By Jessie Scott, ACN Board Member
March 1 will be my one-year anniversary as editor-in-chief (EIC) of Successful Farming. This is only a fraction of what I’ve learned (you’re welcome) because if I included everything, it would be a novel. I’m only mentioning a few of my team members for the same reason, but they all get credit for helping me continue to learn and be better every day.
1. Get good at delegating
If you have historically been bad at delegating, I recommend being completely overwhelmed with new responsibilities, as that cured me completely of any issues I had previously with delegation.
But to be a bit more instructional:
- If someone comes to you with a good idea, instead of taking that on yourself, ask that person if they are comfortable taking the lead with it. Give tips (where to get started, who to talk to) and make sure they know you’re there if they run into any roadblocks. Check in with them to see how it’s going.
- Stop doing work that you can do but that someone else on the team is now responsible for. Make sure they know you’re available as a backup if needed, but let that new team member own the work.
- Look for where strengths and efficiencies align and ask team members to take on additional responsibilities. This is a chance for them to grow. If you’re a team member getting asked to take on new responsibilities, evaluate if the new work is the type of growth that you want in your career. You can say no (see below); you can say not now, but when XYZ is done; or you can say yes, and ask how to prioritize it with your existing work.
- Ask for help when you need it. Hopefully you’re like me and you have an amazing team who is willing to step in and make sure the job gets done. Rely on them and return the favor when you can.
2. Get out of people’s way
When we were wrapping up our January issue, our award-winning creative director Matt Strelecki said he was going to play around with an alternative option for the cover.
Even though we already had a great cover done and were way past the deadline, I said okay. About a day later, he shared the cover below. (The feature story in that issue is on foreign land ownership.)
I didn’t give Matt those lines or any direction for that alternative (and what would be our final) cover. All I did was get out of his way and give him the freedom to do what he does best: create eye-catching designs and covers that make us stand out from our competition.
3. Lean into ruthless prioritization
Ruthless prioritization is a phrase our parent company adopted to help the company prioritize expenses. Like most corporate lingo geared toward cost-cutting, it’s not my favorite phrase, so I decided to co-opt it into something that I work to do: ruthless prioritization of my time.
There are 168 hours in a week. If you’re a full-time employee, you spend at least 40 hours a week working, most likely more. When I first came into the EIC role, I was spending 20 to 30 hours a week in meetings. Many of those were necessary as I was getting up to speed on my role and overseeing our website migration. But I didn’t feel like that was sustainable to give me the time to get (non-meeting) work done without an extra 20 to 40 hours each week. I want to excel in my role as EIC, but I don’t want that to require 60-plus hour weeks every week. (Boomers may disagree, but I’m a millennial. Shush, Gen Z, I know you’d prefer that to say 40 hours.)
To accomplish that, I’ve worked to ruthlessly prioritize my time:
- Could that meeting be an email?
- Does this meeting need to happen every week or every other?
- Can someone else on the team handle that or do I need to be there?
- Does my involvement in that project, meeting, event, etc. provide value to our team? Does it have a meaningful impact for our audience? If not, then I may just…
4. Say no
My former boss (Dave Kurns) once said I was excellent at telling him no. He was right. I am a big believer in saying no so that you can say yes and (ruthlessly) prioritize the important things in your life.
Successful Farming is excellent at creating content that helps farmers make money, save time, and grow their satisfaction in the farming business. I say no internally to projects and content that don’t support that mission.
During my first year as EIC, I prioritized spending time in the office and supporting our editorial team. In addition to my new role, our staff has had retirements, new hires, and a new website, among other changes. My goal was to bring stability where I could, support where it was needed, and to streamline processes where it could help the team save time.
My approach is that if our editors have the support they need, they will create content that is meaningful, actionable, and helps make our audience successful farmers. That has meant traveling less and saying no to events and commitments this past year that I hope to say yes to in future years.
5. Say yes
To prove that I don’t always say no, I obviously had to put this on the list.
A few of the things that I love saying yes to:
- More pages: When an editor has done such a deep dive on a topic and needs more pages in an issue, I love when I can say yes and give them more room. Recent examples: A five-page, 2,400-word article on biologicals in our January issue by Adrienne Held and a six-page, 4,000-word article on carbon pipelines and the future of ethanol in our March issue by Alex Gray.
- New content ideas: When an editor has an idea for a new content series that I think will resonate with our audience. For example, our new 15 Minutes With a Farmer podcast.
- Better documentation and processes: Anytime someone is struggling with a process or a task, I like to evaluate what documentation we have available and what the process looks like. Don’t understand when we need a photo release vs. an agreement? Let’s update our editorial tracking form to make that clearer.
- Making things more accessible: Jordan Brendeland, our copy editor, recently updated our style guide to a Google doc, so it can be accessible to our entire team any time they need it and it can be easily updated. She’s also going to host quarterly style guide roundtables to discuss style questions, issues, and potential updates (grammar geeks welcome!).
– Scott is the Editor of Successful Farming and a member of the ACN Board of Directors.