Why You Should Write and Distribute a User Manual On How Your Team Can Best Work with You

Taking time to first understand your own personal working style and motivations and then sharing those notes with your team can lead to better collaboration

Chris Suzdak

A few years ago, I was faced with the need to make several major adjustments to my team’s regular meeting structure and schedules. The effort aimed to accommodate a fast-growing team that had brought on additional team leadership layers. With additional departments and increasingly complex business decisions, I had realized that the frequency and format of our current arrangement was no longer adequate. In fact, it seemed to have a direct negative impact on our ability to effectively communicate strategy and make informed decisions.

But while change was definitely needed, my decision to make sweeping work schedule changes failed to take in account an undercurrent of pre-existing collaboration clashes between individuals and departments across my team. The ensuing personal arguments and mis-managed projects across the wider team signaled to me that our team was struggling to work together effectively in the face of change. Given that we would likely face additional growth and pivots in the coming years, these challenges deeply concerned me and led me to pursue a number of team-building initiatives.

Around this time, I came across an article by Leah Fessler in Quartz which made this assertion:

“Here’s a funny thing about work: We spend more time with our colleagues than with our friends and family. Yet more often than not, we don’t really understand our co-workers — because being honest with one another is scary.

When a teammate’s lack of organization annoys us, we vent to others. When a boss says “this is fine” (not “this is great”), we wallow in anxiety. Many of us figure out our colleagues’ personalities, preferences, and dislikes through trial and error, not through explicit conversation.

This strikes me as a colossal waste of time, productivity, and happiness. Ignoring these issues just leads to confusion and frustration, and, in time, can wind up threatening your job performance (and your paycheck).

Thankfully, there’s a tool that every team can use to bypass workplace miscommunications and angst, helping to amp up every employee’s potential and morale from day one. It’s called a user manual.”

Reading this at the time highlighted a key underlying factor that had been hiding in plain sight. When my team had been lean, getting along with others had come more naturally since we were a small group and all stretched to our limits building out the foundations of the company. We each knew inside that letting personal issues get in the way would ruin our chances of success. But as the team grew and our operations somewhat normalized to a standard workplace environment, our team’s productivity was determined not just be the sheer will of the founding team to get the job done.

I went on to develop a template for such a user manual for my team. I first went through the full exercise with my direct reports during our annual leadership retreat. After a few tweaks, we rolled it out across our full team. While we couldn’t convince every single person to truly commit to the process of doing their own personal deep-dive and sharing with their colleagues, most staff across all the department teams embraced the idea. Over the next several months, based on more open feedback around personal and team working styles, we re-worked the cross-functional meeting structures and timing to meet most people’s preferences. Even several junior-level staff managed to speak up and have their own 1-on-1 check-in times moved to better suit their working style, something that they had previously not felt empowered to ask their manager.

The template incorporates ideas from Leah Fessler’s articles and several other frameworks I’ve come across in the past. It includes 14 total questions across three sections:

Part 1: Personal Story

• Leadership Journey: Where were you 5 or 10 years ago in your life, your career, and your ability to create an impact in your community? Where are you now? Where do you want to be in 5 years?
• Greatest Mentor: Over the past 2–5 years, who is someone that you’ve learned a great deal from? How did they support your personal and/or professional growth?
• Values: What are your values? Why did you rank the values this way? How do your values influence your work? Where do your values overlap with your company and where do they not? What does this mean?
• Personality: What are your personality and leadership traits? Myers-Briggs type?
• Background: Is there anything else that is important to share about your personal story or background?

Part 2: Personal Sustainability

• Strategies: Which key activities do you pursue and value outside of your professional life? What would a perfect work week look like for you? What types of “personal sustainability” KPIs do you track on a weekly or monthly basis to keep your score high?
• After-Hours and Weekend Contact: Only to be used sparingly for urgent matters, how should someone contact you?
• Time Away from Office: What are your preferred protocols when taking time off? Do you completely unplug?

Part 3: Working Styles

• Preferred Times to Work: What time of day do you prefer to complete certain tasks?
• Check-in Etiquette: How do you like to conduct check-ins?
• How to Help Me: What is your preferred feedback style?
• What I Don’t Have Patience For: What big or small things often annoy you but others don’t realize it?
• What People Misunderstand About Me: What things do you feel others often misinterpret about you that give them a false sense of who you really are or what you’re thinking?
• Key Success Factors in Working With Me: What other collaboration and 1-on-1 strategies have others used successfully with you?

Not Just a One-Time Exercise

Product designers often go back to their products’ original user manuals either when new features are added, new customer segments are being catered to, or frequent user challenges are reported.

In the same way, an individual’s user manual should be a living document that you revisit on a regular basis. If you gain different experiences or build new habits, this should be reflected in your user manual. If you add a new team member or join an entirely different team, having this conversation and tweaking your user manual content to fit the new context will help ease the transition.

And most importantly, if you find yourself clashing with certain team members or notice other unproductive team dynamics, take time to re-read your own user manual and those of your peers to understand what might be the cause of any friction. This will allow you to kick start a conversation from the common perspective of how to best collaborate given each contributors’ working styles and motivations.

Having left a larger team to now launch my own company this year, I still find the user manual helpful. As I brought on my first intern earlier this year, I revisited and updated my user manual to reflect my new start-up working style and longer-term goals. I also intend to use it with my new Board of Advisors to make sure I get the most out of their support.

If you’re interested in using the template that I developed, see here. And if you want to see my own completed version, see here.