Posted on behalf of STC President Hillary Hart.
I want to further clarify the position and actions of the STC Board after what happened on our website earlier this week. Yesterday’s blog was actually from the entire Board. Today’s message is just from me. I want to tell you what I knew, what I didn’t know, and what my duty as president constrained me to do.
A big part of the job of the STC CEO, Board, and staff is listening to members. And I want you to know that we really do try to listen, understand, and respond—although sometimes we don’t quite make the mark.
Another big part of the job is to shepherd and protect the Society’s resources—including the intellectual property and member services that your dues help to create. When I saw the tweets from two members who knew they were in the staging area of the development site, and didn’t seem to care about breaking something, I saw red. Why would an STC community leader mess around on our development site without communicating with STC? Sure, breaking things is a way of testing things, especially in a digital environment, but this looked unfriendly. Looked more like tampering than testing. My initial conclusion was that this was an attempt to further “delay” the production of the ambitious Web-redesign project STC has undertaken. I now believe that that perception was wrong, and I apologize for it.
Before all the facts were known, in order to protect the website, we issued the message last Tuesday. To explain why we issued the “delay” message, I posted yesterday’s blog from the Board. Did we over-react? Probably. It now looks as though nothing was broken on the site and the main delay is the result of having to stop the testing and create another Web space for the development site. We should be able to launch 1.1 on schedule in a couple of weeks.
And, as I explained yesterday, the development team did make a mistake—for a short while, a 404 page misdirected users to the development site. For my original assumption that users had hacked their way in, I apologize. It was indeed, for a few moments, too easy to get to the development site. Neither I nor the Board has any wish to vilify any members who happened to be mistakenly redirected there. For my part, I should also apologize for getting angry yesterday in some of my responses to angry comments on the blog.
Again—my job, the staff and Board’s job, is to protect the resources that your dues contribute to creating. All things digital may be in perpetual beta, but at some point those things are property that must be protected if your organization is going to continue to advance the profession of technical communication.
Actually, everything is probably in perpetual beta, including this job of STC president. I am learning as fast as I can.
I look forward to updating you in more detail early next week on the status of the site development.
Thank you, Hillary.
Thank you, Hillary. As one of the loudest folks around here for the last couple of days, I want to say that I accept the apology and am glad you stepped up and took the blame for it.
I know we can all learn from what went on the last couple of days, and will continue to grow as an organization and as individual communicators.
I commend Hillary for making a public apology. Let the healing begin. Please.
“Did we over-react? Probably.”
Well that was an understatement. Nearly 150 heated comments and who knows how many tweets later, “probably”?
You know, you would have saved a lot of trouble and save a lot of face if you had just contacted me about this. The only direct contact I ever received from you was a snarky tweet. Even after I publicly apologized to everyone and owned up for my blunder, no one from the Board or Office even bothered to contact me about this.
Apology accepted, but please let the apology be but a starting point to some serious fundamental improvements in how the Board and Office interact with the Members.
Thanks, Hillary.
I’ve also been a vocal participant in this discussion, and I want to apologize to you and anybody else who may have been offended by my comments. I wasn’t intending my comments as personal attacks against anybody. They were rants of a frustrated chapter president who is having a hard time explaining the value proposition of STC as a whole to people in our local chapter. They were angry comments from a member who is sad to see the likes of Bill Swallow and Sara O’Keefe leaving the organization.
I sincerely hope we can move on as an organization and hopefully earn back the respect and membership of those we’ve disenfranchised through this internal disruption, and I apologize to you and the Society for the part I played in contributing to that disruption.
Finally, I wish you well, Hillary. You still have more time left in your term than most presidents get in a single term, and I imagine that is not an easy burden to carry. Like you, I want what is best for the Society and hope future discussions will allow all of us to do that in a productive way.
Thanks for the apology, Hillary. I hope this will put the situation behind us so we can move forward.
I also hope that in the future, it will be more clear whether the communication comes from you personally, or from the board. It affects how members view and respond to the situation.
I am grateful to you and the board for your many (many, many) hours of service. I believe that the organization is changing for the better, and I hope that incidents like this will be regarded as growing pains rather than a pattern of behavior.
Well said. Thanks, Andrea.
Thank you. I (like everyone else) am ready to move forward.
I continue to stand ready and help in the site development any way I can.
Thanks, Rick. I hope to have a testing plan to share next week.
Can’t help reviewing this “apology” with an eye to its merits as business communication — something your business would send to a client to, you know, apologize. And, because I teach business communication to undergrads.
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Cheers,
Sean
Hillary, I am very glad that you stepped up and clarified the situation. Facing criticism is hard, and apologizing is equally hard.
