How to not be an asshole Content Designer

There’s a fine line and you gotta walk it
King Joffrey by Know your meme
Here she is again with her rogue titles. I know, I know. But hear me out. After now over 10 years of working my Content Design and UX Writing magic, I truly believe the most underrated skill we can have is walking the fine line between being persistent, confident, and notorious with our work AND being an asshole.
Let me explain.

The one thing that shitty collabs have in common

Some time last year I was trying to figure out the puzzle of matching a small content design team with large requests. While doing that, I was still working most of the requests myself as the new headcount hadn’t joined yet. And while many collabs ran smoothly, there were certainly some that went haywire.
I kept trying to figure out why and couldn’t get rid of this gut feeling that in situations where a collab didn’t go well, something was off.
These situations, they all felt kinda similar too.
Months later I was talking to one of my new team members when it finally hit me: I had been too much of an asshole.

A content designer has to be a great storyteller and an even better negotiator when the story isn’t so great.

This is the number one thing I tell students these days.
What does that have to do with being an asshole?
Well, a lot of people have opinions on copy and content design in general, no matter if it has to do with their job or not. And many of them will openly throw that feedback at you. To deal with that feedback the best thing you can do is ensure you have a good story to back up your copy and content strategy recommendations.
The story may include insights, user research, tone and voice guidance, or simply the fact that you explored tonnes of options and this came out on top.
But that story you tell when presenting your recommendations will still be questioned in some cases.
This is where we make it or break it.
You have to confidently and persistently retell that story, expand on parts of it, and hold your ground without making others feel like their feedback isn’t welcome or hasn’t been taken into account.
And at exactly this point in the content design process is when you have to walk that fine, fine line between confident and persistent vs asshole.

We’ve all been there

Looking back on my haywire projects, I had been an asshole.
I had tried to shut down discussions without expanding on my story. Or my story had been shit in the first place. Or I simply lost my cool, thinking that this was MY JOB and none of YOUR business, and gone into the whole discussion with that mindset (which, spoiler alert, makes it really hard to get people to see your side of things and agree).
I know some of you are now reading this and wondering why I’m openly admitting to being an asshole. Well, first of all, we all are. Sometimes. You are too, dear reader. And the only way to be less of one is to reflect and realize you could have done better.

Respect > a word

When I coach other UX Writers I often hear “And they don’t listen to me!” or “They just change the copy!” or “The devs just come up with their own suggestions at the end of a process without asking me why I suggested something else in the first place” or, or, or…the list goes on.
I will admit it’s frustrating and I know EXACTLY what it feels like. You know you’ve done your job, you have the mandate, and still people step in late in the process and essentially ask you to do your job again from scratch or force you to defend your work (often in public, on Slack of all places. YUCK).
That’s a shitty feeling and it’s very common in Content Design (check this survey).
And it happens (almost) everywhere, even in mature design and product orgs.
So I’d argue you can’t avoid these situations. But you can recenter yourself, take a deep breath, tell your story again, maybe negotiate and discuss a little, and not be an asshole.
This means that sometimes you might need to adjust your work. And other times you might need to back off completely (because you gotta pick your battles and not every battle is worth it, but that’s another post).

But in the end, the respect you have from peers and stakeholders is worth much more than a word you feel strongly about.

Write that down, folks.
Respect and relationships > Words.
Always.

And that’s that. I hope this post inspires you to reflect on the stories you tell about your work, take more deep breaths, and maybe even let it go every now and then.
Our jobs are difficult and sometimes, so much more emotionally draining than we’d ever expect. It’s easy to lose our cool, get offended, and offend.
Let’s all be a little bit more mindful of it.