How To Motivate Your Team To Write Great Content - CoSchedule Blog

How To Motivate Your Team To Write Great Content Blog Its not easy to write killer content over and over again, day after day. It is even more difficult when you arent the one writing, only guiding a team through the process. Step 1: Let your writers write! How do you motivate a team to produce better content? Or sometimes, how do you get them to produce any content at all? Bark, Beg, and Badger Usually, our first inclination is our worst. Hopefully we get better as we guide our team over time, but that doesnt stop us from badgering our writers a bit too much in the beginning.  We send reminder emails.  Sarcastic hints. Eye rolls. Yelling that tanks morale and friendships. These arent all that motivating, or successful. They rarely lead to long-term improvements. There is a better way. Ownership One of my go-to management theories for nearly everything has been the principal of ownership. When writers feel a sense of ownership on a project, they become more willing to do amazing things. They work late, they put in the extra time, and most importantly they take pride in what they do because they arent just doing it for you. They are doing it for themselves. Giving your writing team ownership in what they do gives their words power.This is powerful motivation, but it doesnt happen by accident. How do we motivate our teams? How do we give them a sense of ownership? 1. Let Them In Too many editors assume that their writers cannot be trusted. This is insulting, and makes grown adults feel like a child. Great editors move beyond this, and trust their writers first by letting them in on what we are doing. If they simply cant be trusted, then they probably shouldnt be on your team (and that is a different problem entirely).  This means that you should make them a part of your big decisions. Their opinion needs to count. It also means that your job is not to lord over them. Rather, your job is to delegate big goals, and then get out of the details and out of their way. 2. Let Them Be Them Most editors were writers first, and that makes it easy for them to meddle and place too much control over what their writers do and how they do it. Dont micro manage. Trust your writers, and let them develop their own spin, their own voice, and their own style. Of course, this doesnt mean that you withhold all restraints. Boundaries are good and necessary. Just dont be over zealous in your control, and recognize that your tendency is to go at least one step too far. 3. Create a Creative Environment When we over-extend ourselves as managers, we turn a creative process into a robotic one. We create   templates, guidelines, and standards that suck creativity out of the room. We believe that our limitations bring quality, but if they are over the top, they can do the exact opposite. Creativity is a powerful tool. We have to recognize  that our writers are creative people, and give them the opportunity to embrace it. This means that we need to be willing to let them try something new, let them explore, let them fail, and let them succeed all on their own.