How To Work With Me User Manual

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  2. How To Work With Me User Manual Free
  3. How To Work With Me User Manual 2017
  4. How To Write A User Manual
  5. How To Work With Me User Manual Online

With helpful user manuals, first step documents and general how-to guides available, you will learn exactly how to use TeamViewer to the fullest. Whether using the all-in-one solution as an IT department or a managed service provider, intuitive functions such as Wake-on-LAN, unattended access and ticket assigning are all at your disposal. Jan 19, 2016  How this should all work. Here’s how the User Guide and ILP fit into a system of personalized learning: Every student should have an Individual Learning Plan (ILP) or what NGLC calls a Personalized Learning Plan (PLP). An ILP should include a reflection on collaboration preferences and learning differences (like the “About Me” of User Guide). May 04, 2018  If anyone can point me to an MS 'user manual' site for Windows 10, I'd be very grateful. If there isn't one, this is a shout-out to Microsoft: Please start.

A few years ago I read an article by Adam Bryant, the “Corner Office” Columnist for the New York Times, that led with this provocative question: “What if you had to write a ‘User Manual’ about your leadership style?”

Bryant describes how transparency about our work style – our preferences, values, quirks and all – shortens the learning curve for others by making explicit things that might otherwise take months, or even years, to uncover.

I was intrigued by the piece and took his prompt to heart. I devoured others’ manuals for insights that resonated, and took a clear-eyed look at what makes me tick.

I sat with questions like: Which activities give me energy, and which deplete me? What are my unique abilities, and how do I maximize the time I spend expressing them? What do people misunderstand about me, and why?

What emerged is my personal “User Manual” which has been an important communication tool for my team, and a learning process for me.

Beyond giving my colleagues a window into my wiring (and, as fellow entrepreneur Aaron Hurst endearingly called it, my “flavor of craziness”), the experience of writing the piece - and refreshing it each year - has had other benefits. It’s an opportunity for self-reflection that probes beneath the surface to get at what Tara Brach calls, “Radical self-honesty, and the joy of getting real”.

The process is also an opportunity to get honest feedback from others. Once I had a draft, I shared it with my Leadership Team at Global Citizen Year to see how my view of myself lined-up with their experience of me. Incorporating their input required me to listen not for what I wanted to hear, but for what I needed to hear.

Today, everyone on our Leadership Team has their own User Manual, and it’s become an exercise we encourage all of our colleagues to adopt.

I’m a strong believer that leadership is a practice, not a position.

My User Manual is one of the ways I practice leading out loud. It’s a living document that describes my innate wiring and my growing edge, while putting it out to the world that I know I am – and aim to always be -- a work-in-progress.


Abby’s User Manual

How To Work With Me User Manual Software

My style

  • I’ve been hard-wired as an entrepreneur since I was a kid.
  • I hover in ambiguity and possibility, and am most energized when I’m connecting dots/people/resources that translate challenges into opportunities. I am always scanning for information to feed ideas in my mind, and typically do my best thinking out loud.
  • My high expectations are matched by my commitment to support people in meeting them. I believe in giving people freedom, flexibility and “stretch” assignments, and equipping them with the tools they need to uncover and develop their potential.
  • I’m determined to prevent my attention from being hijacked by technology. I never open my computer until I’ve written my quick list of what I intend to do; I hide my inbox to help me focus, and I’ve tried to take control of my phone by removing everything that’s not a “tool” from my home screen.

What I value

  • I value resourcefulness and proactivity. Be smart, move fast and pivot quickly. Ask forgiveness rather than permission.
  • I’m obsessed with efficiency: I touch each email only once (respond, delete, delegate, or delay), and live by the law of 80/20 – often prioritizing promptness (ie. 24-hour rule in following up on a meeting) over perfection. I start each day by “eating my frog” when my energy and attention are fresh.
  • I expect my teammates to value efficiency as well. Before doing something “the way it’s always been done,” scan for an easier, cheaper, simpler way to maximize your “return on effort”. Before starting something from scratch, ask if it’s already been tried.
  • I value scrappiness and feel an obligation to our staff, Fellows, partners and donors to focus our limited time and resources on the “real good” vs. the “feel good”.
  • I believe work-life alignment matters more than work-life balance, and that strategic self-care – whether sleeping enough, leaving work early to exercise, meditate, or spend time in nature – is the key ingredient to becoming our best, most productive and happy selves. I am religious about spending time unplugged – a day a week, and a few weeks a year.

