One of our team leads ran a genuine training session today for two of our junior team members, and I sat in for most of it, partly to learn something myself and partly because I think it's worth writing honestly about how mentoring actually happens here, beyond the usual language about "investing in our people" that shows up in every agency's careers page.
The Setup
Our senior content strategist has been with us for almost two years now, long enough to have developed genuinely strong instincts about what separates content that performs from content that merely reads well. Today's session was specifically about teaching two of our newer writers how to evaluate their own drafts critically before submitting them, rather than relying entirely on editorial feedback to catch issues after the fact.
This isn't a formal course with slides. It's closer to an apprenticeship model: pull up a real draft, in this case an unfinished piece for a client in the home services space, and work through it together, out loud, catching the kind of problems a checklist alone won't reliably catch.
The First Real Lesson: Reading Like a Skeptic
The draft in question was competent but generic, the kind of piece that hits every point on our own on-page SEO checklist without actually saying anything a competitor's nearly identical article couldn't also say. Our strategist's first note wasn't about SEO mechanics at all. It was a simple, uncomfortable question: "If you deleted this company's name from this article, could a reader tell it was written specifically for them, or could it belong to any plumbing company in the country?"
That question landed harder than any technical correction would have. Both writers admitted, after a pause, that the article could belong to almost anyone in the industry, and that realization did more to improve their next draft than a week of style-guide reading would have accomplished on its own.
Working Through the Fix Together
Rather than rewriting the piece herself and handing it back, our strategist worked through the fix collaboratively, asking the writers what specifically made this particular client different from a generic competitor. It turned out the client had a genuinely distinctive angle nobody had used yet: a family-run business now in its third generation, with the current owner's grandfather having founded it doing exactly the kind of work his grandson still does personally on larger jobs today.
That detail hadn't made it into the draft at all, buried somewhere in a client intake call nobody had thought to mine for content material. We talked, as a group, about how easy it is to lose these kinds of details once you're deep in keyword research and structural requirements, and how a genuinely good content strategist learns to hold both at once, the technical requirements and the human story, without letting one crowd out the other.
The Second Lesson: Editing for Removal, Not Just Addition
Once the family story got worked into the draft, our strategist made a point I found genuinely useful myself: she had the writers cut nearly 200 words from elsewhere in the piece to make room for it, rather than simply appending the new material and letting the article grow longer. Her reasoning was direct: length isn't inherently valuable, and a longer article stuffed with generic filler doesn't outperform a tighter one built around something genuinely distinctive, a principle that shows up throughout our thinking on content strategy more broadly.
Watching both junior writers actually cut their own sentences, sentences they'd written and were naturally a little attached to, was probably the most valuable ten minutes of the whole session. Editing your own work down is a genuinely hard skill, harder than adding to it, and it's rarely taught directly.
Why I Sat In
I could have used this hour for a dozen other things today, and I almost skipped it for a client call that ended up rescheduling anyway. I'm glad I stayed. Watching how a genuinely skilled mentor handles a teaching moment, patient, specific, working through the fix collaboratively instead of just correcting from above, told me more about the health of our content team than any performance metric could have shown me on its own.
By the end of the session, the revised draft was noticeably stronger, and both writers left with something more durable than a fixed article: a specific question they'll now ask themselves on every future draft, before anyone else has to ask it for them.
What This Means for How We Staff Client Work
Sessions like this one directly shape how we assign work going forward too. Our strategist mentioned afterward that she's now comfortable giving both writers slightly more editorial independence on their next few drafts for lower-stakes clients, specifically because she watched them internalize the distinctiveness question in real time rather than just nodding along politely. That's a genuinely useful signal for staffing decisions that a formal skills review every six months would probably miss entirely, since it's based on watching someone actually reason through a problem, not just checking a box on a form.
We're planning to run a version of this same session again next month, this time with a different pair of writers and a different real client draft, since the format itself, working through one genuine, unfinished piece together rather than a hypothetical example, seems to be what makes the lesson actually stick rather than just being heard and forgotten by the following week.
It's a slower way to grow a team than handing everyone a style guide and trusting it to do the work on its own, but a style guide has never once caught the kind of distinctiveness problem we worked through together today, and I doubt it ever will. Judgment gets built in sessions like this one, sentence by sentence, question by question, not in a document anyone reads once during their first week and rarely opens again.
Curious what it's actually like working with a content team that trains this way? Talk to Rafenthic's team.
— Abdullah Abid, Founder, Rafenthic