Stellar User Guide

[Tavarus Calamia]

Iam clearer in writing than in person. In person, I may talk my thoughts out loud which can feel rambling. If my point is not absolutely clear, please ask me to clarify or to be precise with action items.

Because a lot of my job is nurturing creativity, my preference is for others to come to the right solution with their own conviction, not to tell others what I think the right solution is. However, I recognize that sometimes the most pragmatic and efficient thing is to be clear with my opinion early on so we can resolve major misalignments. If I am not being clear and you worry we may not be seeing eye to eye, please let me know.

I am on the hyper-rational end of the emotional spectrum. This can be annoying when you share a problem or feeling with me, and I respond with a bunch of rationalized suggestions, when what the situation called for was listening and empathy. I am working on being better attuned to this.

I am generally more focused on inputs than outputs. This means that if there is a positive outcome, but the process in getting there didn't seem sound or intentional to me, I might not see it as cause for celebration. This can be frustrating if you are more focused on outputs than inputs.

I am frequently late to meetings, like 1-5 minutes late. Sometimes there is a good reason, but 80% of the time, the reason is that I suck at punctuality, and need to get better at it. You should call me out when this happens.

I can fall into the bias of assuming everyone has the same context as I do, and as a result, not communicate the context or my perspective as clearly or as broadly as I should. Please remind me to provide more context if I do this.

Being a designer, I am very comfortable with ambiguity and living in the gray zone where there is potentially a better idea just around the corner. This can be annoying to people who want to nail down specifics quickly, or who want to commit to plans and not change them.

I appreciate people who make commitments and stick to them. If you are the overly optimistic type (like me), who tends to overcommit to more than can be reasonably done, I expect you to come to recognize and improve on this over time, and to reset expectations as soon as you realize a commitment cannot be fulfilled. I lose trust in people who repeatedly fail to honor their commitments to do X by Y.

If you give me critical feedback about a colleague and you have not yet delivered the message to that person directly, I will suggest you do that first. I am happy to help you work through the best way to share feedback, but I have little tolerance for office politics and espousing a culture where people complain about their colleagues behind their back. If I observe you frequently saying things that you'd be embarrassed to have someone else overhear (or be printed in the press), it will erode my trust in you. I have low tolerance for drama, unprofessional behavior, or disrespect among senior members of the team.

If I give you repeated feedback about your work or your behavior and nothing changes as a result, it will diminish my trust in you. I will do my best to debug why this is happening, as perhaps my feedback was unclear, or my expectations are unrealistic, but please help me to understand this as well.

Strong relationships. I get along well with most everyone and have built up strong credibility and trust with many leaders across the company. I am excited to meet new people and learn from them. If I can help you have more impact through my relationships, please let me know.

Staying calm, collected, and optimistic. I don't get overly emotional, and I do a good job of staying balanced. I like to look for the good in everyone and in every situation, and I believe we can make things great if we put our minds to it. This makes me effective at pitching projects, dealing with crises, and selling candidates.

Long-term focus. I think long-term when it comes to prioritizing people, processes, and strategy. I generally have a clear vision of where I'd like things to be in the future, and lots of ideas on how we might get there.

Thoughtful intentionality: I seek to understand a problem and its context before venturing a solution or opinion. This means that I typically have a well-framed rationale for why I think what I think, or a framework in mind when working through a problem.

Directness and simplicity in communication: I am working on cutting through the noise, and closing the gap between what I want to express and what others hear. I'd like to get better at quickly diving into the heart of complex issues and turning them into principled frameworks.

Meta-prioritization: Though I have reliable tools for prioritizing well when it comes to specific projects, I am still struggling to figure out better prioritization systems at a higher level--how to best juggle relationships (old and new), doing specific work, learning, thinking, and meeting.

I recalled the book "Radical Candor", sometimes we just ignore the other person's perspective, and that's key to shape our message and communication style. It also applies to friends and even our partner. So, I will apply your template and let's see what comes next ?

