It’s not easy to make everybody happy when you’re in Marketing and public relations. Engineers, VPs, execs, and firebrands in Technical Support all want to publish content to make their lives easier. Some of them don’t really know what people in Marketing do, so when they’re facing deadlines or customer pressure, they don’t put up with very much delay before they run around the end and figure out their own way to get content written and published.

So for example, the project director inside a large government institution has a remarkable story to tell, but he’s got only a few weeks to use his budget or lose it. The public relations manager tells him, “Yes, we can hire the ideal writer for your project, a person who knows your specialty inside and out. We can also publish the story for you.”

Two weeks go by, and he doesn’t hear from them. The clock is ticking, so he spends some time on the search engines and article sites, in case he needs to hire the writer himself.

Another week goes by, and the PR manager calls to ask some “preliminary” questions about the project. The director starts making phone calls to find a fallback writer.

Finally, he realizes the only way to get the piece done is to hire the writer himself, which he does. The paper ends up a bit late and a bit over budget, but he has it in hand.

Now, if you’re the project director, do you take the paper to the PR manager and ask him to publish it?

If you’re the PR manager, will you work with the content, or be upset by the end-run?

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Nobody likes unreliability in anyone – a stockbroker, a teacher, a spouse – least of all when somebody else downstream is depending on a delivery. Do you have reliability-problems with your writer?

Here are a couple of ways to think about this. None is a perfect solution, but perhaps you can use them in combination to deal with this.

Pick Your Priorities
Everybody wants best-cheapest-fastest. Which do you want most? If you’re getting good content (“best”) at the price you want (“cheapest”), then maybe you give a little on deadlines (“fastest”).

Engage Your Writer on the Subject
Tell your writer about your priorities. Find out why he misses deadlines. You have needs in this relationship and as long as you don’t get ruthless and stake a claim to all of the marbles, you and the writer can have some kind of dialog beyond, “What should we do about the first paragraph?”

Build It Into the Contract
You can try to clause your way around the problem of punctuality by building in milestones and consequences, but if your writer has serious reliability-problems, that won’t help much. This may suit your personality and business-preference, though. Be prepared to play the heavy if push comes to shove and you need to invoke the consequences (warnings, notices, discounts for late delivery).

Ask the Writer
Ask your writer candidly what she would do in your position, if deliveries were consistently late. That’s as close to the bone as you can get in stating your view of the problem. Frankly, though, some people – not just writers, believe it or not – suffer from a pathologic inability to put themselves in anybody else’s shoes, so you may not get very far with this.

Folks, this is a business relationship, so treat it like one, and convey your attitude to your writer. You can be fair and work out a satisfactory middle ground for both of you, even if you have to move from best-cheapest-fastest to better-cheaper-faster.

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