Through the course of moving to a new content management system, launching a responsive website, and getting more involved in projects that were initially outside of our team’s scope, we got really busy. Something had to give. Unfortunately, the blog gave.

So we’re taking a break from blogging.

But don’t worry, we’re not going away! We’re always more than happy to answer your questions, work with you on projects, and fix things when they break. Contact us any time at web-services@bethel.edu.

For the time being, that’s all folks!

A lot of these principles are well and good.

They work swimmingly when you’re building a smallish website. Or when everyone contributing to your site has a solid grasp of web best practices. Or when your main goal is publishing articles, posts, or documentation that carries similar content structures—like news sites, blogs, and help forums.

But what about when you have a 20,000 page website with diverse and varied content requirements? What if you have hundreds of web contributors who are experts in finance, biology, or event planning but not necessarily web content management?

I’ve worked in enterprise content management at a university for six years. And I’ve found a lot of the latest web content theories to be useful and relevant on the super-micro or heady-abstract level. But, if I’m being honest, many of the principles just don’t seem to scale when you’re managing a big, complex content system.

Universities, government agencies, and other mega institutions likely get what I mean. Taking these abstract theories and trying to apply them in a highly political, messy, human environment is immensely challenging and maybe even borderline impossible. When you tack on the limitations of your CMS and available resources, it feels like you’re trying to drive a system as incomprehensible as the Starship Enterprise.

So which of today’s web management principles can we actually use in our big messy systems? Is there any way to make the theories more practical or grow them to a larger scale so they make sense for our kind of work?

Here are a few of the strategies I’ve used.

Extend content management beyond the web

One of my big pushes right now is to help people stop thinking of our CMS as a tool for building webpages. Instead, I want us to see it as a system for managing information.

The CMS should be the place to store as much content as possible—not just webpages.

Some info will end up on the web, but not all of it. Some might get sent out through emails or exported for use on print pieces.

We’re trying to take a huge step back and think of not only what’s needed on the web, but what info should be in the CMS that’s currently sitting in word docs on shared drives, Adobe files on desktops, or email inboxes.

For example, this spring we needed to update our print promotional materials for our undergrad academic programs. Instead of looking only at print pieces, we decided to include the websites and work on new content for both at the same time. That way we could identify what content would be shared across print and web and then build out the content requirements in the CMS to house all promotional info together in one place.

Now, when web authors update their site, they’re also keeping content for their print pieces current because it’s all housed in the same template. Next time we need to run a print job, we can pull fresh content right from the CMS and pass it along to a designer for new formatting. When we need a blurb about a specific program for a new kind of piece or an email, we know where to go.

One of today’s web best practices that makes this system work is separating information from presentation. If we think of content as the words and images (the information), and let the CMS take care of the formatting, then the information becomes more portable and useful. The content becomes pieces of information, rather than designed elements stuck to a webpage.

It takes some work on the backend and lots of conversation and planning, but once structures are in place it becomes a lot easier to maintain information going forward. And don’t worry about doing it everywhere. Start with one small section or a single content type and see what you learn.

Find a balance between structure and flexibility

The harsh truth is that you can’t give everyone equal attention. There’s no way you can dedicate the same amount of time and skill and funds to every piece of information when you’re working in enterprise content management. And that means you’re going to have to say no and make tough decisions and prioritize.

I spend a lot of time thinking about content priority. At our institution, all information falls into 5 different content levels.

Assigning content levels to all of our information helps us determine things like:

• How much time we should spend planning and developing
• What information needs to go through editorial workflows
• How much training and support we can provide
• What tools should be used for building and maintaining content
• What permissions we should assign to authors and contributors

Content levels also help us find the balance between structure and flexibility.

Top level content gets more flexibility. We spend more time crafting unique layouts and content treatments for higher level information. It receives more design finesse and development magic.

But that means lower level content must have more structure and follow more rules. It’s housed in similar templates and uses basic tools so that we can distribute content production to authors who don’t work with web content all day. Because turnover of web authors is high, structured systems also allow us to streamline training and make it easier to replace authors who have moved on to other roles within the institution.

Finding that balance between structure and flexibility will be different for every institution because of politics, clout, business process, and resource availability. But at the very least, it’s important to spend time prioritizing where you should invest the time to make a splash and where you need to say no to unique requests so that you have time for the projects that will make a bigger impact.

