What is a Manual of Me?
Good question. Let’s try and answer it.
A Manual of Me is a powerful document which helps you explore and explain how you work.
You can see an example of mine here.
What you include in it is up to you: focus on what’s important for you to share and that you want others to know about working with you.
It can include simple things like your working hours, your location, the channels you prefer to communicate with.
It can include more human aspects like what motivates you, what type of people you enjoy working with, or how to get the best from you.
It can include how you need to receive feedback, look for support, or what happens when you’re struggling.
It can include things about you outside of work like your interests, or things that others might need to be aware of.
Lots of organisations use documents like these: often they’re called “personal user manuals”, because it’s a helpful guide of how to work with someone.
We didn’t invent the concept (you can find out more about where we discovered them), but we’ve built a platform to help people who want to create and share their own Manual of Me.
1. Questions
We’ve selected a number of really powerful and useful questions — questions which we know are not only useful to share with others, but also ask of yourself. They’re directive to encourage you to communicate, but open enough to allow you to share what you need and want to.
2. Exercises
We found that for many people, answering our questions isn’t always a simple task. Bigger questions like “What motivates me?” or things which might be new like “My hybrid working patterns are… “ take some time to work out, so we’ve added lots of exercises and activities to help you work through exploring how you work. The process is as important as the document.
3. Sharing
We’ve made it as easy as possible for you to share your Manual of Me, so you can link to it from your email signature, from your CV, from your LinkedIn and socials. A simple single place to point people to learn more about you.
4. Teams
We’ve built tools to help teams create and share Manuals with each other, so that groups of people can quickly work better together. Over 60 well-known businesses are already using Manual of Me, as well as small project teams, schools, coaches, charities. Create a manual to kickoff a project, onboard new staff or develop stronger relationships over time.
5. Organisations
We’ve built tools to help entire organisations implement Manual of Me, so they can all work better together, and managers can easily invite their people to manuals which are consistent across a business, or tailored to individual groups, with custom questions specifically for their ways of working, and integrated with their existing tools and platforms.
6. Workshops
And we work with individuals and teams who want to get the most from their Manual of Me, by running sessions to design, explore, complete and share their manuals — either as one-off workshops or year-long programmes.
There’s an infinite number of ways of using a Manual of Me, but the easiest way is to get started for free.
Create your own at my.manualof.me
