Leadership 2. Creating Leadership Documents

Chapter 2. Creating Leadership Documents

Chapter II mainly discuss about creating leadership documents. Sometimes documents crated by leaders can cause a lot of problems and sometimes it even comes associating with the prestige and image of the organization. Hence, documentation should be handled properly and with maximum care.

In according to the type of message delivered and previous chain of communication practiced in the organization, selecting the most effective communication medium plays a vital role while making documents. The type of medium might be text message, emails, memo, letters, discussions, outlines, chart pack or dect reports.

Creating the document alone or in collaboration with a team or other group having some plans will help you to be more productive. Creating individual documents means involving the same person from the initial stage to the final stage by oneself. Thus, we can have more control over the entire documentation but sometimes due to lack of expertise the may not be properly organized. When we prepare the documents in team we divide our workloads and responsibilities in between team member in accordance to their area of specialization. The documents prepared in a team uses one of the two ways to divide the tasks.

i. One person in the team does all of the writing with the others providing the contents to the scribe.
ii. The team divides the writing among the team members according to the sections for they have provided most of the contents. Hence, it could be the single scribe approach, the multiple control approach.

Further, both of them have advantages and disadvantages as well. There should be always some controlling version for both to keep the version straight, the team should decide together when drafts are due, who is to receive them and in what order they are to be circulated through the team.

After that the documents contents should be organized properly. Many business documents exhibits form memos to letter. The exhibit could be placement or labels. Moreover, the business documents usually includes information that you have obtained from primary research (that you conduct directly through surveys, interviews or direction observations) or secondary research (which is research using published materials in book and in the way). Both type of research should be handled properly to make a document stronger and effective.

While creating the business documents, consideration should be given for effective formatting, layouts, alignments, line spacing, proper heading, proper font size and type.