Plan for the life of your content

When you’re dealing with content on such a large scale you have to plan for maintenance. There’s just no other way to keep your sanity. And then you have to do the tough work and carry out your maintenance plans.

This is a huge challenge for us humans. We like to create, but we struggle to sustain because it’s tiring, draining work with little reward.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

– Kurt Vonnegut

There’s no slick trick for ensuring your information is maintained. It’s just a lot of work. But there are some strategies we use to make it a bit easier.

First, we don’t create or publish new content unless there is a dedicated author for the information. Our web team members are not information experts. They’re here to set up web systems that work for the institution. They’re not here to know when information is out of date. All content needs someone looking after it once it’s created.

Second, everyone goes through training. We try our best to not only train people on how to use tools but also on how to create good content—from information architecture to heading structure to linking best practices.

Third, we meet regularly with those responsible for maintaining content and give them new information. Through monthly meeting ups, our authors have an avenue to ask questions, connect with each other, and build their skills.

There’s a lot more I could say about enterprise content management because it’s a huge, challenging task not for the faint of heart.

Be encouraged that there are others out there trying to figure out how today’s best practices apply to the complex work you do. There are likely times when you dream of being able to build and support a 50-page website focused on a single product or service, but know that lots of people appreciate and rely on the work you do behind the scenes to keep your giant systems running.

Keep up the good work, and know that every small step moves you forward.

To create the right solution, we needed to resolve 3 big issues:

• Selecting the correct image size using dynamic JavaScript and HTML
• Creating different sizes of the original image automatically
• Uploading original images into the CMS

So, what did we do? We first looked into getting some JavaScript and HTML to select a good image size. This task was made easier with a little help from our friends across the pond.

Selecting the Correct Image – Imager.js

The BBC has an awesome library called Imager.js. Without burdening you with too much technical jargon, Imager.js is a JavaScript library to dynamically put an image into a placeholder element when the page loads. There are quite a few different libraries to do this, but what separates Imager from the rest of the pack is that it uses the width of the container element, instead of the width of the entire screen. So if we only need an image 100px wide to fit a container (even if the screen itself is 2560px wide), that’s the size we get.

Another thing we liked about Imager was that it loads images by the exact width, rather than using generic identifiers like “small”, “medium”, “large” to specify size. This helps us follow our third rule from the last post, “don’t serve a bigger image than you need.” Imager will select the exact size to fit the screen area. I won’t go into the coding specifics, but it’s documented well and easy to use.

Once we had Imager working correctly, the next problem was figuring out what to do with tons of different sizes of the same image. Dumping them into our CMS would make the system very cluttered and unfriendly. So it was time to look into solutions for automatically creating different sized images of an original image outside the CMS.

Creating Image Sizes – Thumbor

After some searching, we found a Python application called Thumbor.

Thumbor is pretty easy to install, and very easy to use. You simply call the Thumbor service using a URL and send a few parameters. Most notably, you send a width and height. Then it will download the original image, resize, crop if necessary, and return the new image. This means we can put Thumbor URL’s directly in our <img> HTML tags and it will work just like a normal image.

Remember how Imager used exact pixel width instead of a size? This was perfect for Thumbor. It was extremely simple to configure Imager.js to work with a Thumbor URL using an exact width.

Thumbor also has a few other neat tricks. First, it can set the height of the updated image automatically based on the width. It also stores versions locally. So if you request a 300px-wide image, it will resize, crop, and return that image. But it will also save a local copy, either on the filesystem or in a database. This means that next time you request the same 300px-wide version of the image, it won’t have to resize, crop, and return. It will simply return the smaller version it saved. This means that Thumbor overhead is extremely small. It only has to crop an image once. This made meeting our second rule, “have your resized images ready to go before they’re needed” pretty easy. Thumbor stores the versions for us.

To make it even faster, we have a simple script to request popular sizes of Imager from Thumbor when each image is uploaded. This means all our images will be available when we need them.

So once we had Imager and Thumbor working seamlessly together, the last step was pretty simple.

Uploading Images

Now there’s only one rule left to worry about, “always upload the largest copy possible.” Unfortunately, there isn’t some fancy Python script to make sure our web contributors upload the largest image size possible. This step requires some training. However, there might be a few helpful things you can do depending on your CMS. Maybe you can set a minimum width and height for new image uploads? Or a minimum file size? Who knows…just brainstorming.

