Building Confidence to Handle Difficult Editorial Decisions
Some people make everything look easy—from high stakes meetings to difficult editorial decisions. Most people though can struggle with making (and then justifying) tough choices.
This isn’t because the decisions made were incorrect, but rather that sometimes people can lack confidence for any number of reasons. One way to get around this is to have a series of foundations supporting your decisions (and crucially being able to justify them). Here we’ll dive into a few different reasons why handling difficult editorial decisions with confidence is important, as well as a handful of tips to make this easier.
First of all though, let’s talk a little bit about confidence as a whole.
How to gain confidence
There’s an entire industry built on the foundations of “gaining more confidence”. Here, we’re not going to be going into a great deal of depth of all the different tricks and tips that have been compiled over the decades on the subject. Instead, we’ll be approaching this by looking at four, fairly commonly cited traits and factors that can have an impact on confidence. These are:
- Competence
- Experience
- Environment
- Mentors
There are more, to be sure, but in my opinion these might be the most valuable ones that you can have control over with your employees at your journal.
Competence
Competence in handling difficult editorial decisions can sometimes boil down to things like “how often you’ve done something” (see Experience below), but sometimes this is mistaken for experience. Experience is something that often leads to, but doesn’t necessarily guarantee, competence. In a general work context, “experience” is often tied to “how long you’ve done something”. Competence on the other hand is “how good you are at doing something”. Another thing difference that helps to differentiate the two is that competence is often used to predict future results. Experience is often about the past—things you have done with grant you experience.
Just because you have a lot of experience in dealing with challenging editorial decisions doesn’t mean that you are good at it. Also, some times, people who are good at dealing with these tough situations don’t actually have a lot of experience. There are a lot of factors that can influence whether or not someone is competent, but it is a skill that can be built. As noted above, competence in many different skills and tasks can be built through experience.
Experience
“If at first you don’t success, try again” is something that we’ve probably all heard from parents, teachers, coworkers, characters on kids’ shows, self-help gurus, and more. There’s a reason for it. It is the core foundational premise for gaining experience. While some people can develop quickly in many different ways, the vast majority of people need to practice things to get better at them. From the drums to negotiations with people, repeated effort can yield growth.
By giving your team the opportunities to experience different situations (including challenging situations where they need to make hard editorial decisions), they will be able to develop the confidence they need to then make more of those decisions in the future. We’ll touch on the importance of mentors in a moment, but it is very important that proper training be given to your team. When your team is taught how to handle difficult editorial decisions, they’ll be able to tackle them more effectively. In addition to this, making sure that your team has a clear process to handle these situations is important. Make sure that your team has a clear and easy to follow production workflow (and make sure that they have the tools they need).
Environment
It is hard to overstate the importance of a good working environment. From managers to the actual physical space, the work environment can have a massive impact on an employees ability to thrive. While this particular factor might not be as important as something like mentorship, it remains important. The environment can have an impact on things like employee satisfaction and morale, which in turn affects willingness to positively engage in challenging tasks.
Your journal’s growth can be radically impacted by this particular factor, even though it might not be the first thing that we think of.
Mentors
Teachers and mentors can be incredibly impactful in many areas of life. Parents serve as teachers and mentors to their children. An experienced guitarist might serve as a mentor to the next generation of guitarists. And so it goes on and on.
Having mentors to teach your team on various different parts of the job can have major (and life-changing) impacts on the team. In practice, this is the difference between having no idea how to handle challenging situations (let alone confidently) and being in a supportive environment where one feels supported at every stage of the process. Handling challenging editorial decisions confidently is a skill, and having an empathetic mentor to build your team’s confidence while teaching them valuable skills can make a huge difference in their lives.
These are all practical skills that can have an impact on your team members gaining confidence. Different employees might need to focus on different things, but by supporting them, you will have a more effective and competence team.
Why handling challenging editorial decisions confidently matters
In a way, this question can be connected to a different question: “what are your journal’s standards?”
Having clear and easy-to-understand standards lets employees understand a number of things: expectations, processes, and more.
Authors submitting to your journals, also, will be able to understand the expectations placed upon them as well. When expectations and standards are clear, difficult decisions can be made easier. Let’s take a look at a simple example:
Part of your journal’s submission process clearly states that a submission must be in an editable Word document and include a list of references. These standards are clearly communicated in the instructions for authors that need to be both read and agreed to. Suppose that a group of authors submit a manuscript in a PDF format without references, your editor can reject the manuscript confidently as it fails to meet the basic threshold for review. If the authors then complain that they were not told this, they can politely be directed to their acceptance of the terms and given guidance on how to address the situation.
Sometimes people can simply be challenging to deal with. It happens. But the vast majority of people respond well to clearly articulated information and guidance.
Being able to clearly articulate guidance can turn a challenging editorial situation into an opportunity to establish yourself as having standards and credibility.
The importance of consistent criteria and peer support
As we noted above, having mentors that can support your team (especially as you onboard them) has a major impact on your teams confidence (and eventually competence) when it comes to making challenging decisions. These decisions oftentimes relate to rejections, but not exclusively. We’ve tackled the subject of needing to reject submissions previously, and recommend that you be familiar with the reasons why this sort of decision matters. Briefly, it can have an impact on many parts of your business, from reputation to morale.
As we noted above in our example, having clearly communicated guidelines help to establish consistent criteria. If there are no clearly established guidelines, then your team (and the authors submitting to your journal) might feel like a rejection is baseless. Worse, they might feel like the rejection is arbitrary. Both, baseless and arbitrary, rejections can create a negative impression and can have detrimental impacts on your journal’s reputation.
There are many different types of rejections that can occur with a submitted manuscript, so making sure that you establish clear guidelines and processes for each type is important.
Why saying no matters
At the end of the day, your journal’s reputation is one of the most important factors that you need to ensure. This means that your reputation matters more than pleasing any single person. And if you start making exceptions when it comes to standards and editorial decisions, you run the risk of cascading negative impacts.
Your journal will thrive with an established positive reputation. But because so many factors can influence that reputation, you need to be careful that you’re doing your best to contribute to it’s positive image. Make sure that your team is able to face these challenges by ensuring they have the training and resources to tackle difficult editorial decisions effectively and confidently.