Yesterday’s blog post was representative of the first draft response that you write, but never, ever send. The fact that it made its way through the board and was approved is both alarming and disappointing and does nothing to engender the confidence of the membership in the board.
The old adage of “the customer is always right” is, in fact, a fallacy. The customer is frequently wrong. The adage should be “never tell the customer (constituent, dues-paying member) he is wrong. Never.”
Taking a page from Dale Carnegie’s “Winning Friends and Influencing People,” being right or winning an argument doesn’t do much good when feelings are hurt, and you lose business. (Even pointing this out, I’m breaking from the advice, but I don’t have a dog in this fight.)
Again, thank you for stepping up and doing the right thing.
Cheers!
Michael
Hillary, I know this can’t have been easy to write. Thank you for writing it anyway.
I firmly believe that what makes a good leader is not one’s ability to avoid mistakes, but to recognize them quickly, admit wrong when necessary, offer a sincere apology, and grow as a result. You’re showing the traits of a good leader here.
I know I probably stung you when I asked you to resign. I hope you understand that I was not intending that as an attack on you—I don’t even know you outside of a brief meeting at Summit last year. I’m sorry that I chose such strong words, and I’m sorry for hurting you. I should have made the effort to make that point in a less dramatic, less hurtful, and less inflammatory way. Please forgive me for that.
Will — Your comments mean a great deal to me.
I am more than happy to accept your apology.
Thank you
Hillary,
I commend you for this response. This is the strong, responsible, thoughtful leadership that we hope for.
As a community leader who has been working very hard at rebuilding our community and strengthening its relationship with the Society, I was disheartened and not sure what, if anything, to say to our council and membership. Because of our (very successful!) Spectrum regional conference today, I was forced to disengage from the discussion on Thursday’s blog entry and remove myself from the storm raging across the Twitterverse.
I am grateful that I was able to have frank conversations today with three of our board members, our incoming VP, and other community leaders. It was clear that this situation was weighing very heavily on all of us and that we were all looking for the best way to navigate through this for the good of the Society as a whole.
I was thrilled when someone informed me of today’s post and the positive reactions to it. We have a lot more important things on which to spend our limited energy.
I am sorry for engaging hastily in this discussion and putting my points forward much more strongly than I had planned.
I am SO relieved that we can move forward!
Ben Woelk
President
STC Rochester
Ben — thanks for your thoughtful and gracious comments. I am guilty also of “engaging hastily.”
Congratulations on a terrific conference — been hearing all sorts of positive comments!
All this happened while I was distracted with a family tragedy. The relative importance of one thing or another is brought into relief at such times.
Without going back over specifics, a couple of lessons learned, IMHO:
1) “It’s only a website” – life is not at stake here – so a little perspective would be useful on everyone’s part.
2) From the small bit of insider’s perspective I’ve had (via the CAC) on the website development, I think it was done bass ackwards – i.e. started from architecture, and then moved to content. It is true that a kind of content inventory was taken, but not with any content strategy in mind. I think if we had started with the content strategy part, the process would automatically have been more inclusive. It also would have taken longer.
3) We’ve all been guilty of flaming at one time or another, and most of us have not been afraid to apologize, including Hillary. I, for one, respect the courage of any and all who have examined their own communication style during this episode, and learned from it. It shows that we are a group of strong, perhaps opinionated, but committed communicators, and that is a strength.
Finally, I wish to endorse Ben’s last post here, and add my voice to the sentiments he expresses.
I do think STC needs to change its communication style, and even its attitude about what the members represent. Although I was not elected to the board, where I hoped to contribute to such an effort, I publicly sign up to do what I can as a chapter president and concerned member to take us in that direction.
An afterthought:
I was just rereading Ben’s post where he says that he was “…not sure what, if anything, to say to our council and membership.”
Wearing my France Chapter president’s hat, for the moment, it’s curious that this question never even once, even remotely, entered my mind. In fact, I’ll wager that ZERO of my members were even aware of it.
The goings and comings of STC staff and board are so far from being at the center of their thoughts, that were I to raise the question, people would probably be surprised, but respond that they don’t have time to listen to such stuff, it was too remote, with too little to do with them.
A Gallic shrug?
I think not. I think it is symptomatic of a certain navel-gazing tendency that has STC perhaps too inwardly engaged (and therefore irrelevant to the “periphery” outside N. America), and perhaps indicates the perceived irrelevance of STC as an international organization.
The loyalties of STC France members, such as they may be (very feeble), are to STC France as an entity. If you were to announce today that STC as an international organization was to disappear, but the France chapter would continue functioning, most people WOULD give a Gallic shrug and continue. Some few would feel bereft of an international presence that validates them as a professional, but not much more than that.
I rush to add that this is my subjective perception, not based on any survey data, but it does make me interested to conduct such a survey and find out just what our members think.