Share Your "Guide to Working with Me"
Share Your "Guide to Working with Me"
Better to talk about it before the inevitable team friction than after
One of the benefits of working in a team that knows you well is that they’ve figured out how to work with you and you’ve figured out how to work with them. Most of the time, this mutual figuring out is done piecemeal and on the backside of some friction points.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Rather than expecting people to be telepaths or having the post-spat “let’s not do that again,” we could tell each other up front.
My first experience with this practice was in 2005. I had been reassigned to battalion headquarters due to a combination of my ability to see patterns, write well, create plans, and deliver a hard truth with tact and clarity. As part of the process, my supervising major presented me with a list of behaviors that showed how to win with him and what would have us in uncomfortable situations.
I loved it. As a junior officer who had been pulled up to work in a battalion from an elite unit in a combat zone, I had enough technical skills and (what I now call) workways to figure out. Not having to figure out how to make one of my two bosses happy was a relief, as I could just stay within his guidelines. I soon learned that he had the toughest standards of my bosses; if he was happy, everyone was. I excelled in that assignment in part because he gave me the guide to working with him.
From then on, I modeled the same process with all of my subordinates. I wanted to set them up the same way that major set me up. My units excelled.
As I transitioned to being a civilian owner and business, I found the process to be a bit more awkward but just as powerful.
This is why I often work with my clients to create their own “Guide to with Me.” It’s what it sounds like: it’s a document that lays out a bit of who we are, and what teammates can do to get the best out of us. (We also do this in our Level Up Retreats.)
You Don’t Have To Be an Executive, Manager, or Owner to Make Your “Guide to Working with Me”
While my work with clients and Level Up Retreat participants is focused on leaders, owners, and solopreneurs, there’s value for all teammates in doing this exercise and sharing the results with the team they work most closely with. Not only does this make the work more effective, it usually makes it more enjoyable, less stressful, less confusing, and more collaborative.
Creating your guide doesn’t need to take a long time. You can probably create a good working version in a focus block. And given that it’s a living document that you can and will update as you evolve, you don’t have to know everything to get started.
I’ve had my own doc like this for over a decade and shared it with teammates, but I shared it with my whole team in 2021 as we were starting to scale up and my responsibility span increased. There were a lot of updates over the last few years as I realized how much of “knowing how to work with Charlie” came in one-on-one conversations with some legacy teammates and left when they moved on to their next best opportunity – Shannon and Steve had become everyone’s Charlie whisperers.
What to include in your guide
I recommend the following sections at a minimum:
Top great things about working with me
Top challenges about working with me
Please do – things to do consistently and do more of
Please don’t – please avoid these when working with me
My guide also includes three additional sections you (and your team) might find helpful if you add them:
Formative Experiences, which covers topics like my upbringing and family, education, and jobs and training (Boy Scouts, cheerleading, military service) and how they shaped me.
Charlie-Specific Workways, which detail how to best interact with me on areas like communication, meetings, collaboration, and taskings.
Personality Assessments, for things like Sparketype, Clifton Strengths, and Enneagram. These are assessments everyone at PF takes, as a start to understanding each other better. They’re a useful input to the working guide.
Some examples to get you started
Here are a few examples from my own guide that’ll give you an idea of the sorts of things you might include in yours.
Top great things about working with me
I deeply care about you (holistically)
I’m principle-driven and consistent
I’ll see, call out, and integrate your unique GATES, sometimes before you do
I own my part of the mess
If you’re performing well, I’ll stay out of your way
Top challenges about working with me
I have extremely high standards, am high energy, and can be intense
When I catch a critical mistake, I’ll inspect everything around it, so be prepared to answer a lot of questions
I’m often operating from a future or vision I haven’t communicated yet, so ask me about the vision or context if it seems you’re missing something
I will quickly switch between advisory, directive, and collaborative leadership modes and it can be disorienting
Open loops drive me nuts
Please do
Proactively take work from my plate, including #JawsOfLife
Fix it when you see it
Suggest ways we can work better together
Loop me into what’s going on outside of “work” that’s exciting or impacting you
Speak up if you’re drowning and take care of yourself
Please don’t
Make me follow up with you about something you’ve committed to
Use me as the easy button; always investigate, ask other people, and come up with a DRIP (Decision, Recommendation, Intention, or Plan) first unless it’s a soundboarding scenario and I need to be there.
Ask me open-ended “thoughts?” questions when you’re asking for feedback or getting me to weigh in on something; be specific
Assume that I’m mad or frustrated at you when I’m frustrated about the situation
Hold onto a hurt I caused rather than speaking up about it
Encourage your team to make their own guides
My team has found this guide particularly helpful in more effectively working with me. Yes, as the owner/executive of my team, the inherent power asymmetries are apparent, but pretending like they’re not and hoping that people just get it are far more stressful for everyone than owning it.
Once you’ve created a guide for yourself, consider encouraging your team to create their own individual guides. Imagine how much smoother communication and other workways can be when teammates know and understand each other’s preferences, tendencies, habits, and formative experiences.
Remember: the team leader or manager doesn’t have to initiate this process and you don’t have to do all the parts. The “Please Don’t” section may be too much for your organization’s culture — but it doesn’t mean you can’t add some bullets to the “Please Do” list.
What benefits do you see in this approach? What team challenges have you faced in the past that you could have avoided with a guide like this? What conversations have you had that need to be codified into your own “guide to working with me”?