The line they remember

November. Somewhere in every organisation, someone is drafting the year-end message.

It usually goes like this. Communications writes the text and sends it upstairs. A few days later, a one-word reply comes back: “Approved.”
The message goes out as it is.
Everyone reads it. Nobody feels a thing.

Once, it went differently.
The draft came back with notes all down the margins.
The manager had gone through it line by line.
Next to some sentences: “I wouldn’t say it like that.”
At the bottom, a new paragraph, handwritten.
It was about that hard week in February, and the team who stayed late, night after night.
No names, but everyone who read it would recognise themselves.
It ended: “Don’t think I didn’t notice.”

I couldn’t have written that paragraph.
Even if I had, it wouldn’t have landed the same way.
The thank-you the team needed had to come from the manager.
The day the message went out, people wrote back.
Someone printed it and pinned it above their desk.

Employees usually know these messages are drafted by communications.
They don’t mind.
What they really want to know is something else:
Did the manager actually read it? Is there anything of them in it? Did they really see us?
The answer sits in a single paragraph. Sometimes in a single sentence.

My favourite drafts are the ones that come back covered in notes.
Time a manager spends on a text is time spent on the team.

Communications writes the message.
The team remembers the line the manager wrote.