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[Vannessa Rataj]

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I came across an article a little while back, How to Be the Boss Everyone Wants to Work For. It was an excerpt from a book titled One Bold Move A Day by Shanna Hocking. I must confess, I'm unlikely to read this one because it's written specifically for women in leadership. However, Hocking introduced a fantastic concept that I wanted to explore today: the Leadership User Manual.

She credits its origins to Adam Bryant, who wrote an article almost 10 years ago titled, What If You Had to Write a "User Manual" About Your Leadership Style? This exposes the concept of developing a physical document to help your people to understand how best to work with you.

Even though I'm a pretty strong communicator and I'm very open and direct, I'm sure there were times when my people weren't exactly sure where I was coming from. There simply isn't time to explain the ins and outs of every decision, or the experiential elements that form your judgment. A leadership user manual would be just the tonic!

In this LinkedIn Newsletter, I take a deep dive into the concept of the leadership user manual. I look at the benefits and the risks, and I take you along a journey with me as I develop my own inaugural leadership user manual.

Let me begin by saying, we're breaking new ground together here today. I never implemented the concept of a leadership user manual in the days when I was leading large groups of people in corporate, so my assessment of the risks and benefits is going to be an extrapolation of my experience.

This is slightly different from my usual content, which I base on my direct experience in the leadership trenches, having tested to find out what works and what doesn't. But I'm sure you'll bear with me as we explore this together.

Once people understand the principles for how something works (or, at least how something's supposed to work), it gives it meaning. It makes it easier to understand the why. Ray Dalio wrote an excellent book a number of years ago, which was called Principles, and it does exactly that (it's not an easy read, but it's a must-read).

Your principles provide a blueprint for successfully accomplishing things in the right way. Most companies have KPIs to define the what, but principles allow you to speak the language of the why, and the how. This is a critical step in instilling an ethical frame for the way your people operate.

You can put this at the center of any conversation. Almost no one understands exactly what you're trying to communicate, and it certainly takes a lot more than one meeting to convey your expectations for pretty much everything.

Many conversations (sometimes dozens), are needed using different language and emphasizing different points before the penny drops. A leadership user manual would give you a referenceable point of consistency to keep coming back to.

It enables you to take seemingly unrelated events, decisions or directions and tie them back to a consistent set of operating behaviors. It takes the guesswork out of what you might be looking for at any given point, and why you might be looking for it. However, the downside of consistency is predictability (which we'll get to shortly).

Assuming your company has a stated set of values, or a code of conduct, it can help to clarify expectations even further. Your leadership user guide shouldn't contradict the code of conduct, of course, but it will enable you to put greater granularity around some of the expectations.

It also allows for the individualization of the guidelines in the code of conduct for different leaders, which demonstrates that there are many different ways to skin a cat. It's an extra mechanism for describing the desired behaviors that you expect your people to live by.

In the interview I did with Scott Miller just a few weeks ago, I asked him what the biggest trend he was seeing in leadership. Scott's view was that post-pandemic, the biggest trend was the requirement for individualization.

Producing a leadership user manual could well make a leader think their job is done, and that their people will adapt to their style. This is unlikely to be effective in the longer term. The role of leadership isn't simply to be understood, but to understand your people on an individual basis. That's how you'll ultimately get through to them.

For example, if people feel as though they can predict what you're thinking, they'll start to make assumptions. I've seen people stop challenging the status quo because they prefer to not do the heavy lifting required to challenge it.

I've been there, guys! On top of that, people become desensitized to messages over time. At the end of my five year tenure at CS Energy, I was sick of repeating the same key messages over and over and over.

Let's face it, if people were actually doing what they knew they should, I wouldn't have had to reiterate the point so often. But even though everyone pretty much knew that they hadn't done what they were supposed to do, I could still see them mentally rolling their eyes. I could see it on their faces:

I'm courageous (I've never been afraid of losing my job and, although I don't set out to offend anyone, I'm not hamstrung by the fear of not being liked. I'm quite happy to disagree with the most powerful person in the room if I don't agree with them).

You don't get a free kick on leadership work just because you might be a brilliant strategist or an incredible rainmaker (I expect you to put as much effort into developing talent and building capability as you do into any other accountability in your job description).

You won't enjoy working for me if you don't believe in the principle of meritocracy (because you'll feel hard done by when those who perform get the rewards that they've earned, and you're overlooked based on your relative underperformance).

Given that's my first crack at developing my leadership user manual, I think it's a pretty good start. It needs some fine-tuning, no doubt, but it's a pretty reasonable representation of who I am and how I operate.

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