As a manager, I’m often more of an editor. Help!

[Anonymous]

My fed boss is extremely focused on writing, formatting, and details. He expects me to review and provide feedback on all of my employees’s written documents, in the form of value-added content and pushing them to better their writing skills. He expects everything to be passed up to him error-free. I find myself (a former Writer-Editor myself), getting caught up in editing everyone’s work, paragraph by paragraph. We’ve held sessions on quality, purchased Grammarly, and turned back documents with errors, but the volume of work that needs careful review is overwhelming, and people’s writing skills improve but not to perfection. How can I stop being the editor?

[Anonymous]

Change jobs! I’m sorry but onc3 you reach a certain point, that’s what your job is.

[Anonymous]

Have your team review each other’s work, and tell them you expect it to be error-free when you get it.

[Anonymous]

The job of a manager is to get the work done, either yourself or by delegation, possibly with hiring. If you are busy with other tasks, push this down to your team.

If you aren't busy with other tasks, be glad you have something useful to contribute.

Use Generative AI.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My fed boss is extremely focused on writing, formatting, and details. He expects me to review and provide feedback on all of my employees’s written documents, in the form of value-added content and pushing them to better their writing skills. He expects everything to be passed up to him error-free. I find myself (a former Writer-Editor myself), getting caught up in editing everyone’s work, paragraph by paragraph. We’ve held sessions on quality, purchased Grammarly, and turned back documents with errors, but the volume of work that needs careful review is overwhelming, and people’s writing skills improve but not to perfection. How can I stop being the editor?

I have some ideas - and I think PP has a good one - your employees should review each other's work. I'd put a twist on it and call it second level review after Grammarly.

But what is your actual job? And what does your work unit do? What are you not doing because you are editing?

I admit I'm headscratching a little bit because why are you hiring people that don't have the skills or aptitude to learn the skills they need to in order to do their jobs.

[Anonymous]

I'm curious to know what types of mistakes, because I think he's absolutely correct to expect error free work. Are you correcting spelling and tenses or are you having to rewrite and rearrange for clarity?

[Anonymous]

Training field. Not so much mistakes but rewrite and rearrange for clarity, for example, lots of new projects and each one requires a program plan with multiple parts, narratives about the work, and then content summaries too.

[Anonymous]

I feel like this is par for the course in higher up fed jobs. Our top attorneys spend a lot of time reviewing regulations, rules and documents for grammar, not just content. I report to the most senior person and yeah, it better be perfect when she gets it. She makes editorial comments on docs before signing.

If the volume of work that needs reworked is that large, I think this is bad management skills. Put it in their performance evaluations and stick to it. "Requires editing on no more than 2 documents a month." "Works independently and produces quality work." Every time a document needs redone, send them an email about their mistakes as a paper trail. Make them fix mistakes and stop fixing them for them.

[Anonymous]

Yeah unless your role is actually to be an editor, your team is not a good fit. You need to give them tangible requirements and if they don’t meet them, manage them out.

[Anonymous]

Are you editing it in track changes where they can just accept changes and turn it back?

Maybe try doing it in hand or on PDF where they have to make the edits themselves.

Or point out examples of errors, tell them to edit throughout the document to find similar errors, and then turn it back in to you.

Basically, try to teach, not edit.

[Anonymous]

Are you working more than forty hours a week?

This may just be your job.

[Anonymous]

Handwriting the notes and scanning it is so brutal! Do it!

[Anonymous]

Lol okay I'll bite - this seems ridiculous if we are talking about emails and brainstorming.

[Anonymous]

Identify the two best writers/editors on your team. Do you think they could take over a lot of this work? Make them a layer between you and the rest of the staff, so you only get things once they've already given them a first pass. You will still wind up doing review and editing, but things will arrive on your desk closer to a final draft. The goal should be for you to never or almost never have to correct things like basic grammar and punctuation, and to rarely have to pass something back for major structural issues. That way your review can be just to perfect it before it goes to your boss.

I'd also look at your staff and really assess their strengths and weaknesses. Can you allocate assignments in a way that better plays to their strengths. Do you have weak writers who should basically never touch long-form projects? People who are decent writers but prone to typos and other errors when they are in a rush could be shifted to projects with longer headways so they have a chance to take their time, and so on. I'd be rigorous about this -- apply a rubric to each member of the team and see if you can shift people around to maximize the staff you have.

And then I'd really emphasize writing, especially "clean" writing without basic spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors, in future hiring. Again, I know you are limited somewhat as a fed, but to the degree that you can insert some screening for writing quality into the process, do so.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Identify the two best writers/editors on your team. Do you think they could take over a lot of this work? Make them a layer between you and the rest of the staff, so you only get things once they've already given them a first pass. You will still wind up doing review and editing, but things will arrive on your desk closer to a final draft. The goal should be for you to never or almost never have to correct things like basic grammar and punctuation, and to rarely have to pass something back for major structural issues. That way your review can be just to perfect it before it goes to your boss.

I'd also look at your staff and really assess their strengths and weaknesses. Can you allocate assignments in a way that better plays to their strengths. Do you have weak writers who should basically never touch long-form projects? People who are decent writers but prone to typos and other errors when they are in a rush could be shifted to projects with longer headways so they have a chance to take their time, and so on. I'd be rigorous about this -- apply a rubric to each member of the team and see if you can shift people around to maximize the staff you have.

And then I'd really emphasize writing, especially "clean" writing without basic spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors, in future hiring. Again, I know you are limited somewhat as a fed, but to the degree that you can insert some screening for writing quality into the process, do so.

Doesn't the above essentially punish one's best performing workers by giving them more work?