employee or a consultant is move heaven and earth in order to make my client—whether that is my boss or my customer—look like a hero to the folks who matter to him or her.)

Getting your manager to connect the dots

Also, help your manager to connect the dots. For example, if you help with the company training videos, you will be able to apply adult learning theory that you witness when you work with the instructional designers to your own work, thus making it more meaningful and actionable for your end users. By assisting with the training videos, you will be able to bring your intimate knowledge of information architecture and the product to the table and help the folks you're working with gain new skills and competencies.

I think you get the picture.