You should write. It's good for your career.
You should write. It's good for your career.
Writing makes you stand out. It shows that you're a mentor, teacher, thought-leader, and that you’re willing to share your ideas. It's great for career development, and great for your team too.
I’m constantly coaching my teams to write.
There are so many great reasons. Writing is good for your career, good for your team, good for opening up new opportunities. Sit back, take some time, and imagine clearing your head of all those interesting thoughts, ideas, and problems — putting them on paper, and realizing some of the benefits for your own career.
Knowledge should be shared, not hoarded
A while back I wrote an article, Why being a hero isn’t great. The gist of the article is pretty straightforward. Some people keep knowledge to themselves, they focus entirely on making themselves valuable by allowing crises to develop. It’s a destructive role to play and one that’s terrible for the team dynamic.
The antithesis of that “hero” role is someone that tries to lift their team up. Share their knowledge, make the team itself better, stronger, and able to respond to crises together.
These are the kinds of team members every manager wants.
I worked with an amazing, talented engineer at Accenture. He almost never had time to code. Instead, he was always writing up new design patterns, clarifying complex problems with written examples, and building Miro boards to explain how to build effective solutions. When our team sat together, he was constantly moving, coaching everyone, helping them push their own boundaries. Any team he works with becomes a “10X” team.
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Sharing knowledge is valuable
I’ll admit, I’m bugging my team to write for selfish reasons.
I want my team to share ideas. I want them to share their knowledge, and strike up conversations around how to build new and interesting things.
Bottom line, I want to surround myself with a team that’s smarter than me, so I can relax in the knowledge that everything is going to be just fine. The most direct path I’ve found to that idyllic future is for everyone to share their ideas, because it makes me confident they’ll solve problems together.
The more ideas are shared, the more creativity blooms. That leads to collaborative teams, better ideas, and better solutions. I love to see those seeds grow to full bloom.
At Lightbend, after every professional services engagement we took the time to write about what we learned from our customer. I made sure the team had dedicated time to do this. Then we shared it with the company at large. It led to repeated and often very substantial improvements to the Lightbend technology stack.
Sharing your ideas fuels creativity
When my team starts sharing their ideas, I inevitably see a few things happen:
Thought leaderships inspires… more thought leadership. People, especially techies, love to create things. Sharing ideas (about problems, solutions, things to build) leads to more creativity. More problems start to get solved.
More minds are better than one. We always benefit from different perspectives, new twists on our ideas. When one person starts to share ideas, more start to chip in — either contributing or sharing their own new ideas.
The ideas get better and better. The imperfections are removed. Implementation is streamlined. Bugs are eliminated. Kind of like the SpaceX Raptor 3 engine. Collaboration leads to better solutions.
Even a small team of 3 that I led benefited from writing. In one case, our AWS infrastructure and security lead wrote a short paper on landing zone architecture. Then our lead developer read it and right away, they were both collaborating on making improvements to our planned CICD pipeline. It’s awesome to see that kind of collaboration.
You will inspire others
Your ideas will inspire others. It will inspire them to be creative. It will inspire them to accomplish new things. To push their own boundaries.
Whether your writing will inspire someone to try out some new ideas, or inspire them to start sharing their own ideas, or inspire them in some other way — I can guarantee, you will inspire others to take action.
I love hearing from my readers. It inspires me, too. I’m inspired every time someone takes a moment to send me a note about something new they learned, or an idea they particularly liked. It feels good to know what I’ve put out there is appreciated and valued.
Writing restructures thought
The act of writing gets us to think about our ideas. It gives us the chance to reorganize our thoughts, making our ideas clearer, expressing them better.
Often, writing leads to serious insight into our own work. As we intellectually engage with the subject matter, we analyze it more thoroughly. We synthesize concepts and judge the credibility of our sources and information we’ve gathered. We interact with readers — asking opinions or looking for a critique of a rough draft.
All of this activity around the act of writing gives our ideas, our arguments, our stories more depth. Writing is a technology that restructures thought very effectively, according to Walter Ong. Use it to improve your ideas!1
It’s better for memory and learning
Writing about something is a great way to cement knowledge. Just hearing a lecture or reading about something leads to about 10% or 20% knowledge retention.
In contrast, the act of doing leads to much greater knowledge retention. For example, designing a collaborative lesson — in other words, essentially writing about a topic can boost knowledge retention closer to 75%.23
You’ll strengthen relationships
Sending a well-phrased email is critical in today’s world, whether a thank you note or a project proposal. Being comfortable — and capable! — can enable you to make those connections and effectively communicate important ideas.
One of the many reasons I write is to connect with other people. This blog is about sharing my ideas — and it’s a great conversation opener. “Oh, you’re interested in domain driven design? I just wrote a post about that, here’s a link.”
It’s a lot more memorable than an email address. Now they’ve got something interesting to read, something to connect over, a reason for either of us to reach out and talk again. (“I’d love to hear what you thought of that article I sent you.”)
Writing is a leadership requirement
Teams need to grow, and for that they need a catalyst and a guide — someone that will help them find new boundaries to push against, discover new ways to solve problems, tackle interesting challenges.
Distilling your ideas and publishing them creates actionable intelligence for your team. It gives them ideas, blueprints, and challenges to explore.
Creating that kind of impetus in your team establishes you as a force multiplier, someone that creates growth and builds team capacity. It’s great for your career. Whether you want to be a tech lead, a team lead, or move into management — every one of those roles demands showing other people the path forward and challenging them to grow.
You create a lasting impression
Imagine having a reputation for being someone that shares knowledge, makes the team stronger, lifts up other people and does what it takes to solve problems.
That’s a force multiplier. Those are the individuals I can put on a team knowing they will build the team up.
I wish every single one of my employees was a force multiplier. Force multipliers are rare. One of the things I’ve noticed is that force multipliers love to write, mentor, train, record YouTube videos, you name it… they love to share ideas.
Being a force multiplier leaves a lasting impression. As a force multiplier, you’re valuable to your boss — who needs to build up their team. You’re also valued by every team member to whom you’ve taught something.
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Walter J. Ong, The Linguistics of Literacy (p. 293), John Benjamins e-Platform, July 1992, ISBN: 9789027277183.
Learning pyramid (Audio-Visual Methods in Teaching), attributed to National Training Laboratories Institute, Wikipedia. (See also: Edgar Dale).
Weyhe, Uslar, Weyhe, Kaluschke, Zachmann, Original research article, Frontiers in Surgery, Volume 5, 30 Nov. 2018
Good stuff!