Hard on quality, hard on people

At my previous employer, Forrester, there was a dedicated commitment to both quality of analysis and quality of writing. This meant that your editor took what you wrote and critiqued the crap out of it, and you had to learn to make it better to meet that high bar.

My boss at the time, Emily, was used to editing my work. But one time, she asked me to edit a piece she was working on. The objective both to tap into my expertise and to teach me a new skill. She submitted a draft, I marked it up in detail, and we met so I could tell her what it need to become much better.

As we sat down over a draft printout covered in red ink, I started to tell her just what was wrong with it and what it needed. Eventually I looked up and saw a sour look on her face.

“Is there a problem?” I asked.

“You’re supposed to start with, ‘Here’s what’s good about this and what I liked about it.’ “

And we both broke up laughing. Luckily, Emily had a strong ego and a pretty good sense of humor. And there was plenty that was good about it, I’d just failed to mention those parts.

She was very ready to embrace my suggestions to make the piece better. She was just teaching me something: criticism goes a lot better when it starts with a human connection.

(And yes, when she edited me, she had always started with what was good about what I wrote, I just hadn’t taken note of that habit.)

I’m still not great at the human part

That interaction was 28 years ago. I’ve learned some things about human connection since then, but my basic personality hasn’t changed.

In the 9+ years I’ve been freelancing, I did well in part by listening carefully to what clients needed and understanding how to talk to them. But I’m still a hardass about quality.

I always, always start my editorial critique by asking, “What does the reader need?” Every comment comes from that perspective. I am a lot more focused on the reader’s needs than the author’s. My focus on the author amounts to: Why did this person write the way they did, and what do they need to understand to write better?

This is good for the author, but not always easy to take.

Even now, decades after my meeting with Emily, I am far more focused on the quality of the work than on the author’s feelings.

I remind myself that clients are humans with the power to fire me, and so I’ve learned to be a little nicer. A little. And it’s not fake: I do care about them, just as I cared about Emily.

But I don’t budge on quality. The goal of increasing quality is behind every edit I make. I never pull punches to be nice. As I learn and get better, 95% of my learning is about how books and publishing work. Only 5% is about how people work.

I’m sure this limits my potential appeal to clients with thick skins. And I regret that sometimes.

But I’ve learned something.

When your reputation for expertise, intelligence, commitment to quality gets around, people want to tap into it.

Hard on quality, easy on people would be better.

But hard on quality, a little hard on people works too, so long as you can listen and you’re not gratuitously mean.

And easy on people, easy on quality is worthless. I have no interest in clients that just want to be loved as I help them produce crap. (Also: people like that don’t tend to want to pay much.)

I continue to learn about people, and my sarcastic sense of humor is helping my clients and me to get along. We are all imperfect. I’m the first to admit that I am, too.

But I’ll probably be hard on quality and a little hard on people for the foreseeable future.

How about you? Are you easy on people or hard on them? And do you have any regrets?