Stop Making Your Team Stumble in the Dark to Figure Out How to Work with You

Share what makes you tick and how your team can best engage with you in an Operating Manual to up-level how you and your team collaborate.

Photo by Matt Atherton on Unsplash

Everyone has reported to a leader who they couldn’t figure out or struggled to work with.

Someone who induced stress just by the mere thought of engaging with them.

Perhaps it wasn’t clear what they wanted when they asked questions.

Or maybe it was because they would get agitated over things and you didn’t understand why.

Or they communicated in ways that just didn’t make sense to you and you would spend hours trying to decipher what they were trying to convey to you.

Do yourself and your team a favor, don’t be one of those leaders.

There might be several ways you can improve your leadership, but one of the easiest is to clarify for your team what you value, how to communicate with you, and what are some triggers they should avoid if they want to get the best out of your working relationship.

She was confident her leadership would mesh with her inherited team – she was wrong

Lyla had been leading teams for years. She had worked in organizations large and small and helped build several functions from scratch. She was not a newbie to the leadership game.

Lyla had recently started working at a company where the culture and the team were entrenched, most with tenures of 6 or more years. She knew that to be successful, she would need to both get to know the existing culture and figure out how to leverage her hallmark qualities as a leader.

At first, her department seemed open to her different approach.

Several offered insights into how the team had previously been managed and what worked and what didn’t. Lyla saw many opportunities where her more direct communication style, her ability to delegate, and her decisive decision-making could help accelerate progress for the team by empowering more of the staff.

But within the first two months, there were several instances where team members either didn’t understand Lyla’s direction or where her approach resulted in less productivity and greater consternation:

• Confusion & Delay:

  • Courtney, one of Lyla’s senior direct reports, came to Lyla for guidance on a project and was confused when Lyla asked her what she thought the goals should be and how she would set up the parameters for success.

  • Courtney’s prior leader was very prescriptive and she felt a combination of fear and frustration when Lyla didn’t proceed to lay out the details of the goals and other success criteria.

  • As a result, they ended up stalled for 2 weeks before the project got underway.

• Fear & Misunderstanding:

  • Steven was an individual contributor who reported into Lyla. He was an expert in data analytics and was used to leaders coming to him asking for analysis to support their strategic decision-making.

  • When Lyla only came to him once to make a request and then met with him only once afterward to hear his analysis, he was worried that he didn’t deliver what she needed.

  • Steven was used to 2-3 iterations of requests and several conversations before leaders found what they were looking for. Lyla baffled him.

• Friction & Distraction:

  • Mandy was used to frequent touchpoints with her manager when she started a new initiative.

  • Lyla expected her direct reports to operate more independently and only seek her out when they ran into a roadblock that only she could solve.

  • Mandy struggled with a project that Lyla assigned to her not because she didn’t know what to do, but she felt that Lyla was inaccessible to her to validate her initial framing and approach.

  • Mandy wasted hours worrying about whether Lyla was avoiding her and feeling unclear about how to ask Lyla for support.

It was time to ask for help and try a different approach

Lyla went to her coach for some advice as she experienced these challenges. It wasn’t that her prior leadership experiences were all smooth sailing, but she hadn’t experienced as many bumps compared with her current organization.

Lyla’s coach suggested that Lyla consider writing a “Lyla Operating Manual” to help her team understand how to work with her. Her coach also suggested that everyone on the team also write their own Operating Manuals. She offered that share these in an engaging session to build camaraderie and understanding among team members.

Lyla wasn’t 100% bought in, but she didn’t have any alternatives and things needed to change.

Operating Manual Template

There are many models for Operating Manuals, but here is the basic template that Lyla’s coach recommended:

1. What do you value?

   1. Principles, behaviors, ideas, outcomes, etc.

2. How you think and learn:

   1. How you process information: written, visual, auditory, discussion, alone, fast, slow, etc.

   2. When you want to dive in deeper / when you don’t need details

3. How to best engage with you

   1. Time of day

   2. Format of communication and when to use it: email, text, Slack, video call, phone call; which to use based on topic, urgency, time of day, etc.

