Think your job is to be a curator of great writing talent? Think again. When you free yourself from managing writers, you get even more value out of your time.
Granted, there’s a feeling of satisfaction that comes from assembling a talented team of writers, overseeing their work from first draft to final, shepherding it through stakeholder approvals, and releasing it into the wild.
There’s a name for that feeling: the Curation Trap. If you’re in a communications leadership role, it can be a particularly easy trap to fall into and a tough one to get out of. Here’s a cautionary tale.
How the Curation Trap is Sprung
We once heard a communications director proudly proclaim how they had an entire bench of trusted freelance writers at their disposal. If a project required a writer, they’d assign it to the one they felt was the best fit.
But there was a cost. It turned out that managing these freelancers required more hand holding than they expected. Assignments and deadlines had to be coordinated; multiple lines of communication needed to be juggled; invoices and payments had to be properly executed.
Even though this communications director was focused on producing high-value assets with a quick turnaround for their company, managing freelancers had become an outsized imposition on their time and role. And yet, there was a worry that giving up this responsibility might pose a threat to their value.
It was in that very perception, though, where the solution lay.
How to Set Yourself Free
As a communications executive, your value is not in managing writers but in sourcing the best copy. In other words, your job isn’t to curate but to execute—it’s right there in your title.
You do that by finding the team of experienced writers who can produce what you need with the fewest touches possible on your part. That’s what MarketSmiths does for our clients. We are your curators, finding the most talented writers and matching them to the right assignments to produce the best possible copy.
It’s easy to understand how some executives find pride in the ability to curate individual capabilities to match specific needs. It’s an important part of any skill set… as long as it’s kept in perspective. But there are tasks that respect your time and value and tasks that impose on them. Managing writers invariably falls into the latter category.
Ready to free yourself from writer management? We’ll be happy to show you how.
