HOW TO WORK WITH ME?
Today I wrote a user-manual for both my colleagues and the founders I work with. In it I set out how I prefer to work and suggestions on how to get the best out of me.
The idea emerged in 2013 when a CEO being interviewed by a journalist from The New York Times revealed that he had developed a one-page “user manual” so his colleagues could understand how to work with him. Since then the idea has caught on.
My decision to create the user-manual was partly prompted by the following 360-degree feedback I recently received:
Sometimes I feel a bit confused about when/how I should approach you. Sometimes you’re busy and give off the vibe that you want to be left alone/not interrupted. But you also encourage communication. It’s a small thing but maybe some clarity of how you liked to be communicated with?
But it is also a response to the fact I’m about to start supporting four new founders based across the UK, with whom I need to build an effective working relationship quickly and who I won’t always be working with in a face-to-face context.
The idea of the user-manual seems to intuitively make sense: it enables you to share insights about yourself that may take others a while to uncover. And when I was writing it, it felt good. In being transparent about things like when and where I like to work, as well as when I prefer to have meetings, I felt a sense of control.
It’s too early to tell whether it is actually effective, but I do have my doubts. It seems quite long and as a result, I wonder if anyone I work with will actually read it. I don’t have a user-manual for any of my colleagues, but perhaps knowing the person in question is motivating enough to make you read it in full? I can imagine wanting to see if my perception of a colleague aligns with their own perception of themselves.
It is also very much framed in terms of how to work with me. This is fine in relatively flat organisations, but what about in hierarchical organisations? It strikes me that when you work for someone else it might look very different and may not work. Depending on the nature of your work, it may not even be possible to write a user-manual. In this sense, I recognise that my ability to be able to even create a user-manual is one-hundred per cent a privilege.
This takes me onto how the user-manual might be perceived by others. One friend described that it could be seen negatively as if to say it is “my way or the highway”. A different critique of the user-manual appeared on Product Hunt:
The implication here is that we expect to shift the labor of emotional intelligence away from ourselves and onto our coworkers. Instead of asking individuals to be self-aware enough to understand how their colleagues perceive them and work to make sure that their intentions align ever more closely with those perceptions, we place responsibility on everyone *else* to read our “instruction manual” and adjust their expectations accordingly.
I don’t agree with this as a user-manual clearly does not totally negate the need to learn how to work effectively with your colleagues. This is especially the case as people may not actually know how they do their best work, but instead know how they like to work. And that difference is why an individual’s user-manual should be viewed as supplementary tool to support teamwork, not as the sole basis.
Overall, I’m intrigued to see whether I notice any difference in how anyone approaches me in a work context, to see how colleagues react to my sharing it and to see if anyone creates their own in response.
If you are interested in creating your own, you can access a template I made here. There are loads of examples out there, I studied a few and collated the questions that kept coming up and others that resonated with me.