But once the image upload process is actually started in the system, we can start having some fun. The first thing we do when an image is uploaded is automatically upload it to the server. Nobody thinks to publish an image after upload anyway. The CMS automatically pushes this image to the CDN, which triggers the script to request the different widths from Thumbor. This means that there are now 5, 10, 15, or even more versions of the image ready to go.

The best part? The web contributor can work with the image within the CMS just like normal. They have no idea that the image they are working with is never actually used. And that’s not a problem at all. They embed their image onto a page, and the template configures Imager to create the Thumbor-friendly URL inside the <image> tag. And then, when the page itself is published and viewed, the resized images are ready to go, just like any other images.

Aside from a few installs and a little template work, it’s completely seamless for authors, designers, and developers. And, to top it all off, no overhead for end-users. Just like that, we’ve created a 2007-style way to interact with images that works seamlessly with 2014-compatible complexity.

However, a lot has changed in the last two years.

In 2007, Apple released the first-generation iPhone. The iPhone was the first smartphone that appealed to the average person. And, as we all know, it was a huge success and now all the major smartphone manufacturers are taking the same approach.

Overall, smartphones are great. You have instant access to the Internet, GPS navigation, calling, and texting all from a little device that you carry with you. For website maintainers, however, smartphones and the many devices they’ve spawned present some serious problems.

Problem #1 – Mobile connections are slow

While mobile speeds are a ton faster than they used to be, they’re still pretty slow compared to a traditional connection, especially outside of a big city.

So why is this a problem?

Well, compared to text and HTML code, images are really big. In fact, the text, html, CSS, and Javascript from www.bethel.edu is about 10% of the total page size. The other 90% is mostly images.

All that to say, text loads really fast, images load really slow. You can have an entire essay that’s smaller than a single image. On a desktop connection, not the biggest deal. However, this can make a huge difference on a slow mobile connection.

The simple solution: Make images as small as possible. Easy, right?

Not so fast.

Problem #2 – Retina

In 2010, Apple coined the term “Retina display.” In reality, this is just a screen with a ton more pixels than normal and an operating system that can still make everything look good. This is amazing for text and icons. Everything is smoother and overall better to view. So what is the downside? Well, images of course.

If anybody happens to be reading this on a Retina laptop, you might have noticed images look really bad on some websites. Why is this? Well, if you double the pixels of your display, but don’t double your image size, the images will have to expand to fill in the extra area. This causes blurry images all over your websites.

On a desktop, you can just serve an image twice as big. Not a huge deal. But what about mobile?

Retina screens are actually more popular on mobile than laptops because you actually hold those devices close enough to notice the difference. The catch-22 is that if we make our images look good, they are twice as big, and therefore take twice as long to load. If you compress them too much, the image quality will deteriorate. So we are dealing with the worst of both worlds—slower load speed with larger images. And even if connection speed wasn’t an issue, there is one more thing to consider…

Problem #3 – “Just make a bigger copy”

Pretty easy to say, but extremely hard to do.

If your source image is 300×300 but needs to be 600×600 for your Retina device, you can’t exactly just expand the 300×300 copy to be twice as big. It will look just as bad as if you served the 300×300 copy to begin with.

This relates to our first rule of images: “Always upload the largest copy possible.” Technically, we could serve this image all the time, and the let the phone or computer shrink it to the correct size. But these images are huge. At 3-5 megabytes a pieces, using this method would make our homepage close to 20 MB’s—a 2000% increase of our current page size.

So we need to resize it. But now the problem is that resizing and compressing images takes time. And time is very valuable when serving to a mobile connection. This creates a second rule:  “Have your resized images ready to go before they’re needed.” Okay…so we need to have a different image size ready for every single width and height we’ll need to serve.

Great. And since we’re trying to speed things up, we’re going to need to make sure we only serve the exact size needed for the page. This ensures we’re loading as little data as possible. That is, if an image is only going to take up 100 pixels on the page, we don’t want to make someone load a 600-width version of the image. This is in line with our final rule, “don’t serve a bigger image than you need.”

Putting all those rules together shows how big of a problem this can be.

Before, we had one single image in an HTML tag. Now we have 10-20+ versions of the exact same image needed for a single webpage. After all, there are so many different phones, phablets, tablets, laptops, desktops, etc., that all need something different. That’s a lot of overhead.

We’ve spent a long time trying to create a solution that is fast, responsive, and extremely easy to use. And we think we’ve come up with something that, for our web authors, will be as easy as it was pre-2007 when we all we had was one image inside some HTML. Just put your image on the page, and leave the rest to us.