   3. Do you prefer detailed or high-level summaries?

   4. How you best receive feedback

   5. How you give feedback

4. Your decision-making model

   1. What information do you need?

   2. How do you assign roles and responsibilities?

   3. Speed and level of detail

   4. How do you handle new information or indications that you are on the wrong track?

5. What lights you up / stresses you out / gets you down

6. What accomplishment are you most proud of? Why?

7. What circumstances or functional areas do you want more support?

8. How can someone earn a gold star? A black mark?

9. What do you enjoy doing outside of work?

   1. Hobbies and pastimes, including those you want to try

   2. Food preferences

   3. Favorite and most disliked music, books, movies, etc.

Before even starting to write, Lyla asked her team if an Operating Manual would help them and she heard a resounding “Yes!”.

So Lyla took 2 hours to write her manual and then shared it with her direct reports. She asked them to create their own Operating Manuals and to have their teams do the same.

It’s not enough to write it — you need to help your team digest it

Lyla sat down with her direct reports for a 90-minute group session where they each talked about different aspects about themselves based on their manuals and asked questions to better understand each other.

Afterward, Lyla’s direct reports shared that they not only felt more confident in how to work well with Lyla, but they were feeling more connected overall and more energized to achieve their goals.

In a few short weeks, Lyla could feel the difference. Her team was being more direct in their communications. Issues were surfaced and resolved much faster than before. As a team, they accelerated their pace and progressed toward their goals.

It was as if the entire team had gotten a tremendous boost of energy.

A Learning (or two)

An Operating Manual is a very easy way to help your team better understand how to work with you, and how to work together as a team.

Lyla’s coach gave her a simple model that you can use as a template for your team. You can also google search for other templates and I’ll link to some in the additional resources below.

A key part of making this endeavor successful is not just what you write, but how you facilitate a conversation that allows people to ask questions, share their own preferences, and set the conditions for more open dialogue in the future.

Only by helping everyone, including yourself, open the pathways for proactive discussion in the future will you reduce and even eliminate the barriers to working well together.

Some facilitation designs that I’ve seen work well include:

• Facilitator: Invite someone from outside of your team to facilitate so that you can be fully present. It could be another leader in the organization, a member of your HR team, or an outside consultant.

• Ease Your Way In, and Dive in Deep: Don’t start with the tough topics. Start with something lighter, like your favorite foods or movies. But also don’t just swim on the shallow side of topics. Cover more uncomfortable topics like what gets you frustrated or how to approach you when you seem irritable as everyone settles into the conversation. Your team will remember and appreciate your vulnerability and they will take what they learn to help you work together better.

• Make it Fun: One leader I worked with read everyone’s responses and made the entire session a trivia game with points and prizes. This is a great way to take serious topics and make them easier to discuss and create a more positive, memorable experience.

• Food & Drink: Everyone is in a better headspace when they are fed and hydrated. I’m not recommending alcohol, but instead, just light snacks and maybe some water and flavored seltzers. Or order lunch and make the meeting a lunch discussion.

No matter what you do, put a bit of thought into it, and don’t be afraid to ask one or two direct reports for their feedback before you set up the session. This will give you another perspective and a quick check before you push forward.

What if I have some reservations about sharing so much?

Sharing more about yourself can feel a bit scary.

What if your team thinks that you are difficult to work with? Or they view your likes and dislikes as strange?

Instead of seeing the risks of putting yourself out there, see the positives:

• Your team will feel that they are working for an authentic leader

• You’ll give your employees a great model to follow for more open conversation and dialogue

• Your team will not need to waste time wondering how to navigate working with you and can instead take action with more confidence and less hesitation

So how do you get started?

Grab a template and start to fill it in. Set up time to talk with your team to share your Operating Manual and then invite them to create theirs.

After you all meet again, check in every 6-12 months to see if there are new topics that they would like you to add, or if you feel your Operating Manual needs to be updated because you have changed something about how you work.

To really have fun with your Operating Manual, consider sharing this with people in your personal life. You might be surprised by what you learn about your personal relationships and how people across all facets of your life can benefit from knowing you better.

I’d love to hear from you

Share how you have helped your teams understand how to best work with you in the Comments section below.

• Have you tried building and sharing an Operating Manual?

• Is there another tool or process that has worked well for you?

Looking forward to learning from you and others in the Practice & Play community!

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Additional Resources

• Want People to Understand How to Work With You? Write Them a Manual (Inc.)

• A User Guide To Working With You (The Looking Glass, by Julie Zhuo)

• Explained: “How to work with me” manual (and why your company needs one) (The Remote Company)