DESIGN MANAGEMENT
“Handbook of Me”: canvas template for team onboarding
How to set up collaboration rules in your design team
All teams are different, and something that has worked with one group may irritate or even offend another one. As a new design lead, you definitely want to establish a trustful relationship with people, but how to do it effectively?
“A Handbook of Me” is a workshop where team members share their collaboration preferences in a fun and structured way. It derives from Matthew Knight’s framework “Manual of Me” and is adjusted to the design domain. But before we jump to the canvas, why is the topic of team collaboration so tricky, in the first place?
- 📞 “Let’s jump on a quick call” — can be a normal communication method in a close-knit team or awful disrespect to one’s time in a company with many recurrent meetings.
- 🧩 Back-to-back meetings — can be an efficient way to keep all calls together so they occupy less working time or an unacceptably harsh schedule when people don’t have a spare minute to drink water and switch their brains to a different topic.
- 🍹 Informal team gatherings after work — might be an expected and pleasant way to socialize with each other or an annoying activity that prolongs the working day and leaves less time for private life.
- ⏰ Fixed working hours — may be a good way to increase the time during which team members can collaborate or an obnoxious restriction and sign of authoritarian control.
This list is endless: Office days or fully remote? Defined meetingless days/hours or not? Weekly or daily team syncs? Beer on Friday after work or attending design meetups together? Autonomous work or collaborative exercises?
Depending on your team, the very same thing can be perceived either as something good or utter evil. For example, I like to start my working day with meetings so that I can spend the rest of it doing hands-on tasks, but for some people, it’s too stressful to dive into tough conversations in the morning, and they prefer midday or evening talks.
I should admit I wasn’t always savvy in managing people, and here is a batch of my epic fails:
🤯 Mike, a designer from my team, was more productive in the evening; he started after 11:00 and worked until 20:00. I didn’t know about that. One day, a team member complained that she couldn’t reach out to Mike several times in the morning. I approached Mike to figure it out, but probably I sounded judgy, as if I assumed Mike was idling. I offended Mike; our trust was ruined.
😡 My previous team often gathered for drinks after work, so habitually I tried organizing something like that in a new company. However, my new team members valued privacy, didn’t drink alcohol, and perceived such initiatives as a continuation of office hours, which they weren’t obliged to attend. The backlash I faced damaged our collaboration.
😖 When I only became a manager, my team included middle and junior designers, so I spent a lot of time on knowledge-sharing and mentorship. When I joined an all-senior team later, I tried the same, but senior designers were autonomous and managed self-education well. I didn’t shield them from real problems like stakeholder pressure, so they thought I was useless.
As you can see, it’s not that hard to break fragile trust with the team. And the root cause is not figuring out people’s collaboration preferences early in the process, for instance:
- 📃 level of formality and order;
- 🕤 work schedule;
- 🎀 communication channels and style;
- 🎯 shared goals and values;
- 🔋 the balance of work and private life, etc.
So, when you step into the leading role, spend some time learning about the team’s work habits, and one of the handy methods is conducting a relevant workshop. Not only will you learn more about each other, but also agree on team rules, conventions, and rituals.
👉 “Handbook of Me” FigJam template
- open-ended questions;
- complete a meme;
- sliders;
- dot voting.
Copy and paste this template according to the number of team members, and feel free to include it in the onboarding kit for newcomers. Besides, you can customize labels and even whole sections depending on what you want people to share.
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Recommended materials
- “Manual of Me” framework by Matthew Knight.
- “5 best employee onboarding tools on Product Hunt,” an article by Jordan Gonen.
- “Team Charter” canvas by DesignABetterBusiness.
- “Culture Map” canvas by Strategyzer.
- “Team Culture” canvas by Kevin Weijers.
- ✍️ Here are all my design articles on Medium.
- 💼 Let’s connect on Linkedin. Drop me a note if you want me to present the topic of this article at a conference or meetup.
- 🏰 Bored by design articles? Check my other blog about photography and overlooked architecture.
