The Importance of Good Writing

If your grade-school education was anything like mine, lessons on parallelograms, subject-verb agreement and neutrons were met with a chorus of whiny students asking, "When will we ever need to know this?"

I admit, many years later I still haven't tapped into my algebraic knowledge of a parabola, but other subjects have played important roles. Writing lessons, for example, have played a large role in my life, and not just because of my line of work.

Between e-mails, texts and Tweets, our society spends a lot of time communicating via the written word. We spend more time writing in our professional and personal lives than we probably imagined we would back in school. What you may not realize is that these written exchanges can boost your career or hinder it, depending on how you treat them.

Write your way to a jobTodd Henning recently began an internship with a public relations firm, and he's quickly discovering that his writing abilities are helping his fledgling career. In the few months he's been interning, he's seen his list of responsibilities grow.

"Right after I was hired, they told me it was largely due to the writing samples that I had given them during the interview process, and they had stopped considering others because of their writing samples," Henning says.

Of course, if you're applying for a position where writing samples are part of the application process, you're probably not surprised that composition skills pay off. But Rebecca West, interior designer for Rivalee Design, recently landed a position because of her writing skills. Not what you'd expect for someone whose job relies on a creative eye rather than a way with a pen.

West met with a potential client to discuss a bathroom remodel, and she didn't think the meeting was a success. She didn't think she connected to one homeowner and the other homeowner was unable to attend.

"I always send a follow-up thank you after my first consultation, but this time I took it a step further and composed a full letter describing to the client how I thought I could best help in their project, and offering to meet with them once more," West says. "I didn't really expect anything to come of it, but several days later they called and asked to set up another time to meet. During my second visit the second homeowner mentioned my letter, thanked me for it, and said it brought 'tears to his eyes' -- and no, he wasn't being facetious."After the second meeting, all three parties decided the homeowners didn't need a designer to execute their remodeling plans, but that didn't bother West."From them I had two business referrals, and I was able to refer them to a contractor of mine who in turn got the remodeling work," West says.

Employers careLilia Fallgatter, an author and e-learning consultant, has enough experience as a hiring manager in higher education to know that writing skills affect every career. "How you write speaks volumes about you," Fallgatter stresses. "Incorrect grammar, spelling and usage make a bad impression and can affect your credibility on the job. With the advent of text messaging, instant messaging and social networking sites such as Twitter, more people are abandoning the rules of writing. The use of abbreviations, failing to use capitalization and punctuation is extremely informal and does not translate well to the professional setting." Fallgatter is quick to point out that, all things being equal, in a showdown between two job applicants, she'll choose the better writer.

A reputation as a good writer has paid off for Mel White, vice president of marketing and business development at Classic Exhibits, a firm that specializes in providing equipment to trade show vendors and exhibitors. He says effective communication skills have enhanced his professional image in ways he didn't expect."I'm no genius, no superstar -- but strong writing skills have always made me a valuable asset," he says. In business school, he frequently earned higher marks than his classmates because of his writing abilities, a trend that carried over to his business life. "Regardless of my position, I've become the default writer and editor everywhere I've worked. Writing skills matter. For some odd reason, people think you are smarter and more competent."

This phenomenon has held true for other professionals, including Dustin Weeks, author of "Lessons From a Recovering Worker Bee." "While working abroad I was responsible for making sure that all written communications for our American English-speaking clients were grammatically correct," Weeks explains. As a result, he became the resident expert on English and North American business strategies. "I was often asked strategic questions about how something should be presented to our North American clients because I had command of the English language and was from North America."

How to make writing work for youAll this said, strong writing skills can lose you a job if you're not careful. If your command of English makes you the go-to editor for the office, you still need to temper your criticisms a bit. If your eagerness to mark up a paper with red ink outweighs your desire to help your colleagues and boss, you'll appear arrogant.

With that in mind, here are some tips to help make the most of your written communications at work:

. Proofread, proofread, proofreadTypos, slang and bad grammar send a negative signal whether you're a job seeker, new employee or a supervisor. Look over your own writing and if it's an important document, ask someone else to review it, too.

. Even e-mails deserve attentionAll business communications should be treated with some level of professionalism. Although not every e-mail is a letter to the CEO, don't forget that these messages can be forwarded to anyone. Plus, in a culture where e-mails are more prevalent than face-to-face conversations, your writing is the face of your professional image.
· Pick your battlesIf you're a great writer, don't become the office grammarian who constantly corrects the usage of "who/whom." Congratulations on your knowledge of "The Elements of Style," but being known as a know-it-all can overshadow your knowledge.
· Context mattersPart of being a good writer is knowing how to communicate effectively to your audience. A white paper should be more formal than a personal message to a colleague you know well. If you treat every correspondence with too much formality, that will be more noticeable than the content. So sometimes "Hi" is a better way to open a message than "Salutations."
Anthony Balderrama is a writer and blogger for CareerBuilder.com and its job blog, The Work Buzz. He researches and writes about job search strategy, career management, hiring trends and workplace issues.

Copyright 2009 CareerBuilder.com All rights reserved. The information contained in this article may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without prior written authority.

How to be a better global manager

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- In 1997, with $100 billion in annual sales and 750,000 employees in 8 countries including the U.S., Wal-Mart decided to open 85 stores in Germany, a move Wall Street analysts applauded because it would pave the way for expansion into all of Europe. The retailer bought up a couple of smaller German store chains, and sent over an executive who had successfully run 200 U.S. Wal-Mart stores from headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., to manage the German operations. Nine years later, in July of 2006, Wal-Mart announced it would close down its German stores. The resulting loss: About $1 billion.