So how do we solve this? Check back next week for The Responsive Image Challenge – Part 2.

It might seem like all the different pieces would make it too complicated to use. But in reality, it’s almost the opposite. You can almost think of Cascade as a CMS to build a CMS. We start with a blank slate and work until we have Bethel-flavored Cascade ready to go.  This is where it’s advantageous to have all the different pieces and possibilities. We can put them together so they fit our needs perfectly in an easy-to-use package.

Right now we’re essentially playing with high-stakes digital LEGOs. Even our most basic page has dozens of parts. But this is actually a good thing. When we’re done, you won’t see individual LEGO blocks. Instead it will be finished LEGO sets, glued together so they won’t fall apart—ready to play with.

You might might be thinking both Silva and Cascade just put words onto the internet, so how different can they be?

Great question.

It’s almost like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. On the inside, they couldn’t be more different. Silva is a square cartridge and Cascade is a round hole. It’s our task to move over parts of Silva until they are square and work “The Cascade Way”.

So far I’d say we are off to a good start. In the last month alone we have:

• installed a fresh copy of Cascade
• integrated it with Bethel Single Sign On
• integrated basic pages, forms, and videos

To make things more complicated, each piece in Cascade is built using a ton of different parts (more on that in another post…). This means we’ve have to read, plan, experiment, and then read some more, all before we could even try and set up the most basic page we could imagine.

The good news is that if we set it up right, it will be simple to use. All the burden is on us to do things well so we make creating and editing pages as easy as possible. We’re excited for the task. And we’ll keep you posted on our progress.

“Done is better than perfect.”

Interesting, I thought. Truth be told, I’m a recovering perfectionist and am perfectly content being quite type-A. But for some reason, I found myself resonating with what she was saying.

Is done better than perfect?

This summer I spent a good amount of time working through a few projects. Due dates were getting pushed back as we worked through the nuances of a word choice, a photo selection, or a slight color tweak. If I’m honest, it was a little draining at times. But more than that, I found myself wondering, is this extra time worth it?

I think that’s why I resonated with Sandberg’s comment. Our projects didn’t seem to be significantly more “perfect” even though we had spent an extra couple days or weeks.

Done is better than perfect.

But I still wasn’t sold. Embarrassing projects of the past floating into my head. Let’s just say, I’ve had my fair share of unfortunate typos, incorrect URLs, and email blunders. I may or may not have sent an email an incoming class of students, greeting them with the wrong name. Were these mistakes preventable with a little more time? A lot more time? How many rounds of proofing? How many rewrites and design comps? Where do you draw the line?

After some time to think and forget the mistakes of the past, here’s where I ended: Done is better than perfect—when something is done right. And something that’s done right is different than something that’s done perfect.

Here are the 3 keys to something being done right.

1. It accomplishes the goals/objectives

At the end of the day, the communication needs to do what it is intended to do. If an event postcard doesn’t entice people to attend, it’s not accomplishing its objective. What if there aren’t clear goals for a piece? Well, that’s a problem.

We need to have clear goals for our work, but also be willing to try new ideas and methods for accomplishing them. Some days our ideas won’t be right, but we need to try new things and new ways of communicating. In 21st century communication, “Tried and true” is rarely an accurate statement.

2. It’s within our brand and personality

Bottom line, what we do needs to sound and look like Bethel. No matter if it’s a prospective student, an alum, or a church partner, the recipient should feel like they’re hearing from the same Bethel.

Our new brand highlights a lot of great keys to making this happen, but here are two important ones—be inviting and not complex. Be inviting—I don’t care if it’s a gift receipt, a thank you note, or details about a financial aid package, the message needs to invite others into the conversation. Talk with others—not at them. Avoid complexity—people read, but they’re not going to read a novel disguised in an email, letter, or postcard (novel postcards are the worst!). Get the point, make it understandable, and be done with it. My wise colleague Kelsey Lundberg always suggests writing your content, cutting it in half, and then cutting it in half again.

Our new brand is just as much about design as it is content. It’s important that our visual representation reflects Bethel well and follows the same guidelines. So, when royal blue, navy, or Bethel gold get’s old—they’re still our colors and being consistent makes for a better brand experience.

