Make a mistake and the majority of people won't notice or won't make an issue out of it. This is indifference, and in this context there is a lot to be said for it. Other people, a small, valuable minority, will point it out in a quiet voice with the intention of helping you. The rest, a much larger minority, will trumpet it at the tops of their voices and to a cc list a hundred people long. Their tone will question your competence (muttering something like “can't even get one simple thing right”), they make a production out of it in meetings, use it to cast doubt on all your other judgements, wreck your appraisal and hold back your bonus. These people are The Enemy and you must know who they are. They must never see a working draft. They must only see the release version.
The catch is this: there comes a point when you can't see your own work anymore. You have to have someone else look at it. And for this task, you have to choose carefully.
The Enemy includes your supervisor or your manager because they are judging you at all times. The nature of the working relationship between you is that you are their servant. If you make the mistake of asking them for help, they will think you have submitted your work for their judgement. That's the nature of the relationship between you and them.
It can't be anyone who is an intended receiver of the document. They won't be able to stop themselves behaving as if they have the release version. They will get irritated when they see the glitches you can't see anymore.
It can't be anyone who is looking for promotion or other advancement. There are companies where people are promoted for the help they provide and told off when they sabotage other people, but neither you nor I have ever worked there. Advancement needs a demonstration that you can take someone down and are therefore to be reckoned with. Co-operation is for the weak.
It can't be anyone who knows nothing about the subject of the report or little about the products or business. They won't have enough expectations about what content they should be seeing to spot oversights and wrong numbers and statements.
It can't be anyone who is too busy to spend the time you need them to spend. Or who is suffering from detail fatigue as well.
Good luck finding anyone, because I've just ruled out everyone in my team.
If you do find someone, what they don't do is “check” your work. Too often “checking” means “scanning for a mistake, pointing it out and getting off the task as quickly as possible”. One of my team calls this “sense checking” - looking for silly numbers that might indicate a wrong formula or query. He will happily sense-check something. Ask him to “check” it and you get a case of the grumps. Because “checking” means line-by-line, it means, in effect, doing the work over again.
I don't like the word “checking”. It puts you in the position of pupil, them in the position of teacher and it becomes all about how many out of ten you got. So they are not sharing the responsibility with you, and they get to dodge out halfway through. This is neither collegial nor does it get the job done.
What does get the job done is the subject of the next couple of posts.
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