User Manuals for Team Collaboration
Collaboration requires trust; trust requires vulnerability; vulnerability requires transparency.
That’s the logic chain that comes to mind when I consider why a “user manual” is valuable. You might be asking yourself, “What’s a user manual?” That is a great question that I also had when one of my managers shared his with me early in my tenure at InVision. After I asked the question, he shared this post from Brad Feld. The short answer is this: a user manual is a lens into who a person is and how to work with them most effectively.
Shortly thereafter, I wrote my own user manual and began sharing it with my team. What I found is that my transparency was interpreted as vulnerability, which led to building trust and collaboration between me and the people with whom I shared it. Repeated experiences sharing my user manual lead me to believe a common effect is to short-circuit some of the ‘getting-to-know-you’ time required to build a healthy, collaborative working relationship with anyone.
Achieving that effect requires self-awareness and courage, so I naturally felt some level of discomfort sharing my user manual. What helped me gain that courage is acknowledging that a user manual has to be a living document. That’s the case because self-awareness is inherently biased, so self-aware statements in a user manual require external feedback to get closer to being accurate. It also has to be a living document because everyone changes over time, so what might be an accurate statement about a person now may not be an accurate statement next month or next year.
Even though I have conviction in the above statements, I’m a bit wary of sharing my user manual with you now. However, many times courage is equivalent to a leap of faith, and I have faith that sharing my user manual with more people will improve it and my relationships, so here goes:
If we’ve worked together and you have feedback on my user manual please request access to comment after opening the Google Doc or by sending me a message. I’m looking forward to it!
