I’ve learned many things (so many things) the hard way over the course of my career, and especially during my time as a manager and administrator in academic libraries.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that writing really benefits from the “buddy system.” You know about the buddy system — it’s the primary way that we keep large groups of small children from getting lost or running out into the street when we take them out on field trips. You have the children pair up, making each member of each pair accountable for the location of the other. When the time comes to get onto or off of the bus, or to move to a different location, or to walk along a busy street, you yell “Buddy up!” and all the children have to find their buddy and stay with him or her throughout the process. It’s not a perfect system by any means, but it doesn’t have to be; it just has to increase the ease of keeping the kids together and reduce the likelihood of a child getting lost or hurt.

Buddying up is also a valuable tool when it comes to producing documents, especially documents designed to communicate a message from library leadership.

Here’s the thing: I’m now old enough to have a pretty good idea of what I’m good at and what I’m bad at. One thing I’m good at is writing. I’ve been a good writer since I was six, and I’ve become a better one since. I don’t claim to be a great writer, but it’s something I’m very good at.

What I’ve learned over the years, however, is that being a good writer is not key to producing good professional and administrative documents. It’s definitely helpful, but it’s not key. What are the key elements of a good document? There are actually three:

A good administrative document includes correct information, which is presented clearly and concisely, and answers more questions than it raises. A document that is awkwardly written but still accomplishes those three goals is better than an elegantly written document that fails to accomplish them. (Of course, poor writing can be poor precisely because it’s unclear; but awkward, lifeless, and even ungrammatical writing can also be admirably clear and concise.)

Being a good writer is not key to producing good documents.

Most people in positions of library leadership will be at least reasonably good writers; it’s hard to get to a leadership position if you don’t have a history of clear and effective written communication. And the danger of being a good writer in leadership is that you may come to the mistaken conclusion that you don’t need help producing important documents.

Experienced leaders reading this essay are probably already nodding their heads ruefully, remembering a time they drafted a public or organization-wide email, memo, policy statement, or press release without getting help from their team, and came to bitterly regret it. Certainly this has happened to me, more than once (I may write well, but I learn slowly). Here are three lessons I’ve learned, each connected to one of those three key elements of a good document:

1. As a leader, you do not have enough information. It’s in the nature of your job to be a fox (who knows many things about your organization) rather than a hedgehog (who knows one area of the organization very well). This is both inevitable and essential, and it puts you in a very good position to say broad things about the library as a whole. But you need the hedgehogs to help ensure that you say accurate things about the specific areas of the library they know well.
2. As a writer, you are not as clear and concise as you think you are. You need other people to help you kill your darlings and pare down your writing to what’s essential and what really serves the purpose of the document. A phrase you love may be a phrase that gets in the way, and only someone who doesn’t love it will be able to help you see that.
3. As a reader, you cannot read your document the way another reader can. You know what you mean before you start reading your own document; you need it to be read by people who don’t already know what you mean. They will be the ones able to identify which questions you’ve answered and which new ones you’ve created, and thus to help you either change what’s written so those new questions aren’t raised, or adjust the writing so that those questions are answered in the document.

As I’ve learned these lessons, I’ve come to adopt a practice that has saved me untold heartache: I almost never send an important email, policy statement, or other significant document out to the library organization, to the campus community, or to university administration without first running it past the members of my leadership team and asking “What am I missing or miscommunicating here?”. The feedback I’ve received from them has saved my bacon (and, more importantly, preserved the library’s reputation) more times than I can count.