Thanks for sharing. I tried a similar thing with a different template, it got me positive feedback from DRs and some Team Leads. Though on the way I learned that the majority of people in middle and higher management tend to feel intimidated by the shown level of openness. On the other hand, with C-Level it seems to work quite well.

\uD83D\uDC4B Hi! I\u2019m Julie Zhuo. I help companies scale and build people-centric products informed by data. I\u2019m the author of a popular management book. I used to lead design for the Facebook app. The Looking Glass is my once-a-month-ish musings on products, teams, and our journey as builders.

Every six months, our company ran a wide-scale anonymous satisfaction survey that pretty much every single employee answered. If your team was big enough, you\u2019d get your own breakout of the results for how your immediate team was feeling. I always looked forward to diving in and seeing what was going well and what wasn\u2019t.

Under the question \u201CHow often does your manager show care for you?\u201D the chart that displayed the responses from my team was a mass of red. I had to read it a few times to ensure I wasn\u2019t misunderstanding: the majority of my team thought I didn\u2019t show care for them?!

This was hard to process because of course I cared. I cared a lot! I took pride in helping my reports grow and thrive. I gave them challenging projects and frequent feedback because I wanted to see them succeed. And if there were ways in which I could help them\u2014by hiring for their team, advocating for issues on their behalf, or pitching in on a tough project\u2014I always showed up. How could they possibly think that I didn\u2019t care?!

That night, I met a manager friend for dinner and poured my heart out to him. He listened and then gave me a diagnosis. \u201CJulie,\u201D he said, \u201CHave you ever told your reports that you care about them? Or asked them how they\u2019d like to be cared for?\u201D

I searched my memories and came up short. He had a point. \u201CEveryone\u2019s wired differently,\u201D he said. \u201CSo sometimes we struggle to understand each other. Maybe the way you show care and the way your reports perceive care are different. Everyone has their own preferences for how they like to operate and be treated.\u201D

He was absolutely right. I took the feedback to better understand what \u201Cbeing cared for\u201D meant to my reports. And I would learn this lesson time and time again--that even if you\u2019re a good, experienced manager, even if you show up to work every day with confidence, you\u2019re still going to fail to connect with others from time to time. You\u2019ll still have misunderstandings or talk past each other.

Some of this will be due to cultural differences, or contrasting personalities, or because we simply have different perspectives and life experiences. Whatever the source, the more I understood about what mattered to my the people I worked with, the better of a colleague and manager I\u2019d be. Similarly, the more my colleagues understood about how I worked, the fewer misunderstandings we\u2019d have.

I started writing a \u201CHow to work with Julie\u201D guide for my team about three or four years ago, and heard the phrase User Guide some time later. Instantly it stuck with me. When you buy a new camera, it comes with a little booklet that teaches you about the specifics of the gadget\u2014what each button means, how to select the appropriate lighting, how to review the images.

A User Guide for a Person works in a similar way. It creates clarity on how you work\u2014what you value, how you look at problems, what your blind spots or areas of growth are, and how to build trust with you.

The key to a good User Guide is to make it as specific to you as possible (check out this post on why that matters). Leave out the generic fluff that everyone would agree with, like \u201CI get motivated when my work has impact.\u201D That doesn\u2019t tell us anything, except that you\u2019re not a cat. Can you be more specific and tell us what kind of impact is motivating to you (and what kind isn\u2019t?)

The most effective User Guides contain snippets that might make you feel vulnerable, like you\u2019re letting the team see you unplugged, in your PJs with rumpled hair. But vulnerability is the secret ingredient to trust. When you acknowledge your imperfections, you will receive far more rewards in the form of support, mentorship, and empathy. And you invite others to be more open with you as well.

I\u2019ve included a User Guide template and my personal example as a starting point\u2014feel free to modify to best suit your needs. Mine has been a living document over the years, honed through continual feedback that has shined new light on how I understand myself and my relationships. I hope yours gives you a similar gift.

3a8082e126