Motivating SMEs (even though you can’t fire them!)
In the valiant pursuit of providing excellent product help and other documents, just about every technical communicator out there works with subject matter experts (SMEs). Talking to experts is a normal part of the research for writing a technical document. SMEs are an invaluable resource, but can be challenging to work with sometimes. After all, whatever makes them experts in the first place has the potential to also make them:
- Very busy and hard to get in contact with
- Frustrated with people who don’t already understand the subject matter
- Downright arrogant
My own favorite SME quotes come from back when I was in college. I wrote technical manuals for a high-energy physics lab on campus. Once, after reading my first draft of a document about a piece of machinery in the lab, my supervisor told me, “It’s clear you don’t understand this at all.” That was harsh, but not really rude (and certainly not untrue). It was another time, when a grad student said to me, “I can’t understand why you’re having trouble with this; it’s trivial” that I really got to experience that I’m-too-smart-and-busy-to-bother-with-insects-like-you attitude that some technical writers deal with every day.
Fortunately, there are approaches that you, the technical communicator, can take into your interactions with SMEs to encourage responsiveness and respectfulness, even though you probably don’t have any actual authority over your SMEs.
Prerequisite: be a writer SMEs want to work with
Before you can start pulling the levers of motivating your SMEs, there are a few things you need to do to prepare yourself.
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