3. It launches when it’s time to launch

Everyone suffers from some buyer’s remorse and a little bit of nervousness when it’s time to launch something—but that’s why we set deadlines. We could always edit, rewrite, redesign, and reimagine every webpage every day. But if we did that, we’d never have time for new projects. More challenging—would those webpages (or print pieces) be significantly better? Would the improvements justify the additional time spent?

Harvard Business Review did an article on What Really Happens When You Extend a Deadline and I’d encourage you to read it. Spoiler alert, more time isn’t as great as we think.

So, I’m going to try it. We’ll have ambitious timelines and some days will feel like a constant sprint. But I think it’s worth it. The message we are communicating is that important. As my high school math teacher would say, “Ready? Go!”

Then I went to the Global Leadership Summit put on by the Willow Creek Association. It was incredible, and listening to speaker after speaker talk about what it means to lead got my mind going. Many people are put in positions of authority and power. Does that make them leaders? Is a manager always a leader? Can you be a leader and not a manager? What’s the difference?

So I decided to make a short diversion from the obstacles to change to explore these questions. I hope you’ll bear with me, and check back for some tips on overcoming the obstacles to change shortly.

What’s wrong with managers?

Nothing. My goal here is not to disparage managers. They’re needed in every organization. They keep systems running and ensure consistency, predictability, and reliability.

But leaders inspire greatness. They bring out the best in the people around them. They empower and trust their people to have both the will and the confidence to exceed their own ideas of what they thought themselves capable. They make a real difference in organizations facing unpredictable environments. They innovate and lead growth and have the potential to take an organization from consistently good to overwhelmingly awesome.

That sounds like something I aspire to. How about you?

If you, like me, want to be a better leader, or worry that you spend too much time managing, this might be for you.

5 signs you’re managing instead of leading.

1) You think about org charts, not people

Do you think solely in terms of organizational structure?

When you’re calling a meeting to talk strategy or vision, do you make sure the people who can be valuable contributors are invited? Or do you use the org chart and involve people based on position?

When changes happen, when priorities shift, when you learn new information, do you get your people together to tell them about it, or do you assume important info will trickle down the hierarchy?

Do you know the people who actually do the work of your organization? I’m talking really know them. Like hopes and fears and aspirations and untapped talents know them.

If you operate purely in terms of organizational structure, you might be managing instead of leading.

An organization is about people. It can’t succeed without them. To be a leader, to inspire people to greatness, you need to think of them as more than boxes on an org chart. If you want to innovate, you need to trust and empower your people to be innovative, and then include them in important conversations. You need to earn their trust through transparency. You need to give them a reason to follow your vision.

2) You don’t have a vision

Speaking of vision.

Where should your organization be in 1 year? 5 years? 10?

How about next week?

You need a vision to know what greatness means, to know what it looks like when you’ve succeeded. You need to imagine something better than the present if you hope to grow. You need to have a destination in mind before anyone can follow you.

If you don’t have a vision for your organization, for your team, for yourself, you’re probably managing instead of leading. As Kotter says, “Visions and strategies are not formulated by individuals who have learned only to deal with plans and budgets.”

3) You love output and hate failure

One of my favorite sessions at the Global Leadership Summit was an interview on innovation with Indian entrepreneur and Dartmouth professor Vijay Govindarajan.

Govindarajan said there are 3 boxes for projects, and all of an organization’s efforts fit into one of them.

Box 1 is the present. Ongoing operations. The proven profit driver of an organization. This box needs consistent, quality production. This is where managers thrive.

Box 2 is for past projects that need to be forgotten.

Box 3 is planning for the future. This is where innovation happens. This is where leaders who can form a vision and set a strategy are needed.

The problem is that Box 1 and Box 3 are in conflict. Box 1 demands consistent output.

Box 3 has to value failure.

According to Govindarajan, the job for innovators (and innovative leaders) is to “learn to resolve assumptions and unknowns. The planning process has to be about testing assumptions. Spend a little, learn a lot.”

Failures are valuable because we learn from them. If you and your team aren’t failing, you aren’t learning anything new, and you certainly aren’t innovating.

4) You make decisions in a vacuum

The traditional view of organizational leadership is that there are a few people at the top who determine direction, set strategy and policy, and hand it down to their employees. It’s bureaucracy. In this type of structure, the few powerful figures don’t worry about gaining support or buy-in. They don’t need to. They make decisions and try to enact them using authority alone.

This is management, not leadership.