What I don’t have patience for

  • If you make a mistake or something is heading off the rails, tell me before the crash. Failure is great (as long as you learn quickly); surprises are not.
  • I get antsy with hypothetical musings and over-analysis. I learn best through experience and experimentation and have a strong bias toward action.
  • I default to trust, but if my confidence is shaken, it’s hard to rebuild. Ways to lose my trust: not following through, withholding important information, avoiding hard conversations, or treating others with disrespect.
  • I am turned off by entitlement, boredom and taking things for granted – it’s a privilege to do what we do, and it’s our joyful responsibility to take our work seriously, but not ourselves!

How best to communicate with me

  • Be crisp. Start with the headlines. I prefer bullet points to prose, and .PPT to .DOC.
  • I love to solve problems, remove barriers and help others move the ball forward. Come to me not just with problems, but with plausible solutions and your recommended course of action.
  • I value authenticity, honesty and transparency. If I say something you disagree with, tell me. I am hungry to be challenged in thoughtful and constructive ways. I respect people who have the right blend of confidence and humility to know when to question someone (even the boss!), and when to defer to another's expertise.

How to help me

  • I move quickly and don’t always catch every detail (except when it comes to our brand and communications where I’m a painstaking perfectionist). I appreciate help making sure the details are covered, and flagging for me any that need my attention.
  • Nudge me when it’s time to start or end a meeting - but have (some) patience with my flexible approach to time.
  • Tell me what I need to know, not what you think I want to hear.

What people misunderstand about me

  • I am an introvert, posing as a professional extrovert. Don’t confuse my tendency to work alone in my office with being disengaged. My door’s always open.
  • I speak with conviction, but I’m not set in my thinking. I'm open-minded and always delighted to be shown a better way. I make decisions quickly, but if you give me reasoning or data that points in another direction, I’ll happily change course.

Finally, I may be the boss, but I’m also a person, a teammate and a messy work-in-progress. I’m committed to always getting better at my job, and to becoming a wiser, kinder and more impactful human.

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What would your User Manual say? Check out this this piece to get started: Five Steps to Create a personal User Manual

#EdInsights #Entrepreneurship #Leadership #UserManual #Innovation #Learnings

How To Work With Me User Manual Free

For media and speaking inquiries, please contact media@globalcitizenyear.org.


Earlier this month, I attended one of the most useful conferences I’ve been to in a while: the New Work Summit, hosted by the New York Times. There were a number of very relevant sessions and breakouts, but there was one that has transformed how BetterCloud works. It taught me an exercise that I’ll do at every company I’m a part of for the rest of my life.

This standout session was hosted by Adam Bryant, a columnist for The New York Times. I met Adam last year when he interviewed me for his column, The Corner Office. His session, entitled “The CEO’s User Manual,” was inspired by his interviews with CEOs where they talked about creating “user manuals” for themselves.

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. What a brilliant idea -- it makes you kick yourself and wonder, “Why didn’t I think of doing that?”

Here is an excerpt from a Corner Office interview where Ivar Kroghrud, discusses why he developed it:

“It made sense to me because I’ve always been struck by this sort of strange approach that people take, where they try the same approach with everybody they work with. But if you lead people for a while, you realize that it’s striking how different people are -- if you use the exact same approach with two different people, you can get very different outcomes.

So I tried to think of a way to shorten the learning curve when you build new teams and bring new people on board. The worst way of doing it -- which is, regrettably, the normal way -- is that people just go into a new team and start working on the task at hand, and then spend so much time battling different personalities without really being aware of it. Instead, you should stop and get to know people before you move forward.”

-- Ivar Kroghrud, QuestBack

After explaining the concept to the audience of 150-200 leaders and CEOs, Adam led us through an exercise where we created our own user manuals. First, he walked us through a couple of items from his own manual and then put a list of questions up on the screen to help us get started:

The first set of questions were focused on us:

How To Work With Me User Manual 2017

  • What are some honest, unfiltered things about you?
  • What drives you nuts?
  • What are your quirks?
  • How can people earn an extra gold star with you?
  • What qualities do you particularly value in people who work with you?
  • What are some things that people might misunderstand about you that you should clarify?

The next set of questions were more focused on how we interact with others:

  • How do you coach people to do their best work and develop their talents?
  • What’s the best way to communicate with you?
  • What’s the best way to convince you to do something?
  • How do you like to give feedback?
  • How do you like to get feedback?

How To Write A User Manual

For the next 15 minutes, the audience was heads-down, writing. Nobody was on their phone. Nobody was looking up. The only sound you heard was the scratching of pens and pencils as people feverishly jotted down answers in the the little notebooks we were provided.

