A User Guide To You
Helping your team help you lead better, faster.
Effective relationships are central to any successful leadership role. When taking on a new leadership position, establishing them quickly is pivotal.
For leaders, there are direct relationships and indirect ones—those who may meet you every quarter at an All-hands meeting or all-company event.
While the approach you take with the former may be more personal, there are techniques to help all those you lead understand you better, and work with you more effectively.
Naturally, all relationships are two-way, and leaders' ability to adapt their style to meet the needs of others is pivotal. Helping them meet you halfway by understanding your natural preferences can accelerate the relationship-building process exponentially.
Every leader, like all the different bosses you have worked for, is different; preferences around meeting style, communication, and detail vary.
Playing your cards close to your chest can leave your team constantly guessing and trying to figure out how to work with you best. This can be frustrating for both parties, as well as slowing down real progress.
Tim Hockey, a Canadian CEO, set out to proactively ensure his new senior team had a clear, accurate understanding of him - before his first day. In his Fast Company article, “I wrote a users’ guide to myself, and you should, too” he describes his approach “I tried to imagine everything I ever wanted to know—both the personal and the professional—about the bosses I’ve had in my career and articulate those things about myself.. that I hoped would remove any mystery from me.” In addition to sharing results of personality assessments, he shared his leadership principles, approach to strategy, how he likes to work, and how he likes to work with others.
But there needn’t be a first day to prompt a move to a more open approach. Gitlab is arguably a pioneer for its open attitude; and its CEO Sid Sijbrandij lives it personally. Any interested party - within the business or outside - can access his guidelines to working with him. It contains details of his strengths, flaws, communication preferences, presentation requirements, connecting on social media, home office set up - right through to his meeting schedule and how to send an email to make sure he opens it. His open book attitude leaves very few questions for those working, or looking, to work with him. It’s a fascinating approach that’s worth a look.
While you may not want to go to the lengths of Sijbrandij or Hockey, there is an opportunity for new leaders to accelerate their relationship building and to help those around them quickly understand what they need.
To help you do that, here are four prompts to give you a kickstart.
Reflect: As Hockey did, think back for a moment about the bosses you’ve had during your career.
What did they share with you immediately when you started working together?
What did you always want to know but were afraid or unsure to ask?
What did you learn about their approach over time that could have been useful to know upfront?
Write these down and make a list.
Document: Think about yourself and those around you at work. And then take a look at the list you have above. Put a ✔️, X or ? next to each item to indicate how confident you are that this is known by those you work with.
What stood out to you?
What patterns do you notice?
How would you prioritise the list according to usefulness and importance of each item?
Share: Starting a new role like Tim Hockey is a great opportunity to kick your relationships off on the best foot. But there needn’t be a reason for deciding to help your team work with you a little better.
What existing opportunities are there to share more about yourself in a way that could be useful and engaging to those around you?
What, from your list above, could you share for an immediate impact?
How and when would you share it?
And who would you verify it with beforehand?
Utilise: Tools that help you understand your personal leadership style can act as an additional accelerator to share the less overt features about you.
Having used many assessments throughout my career, Wiley’s Everything DiSC tool (snapshots below) stands out for its practical nature, enabling sharing and comparing of styles to identify common strengths, mutual blind spots and where you might get into difficulty working together. It’s a game-changing tool to build trust and understanding, fast - especially with new hires.
What tools do you have at your disposal to help you engage in more open leadership and accelerate relationship building?
If you don’t already have insight like this ping me a note and we’ll get you set up.
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