Leaders involve people in important decisions. They ask the right questions. They try to figure out which questions they don’t even know to ask. They get the perspectives and opinions of the people doing the work. And then, instead of trying to push people towards their vision, they give people a reason to follow them in that direction.

According to Kotter, “transformation requires sacrifice, dedication, and creativity, none of which usually comes with coercion.”

5) You ground your soaring eagles

Of course that sounds a bit melodramatic.

But don’t underestimate how important and valuable your budding leaders are.

My favorite talk at the Global Leadership Summit was given by Chris Brown (no, it’s not the one you’re thinking).

The Chris Brown who spoke is a co-senior pastor at North Coast Church in California and is passionate about developing young leaders. Really passionate.

Brown started his talk with the story of David and Goliath. If you aren’t familiar, the story takes place in the midst of war between Philistine and Israel. For forty days, Philistine’s mightiest soldier (a giant named Goliath) calls out the Israelites and their leader, King Saul. But they’re all too afraid to fight him.

Finally, a wimpy kid named David accepts the challenge. He walks out to the middle of the battlefield, and when Goliath moves in for the kill he knocks him down with a small stone thrown from a sling. Then he cuts off Goliath’s head and delivers it to Saul.

But Chris’s main point wasn’t David’s miraculous victory in battle. It was King Saul’s response to David’s budding leadership.

After David killed Goliath, Saul started trusting him with more and more responsibility. David was successful everywhere he went, so eventually Saul put him in charge of the whole army. But Saul wasn’t quite ready to share the spotlight, and when David returns from battle to chants of praise and choruses of women singing “Saul has slain his thousands and David his tens of thousands” (1 Samuel 18:7), Saul becomes insanely jealous and afraid, thinking David is a threat to the throne. So he plots to kill David, and fails over and over again. Finally, Saul is killed in battle against the Philistines (he falls on his own sword to avoid the shame of defeat) and David ascends to the throne.

It’s worth wondering: what if Saul had embraced David and shared leadership with his soaring eagle, instead of expending so much effort trying to have him killed? Would he have lost the battle to the Philistines? Would he have died before he needed to?

There are many reasons managers will smother budding leaders.

Some are afraid and protective, like Saul was. They worry about talented people threatening their status and position.

Some are jealous, and believe that success is a zero-sum game. In their minds, every bit of credit given to an employee is taken from a limited supply of recognition. And they aren’t willing to share.

Some are so focused on keeping the organization good that they don’t make room for things that could make it great. Young leaders don’t always fit neatly inside organizational structures. A budding leader with a strong vision, a desire for growth and change, and the ability to inspire will be difficult to constrain inside a box on an org chart. Managers believe their job is to maintain the status quo and support the bureaucracy. Young leaders are looking to shake the dust. This can be scary.

But organizations can’t afford to disempower budding leaders. Kotter says, “Wasting talent will become increasingly costly in a world of rapid change. Developing that leadership will, in turn, demand flatter and leaner structures along with less controlling and more risk-taking cultures. The negative consequences of putting people with potential into small boxes and micromanaging them will only increase.”

There you have it. Five signs you might be managing instead of leading. I hope this post helps you think about how you can be a better leader. One who inspires people to do their best work and is capable of amazing things. I also hope it encourages you that leadership can come from anywhere. You don’t need to be in a formal, appointed position of authority to lead. When you’re open to collaboration and invite people into your decision making process, when you empower and encourage people, when you support the visions of leaders you admire, or take the time to think about your own vision, when you’re bold enough to take big risks and aren’t afraid to fail, you show the people around you that you’re a person worth following.

It’s true that collaborative efforts can be lousy and unproductive. But this doesn’t mean the idea of collaboration in itself is the problem.

As a writer, I love to collaborate. I know this sentiment is quite countercultural for the writing breed. Before I fell for collaboration, I’d throw on headphones and get lost in the cadence of my own voice instead of inviting other writers into my process. And when I came out of my hermitic retreats, it was tough to see how the ideas of an outsider could fit into my polished prose. I produced something great, thank you; I’m taking no comments at this time.

But, even though it’s in my nature to be the lone authoritarian of my written words, I’ve come to see that when I let other writers in, we produce something better than I could have alone. And because I want my writing to be its best, I now try to collaborate as much as deadlines allow (even if it drives fellow writers bananas).

Here are 6 truths that changed my mind about collaboration:

It makes me a better writer

We have a team of great writers here at Bethel. Whenever I let them speak into my work, I learn something valuable. With each revision and draft, I get more practice. And with more practice comes better first drafts.

