Every documentation team needs consistency, and every style guide is a small act of flattening. The tension is real: a reader should never be able to tell which writer wrote which page — and yet the writers are people, with instincts and taste you hired them for.
The line I try to hold: standardize the interface, not the mind. Terminology, structure, the shape of a procedure, the voice the product speaks in — lock those down hard. But how a writer gets there, what they notice, the questions they ask a product team — leave that alone. That’s where the good work comes from.
The failure mode of leadership here is turning writers into a rules-compliance function. You get consistency and you lose everything that made the content worth reading. The better move is to make the standards so clear and so automated that they stop being a source of friction — and then spend your actual attention on judgment, argument, and craft.
Lead the system tightly so you can hold the people loosely.