What went wrong?
Wal-Mart's main mistake was blithely assuming that what worked in the U.S. would be just as effective in another country. First of all, that Bentonville executive in charge of Germany spoke no German, requiring all his direct reports to speak English at all times. (He turned out to be the German operations' first of 4 CEOs in 4 years.) Worse, Wal-Mart (WMT, Fortune 500) exported its U.S. corporate culture wholesale -- complete with a daily morning cheering session for store employees -- and trained greeters and other staffers to ask customers "How are you today?" the way they do in U.S. stores.

So what, you may ask. Well, Germany may look deceptively similar to the U.S. on the surface, but German culture is much more hierarchical. Managers are expected to maintain their dignity and their distance from employees, not lead them in cheers. Moreover, Germans tend to reserve smiles and greetings for people they know, so shoppers found the greeters' rhetorical "How are you?"s baffling and intrusive. Even details like who bags the goods at check-out were a mismatch: Germans prefer to do it themselves rather than having a store clerk pack their purchases. And Wal-Mart's famous ban on coworkers dating each other sparked an employee lawsuit that was a resounding defeat, and a major embarrassment, to the company. These and other culture clashes made for unhappy employees, few repeat customers, and a dismal bottom line.

But let's not be too hard on Wal-Mart. Charlene M. Solomon and Michael S. Schell, co-authors of Managing Across Cultures: The Seven Keys to Doing Business with a Global Mindset (McGraw-Hill, $34.95) say that plenty of other companies -- and not only American ones -- commit similar blunders when they try to expand into unfamiliar markets; Wal-Mart's German debacle is only one case study among many in their book. The pair run a consulting firm called RW3 (www.rw-3.com) that coaches managers at global giants like Intel (INTC, Fortune 500), HSBC (HBC), and Colgate-Palmolive (CL, Fortune 500) on how to adapt and thrive abroad. A few excerpts from our recent conversation:

Q. Why did you write this book?
Michael Schell: Global companies need people who are trained to recognize and adjust to cultural differences. If you want to advance in a global enterprise, that cross-cultural understanding has to be part of your toolkit. But beyond that, what many employers are realizing is that the workforce right here in the U.S. is now almost 25% foreign-born. Globalization has come to our doorstep. That, combined with the rise of virtual teams in recent years, where team members may be located anywhere in the world, means that you need some awareness of cross-cultural issues even if you never leave the United States.

Charlene Solomon: More and more of our clients are asking for help in training U.S.-based managers to lead global teams.

MS: It's partly due to the changeover from a manufacturing economy to a "knowledge economy". In most companies, productivity is no longer measured by how many widgets you turn out. When the "product" is innovation and intellectual contribution, the only way to maximize that is to understand how to communicate in a given cultural context.

CS: In order to understand the biases and assumptions of people from other cultures, you have to understand your own -- beginning with recognizing that you have them.

Q. Beyond the Wal-Mart example, what are the most common cultural mistakes U.S. companies make when they try to enter foreign markets?

CS: One issue that comes up again and again is that different cultures regard time and deadlines very differently. In Spain or Saudi Arabia, for instance, meeting times and project deadlines are seen as approximate and flexible. Being late isn't a big deal. An American manager, or a Swiss or Japanese one for that matter, will often cut short a phone call or a meeting in order to be on time for the next one, but in many parts of the world that is regarded as unforgivably rude. So when dealing with colleagues or employees in another culture, you need to understand how they see time.

Another big area of difference among cultures is that U.S. employees are empowered to make many more decisions on their own than employees in, say, India or Mexico, which are more hierarchical and give almost all decision-making authority to the boss. With American team members, you might give them a project and a deadline and let them run with it, but that doesn't work in very hierarchical cultures. In India, for example, a much better approach is to set a series of smaller, intermediary deadlines and then check in regularly to guide that employee and give her feedback on how she's doing.

MS: Along similar lines, Americans are much more comfortable with consensus-based decision-making, where the boss will sit down with his or her team and ask for suggestions on how to reach a goal. But asking for underlings' opinions tends to flummox people in more hierarchical cultures. As the boss, you are supposed to have the answers, and an employee who wants to make a suggestion probably fears being seen as disrespectful or presumptuous.

The whole area of risk is interesting, too. American executives often pride themselves on making quick decisions and "trusting their gut". But managers in other countries -- even in places that seem superficially very like us, like Germany and Britain -- regard that as insanely risky. They tend to weigh decisions much more carefully and regard fast decision-making as reckless.

Q. When you train people for cross-cultural assignments, how do you get them to recognize these kinds of cultural pitfalls?

MS: That's the challenge. Even when you spell it out, people often will deny that there are any real differences, or they will just go ahead and act as if they don't see any.

CS: Or, when they run up against a real, deep-seated cultural difference, many people will interpret it as a personality conflict. In China, for example, you won't get very far asking a question that requires a yes-or-no answer. It just isn't the way the Chinese communicate. So when you ask a Chinese employee, "Did you finish that report?" he is likely to reply by telling you a long, roundabout story, with the answer to your question embedded in the middle of it, or perhaps at the very end. If you don't recognize the way Chinese people are raised to speak to each other, you'll probably think this person is being deliberately uncooperative or evasive or, at the very least, just way too chatty. But once you recognize that it isn't personal, it's a cultural thing, then it becomes much easier to adapt to -- or to discuss and resolve