It produces a useful product

In the end, what I write for Bethel is not about me.

I should care chiefly about creating the best product for my readers, audiences, and users, even if it means letting go of phrases I love. Having someone else read and speak into my work helps me focus on the bigger picture to make sure the words I’m choosing match the priorities of the project.

It creates consistency

Writers have a voice, a method, an approach to their writing that allows who they are to peek through. They have strong preferences about style and word choice. They believe in right and wrong.

But writing for Bethel requires that I quiet my voice and push aside partiality for the sake of the brand I represent. When other writers dig into my work, they take out the stuff that embodies too much of me and not enough Bethel.

It builds trust

I know I’m flattered whenever a teammate asks for my help. It validates my skills. It makes me feel valued, wanted, and appreciated. And I’m more eager to ask them for help in return because we’ve established an understanding that it’s okay to be vulnerable. It’s okay to have questions. It’s healthy to rely on others and to support them in return.

It strengthens relationships

The pressure to write something useful each day is daunting, stressful, and draining. If I didn’t have such insightful and caring teammates, I’d be nearing the end of my marketing stint. So I involve my colleagues in my work because it creates meaningful conversation that builds our bonds. And it’s these relationships that keep me coming back to work each day.

It broadens my thinking

It’s easy to fall into familiar patterns for approaching the same content year after year for the same audiences. But when I invite a new voice to speak into my work, someone who has less history with what I do, they can help me break out of routines and habits. They free me up to take risks that might produce something incredible.

Ultimately, I do better work when I invite others to help me out. Sure, there’s often heated editorial debate and disagreement, but I believe the benefits of this tough work far outweigh the complications. And I always have a few personal side projects going just to feed my domineering tendencies.

So instead of shying away from feedback, I’ve learned that my work’s more fun when I have colleagues eager to pitch in and produce something great—together.

But who’ll help you lead the charge? It’s time to build your change team.

Kotter tells us that a “powerful guiding coalition” is absolutely essential for successful change, meaning that the change team has to have people on it with the power to clear out obstacles, enforce new policies, and allocate resources and rewards (as well as dish out punishments).

He’s probably right that this kind of power helps a whole lot. And I’m sure his fairy tale land where powerful guiding coalitions are given the resources and authority they need to bulldoze opposition is a delightful place to live.

But back here on Earth, we all know that the people with that level of authority rarely execute the day-to-day work, and they’re not going to be on the ground guiding the change process.

The Power Shortage

So we have to ask ourselves a question: How can we lead change when we don’t have any power?

It’s a problem I face often. It’s the source of a great deal of frustration. Sometimes it keeps me up at night, and some days it makes me want to throw my computer through a window (along with my reputation as a rational sort of person).

Why won’t people just do what I tell them?

And then I remember why: Because they have no reason to.

I’m young. I’m relatively inexperienced. I’ve been at Bethel for a little under 2 years. Some of my coworkers have been here for 20+. Why should they take the risk to follow a n00b like me?

But my frustration and self-pity grows from an inadequate definition of power.

I’m operating out of and being constrained by the traditional definition that says power is assigned. It’s authoritarian. There’s a boss who makes the calls and everyone else follows marching orders. But this kind of power is outdated in an unpredictable world where change needs to happen fast and often.

Earned Power vs. Assigned Power

You don’t have to be assigned to a position of power in order to be a leader. And oftentimes, earned power is more influential and effective than assigned power when you’re leading people, anyways.

What do I mean by earned power?

I’m talking about the kind of influence that comes from being respected for the work you do, looked to for solutions and ideas because you keep pushing yourself to get better, and well-liked because you advocate for and care about your teammates (I’m talking actually care, not the phony Carnegie “How To Win Friends and Influence People” kind of care).

It’s about connections and relationships, and working towards common goals, and proving to your team that you care about doing great work as much as they do.

It’s about the kind of trust that grows from community and loyalty, and standing by people through the ups and downs and showing that you support them and want them to succeed. It’s about giving everything you can because you don’t want to let them down.

That’s earned power. And when you have earned power, people will trust you enough to take a great risk and follow you down the path of change.

When it comes to earned power, I’ve had some amazing role models at Bethel. They’ve shown me that teams full of people who have earned power and trust can accomplish a great deal, and when they say change needs to happen and volunteer to lead it, people will join them.