In fact, we were so engrossed that Adam had to forcibly tell us to stop writing. Next, we paired up with the person sitting to our right and shared what we wrote. As the session was ending, my neighbors and I all remarked that we’d publish and share our manuals with our teams when we get back. It felt like the entire room had a collective “Aha!” moment.

The New Work Summit was at the very beginning of a 3-week travel marathon for me, but this user manual exercise really stuck with me. Usually, I end up losing my notes from conferences and forget what I learned. But during every meeting I had over those next 3 weeks on the road, I told every person I met about the exercise and suggested they try it.

Every time I spoke about the concept, though, there was one thing that seemed odd to me: It’s a CEO’s manual.

The value was crystal clear, but why should it be limited to learning how to work with the CEO only? This learning curve seems to be even more pronounced in intra- and inter-team interactions, which happen a lot more on a daily basis than interactions with me do.

So I took it one step further: I decided to have the whole company create user manuals.

How To Work With Me User Manual Online

At this point, I was really eager to get back to the office for our monthly company meeting so that we could introduce this initiative to everyone. I was still on the road, though, and I grew restless. With each day that passed, it felt like we were missing out on bringing some kind of super-efficiency and high-level engagement across our team. I knew how to make employee interactions more enjoyable; I just needed the opportunity to put it into action.

In preparation for this company meeting, I mentioned we’d be doing a team exercise and asked everyone to bring their laptops. After going through the typical items on our meeting agenda for about an hour, I shared my story from the New Work Summit. I explained why I found the user manual valuable and walked through mine, one item at a time, with our whole team of 130 people. I then replicated Adam’s exercise so that everyone could create their own user manuals in Google Docs.

I don’t think we’ve ever had a period of time where every person in the company was typing at the same time -- they were so absorbed that nobody was talking or looking up; everyone was just furiously typing away. Just like what happened at the conference, I had to tell people to stop writing. But the coolest part of all was when we finished and people went back to their desks: I noticed everyone was in the shared Drive folder and avidly reading each other’s user manuals, curious to learn more.

We’ve been doing monthly all-hands/company-wide meetings since we started the company 4 years ago and I have never, not even once, seen this kind of overwhelmingly positive response to an exercise before.

Getting buy-in was effortless, and it makes perfect sense why people instantly saw the value in it. Think about it: We all have different personalities. We’ve all been shaped by profoundly different life experiences. We all communicate differently. But many times when we come into work, we’re expected -- and in many cases forced -- to interact with each other in a templated, “one-size-fits-all” way.

Here is my user manual, which is a work in progress and will continually evolve but I've already noticed changes in how people interact with me:

  • I don’t have any hobbies (which I know is unhealthy) but I’m 100% focused on and dedicated to BetterCloud. All of my energy is devoted to BetterCloud and my family. I’m passionate about what we do, so you will get emails from me at all times of the day and week. I will challenge you, and I have high expectations.
  • Email is how I manage my task/to-do list. If you want me to do something, send me an email about it. I try to work through my email and get as close to inbox zero every morning (I usually get there once a month). I’ll communicate via Slack, Google Hangouts, text, or phone, but things fall through the cracks there.
  • Three attributes that I love in people that I work with: an infectious work ethic, intelligence, creative problem-solving skills.
  • Three attributes that I hate in people that I work with: selfishness, insincerity, rigidity.
  • I like people to be straightforward and give me feedback directly. I’m not easily offended. I know that I don’t know how to do everything and can’t see everything that is happening in the company or market, so feedback is always welcome.
  • It doesn’t take too much to convince me to try new initiatives, but it takes a lot more to convince me that it makes sense to make a bigger and longer-term investment in something. I want to see data to back it up.
  • I love brainstorming new ideas with people. I get an actual adrenaline rush from coming up with something innovative, even if it is something small.
  • Unfortunately I’m late to a lot of meetings, but I’ve tried to get better at being on time. It’s said that people who are late to meetings are very selfish and aren’t thinking of others, but my meetings often run long because I’m very present in meetings and don’t pay much attention to time.
  • If I ask someone to do something and they acknowledge they are going to do it, I expect it to be done and not to have to ask about it again in the future. This is my biggest pet peeve, and it frustrates me if I have to be the one to remind you to do it.


This exercise, while short and simple, is tremendously powerful. It’s helping my team be more effective and efficient, and ultimately transforming how they work together. With a little perspective and 15 minutes, you can truly revolutionize how your team works together.

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