Everyone Needs A User Manual

What if you had a user manual for your manager, the members of your team, or the people who work for you?

You could, without years of working together first, learn how they like to communicate, how they like to manage or be managed, how they like to give and receive feedback, what their pet peeves are, and more.

After I read this blog post, I had to try it.

I won’t reproduce the entire blog post, but here’s the summary (the author was at a CEO summit, but it applies to everyone):

Basically, the user manual is a “how to work with me” guide: It outlines what you like, what you don’t like, how you work best. It was something these CEOs would give their team members when they joined the company in order to shorten the learning curve of working with them. It’s a “cheat sheet” of sorts, giving employees a way to quickly and efficiently learn about executives, which in turn allows them to work together more effectively.

Genius idea.

So, I wrote my user manual.

By thinking about these questions, getting feedback from people I’d worked with in the past, and writing out the notes and answers, I learned a lot about myself. It was like a self-directed, long-term review process.

My current team appreciated it too, and it helped them work better with me.

Do it.