User Manual for Me

This is mainly for my teams and direct reports to understand how we will work together.

Feedback

I like it quick, if you spot something and think I handled it wrong or could improve please let me know. If you need extra support from me, please reach out, don’t sit in silence. Positive feedback is welcome too if I do something you think I did well. A quick message will do initially if I feel I need to understand more I would welcome a more in depth discussion via F2F or similar.

I like to address any disagreements rather than them fester and become something more. Not agreeing is part of life, we can agree to disagree and move on it won’t make me respect you less, we all see things differently.

Direct Reports and Teams

25% of our time I am your boss. I will keep you accountable for goals, quality, growth and how you are performing with your peers and teams.

50% of our time I am your peer. Bring decisions that need my input, get my feedback, learn from my mistakes and experience. Let’s put our minds together to solve real problems.

25% of our time I work for you. Given your goals and our mission, how can I help you. What do you need from me to do your job better.

%'s are guidelines, of course different challenges and situations need different ratios.

Decision Making

Use this decision tree model:

Leaf Decisions: Make them, act on it. I don't have to know about them. They are usually reversible.

Branch Decisions: Make them, act on it. Let me know about them and share your heuristics so that we can learn. Reversible with some effort.

Trunk Decisions: Share your decision and heuristic before acting on it. Get some feedback from me and a peer. These decisions will have broader company impact.

Root Decisions: We will make the decision jointly. These are decisions that when poorly made can cause major harm to the company.

Conditions I like to work in

• I like to work in cooler environments, I don’t like it too hot, it makes me grumpy.
• I can work from anywhere, but I love my home office as it is my personal bliss station with access to lots of books, notes and scribbles. A balance of home & onsite works best for me.
• I like large screen real estate. I often have my left and screen where I work and my right hand screen for reference material or video calls. Not always ideal for looking into a camera which I put in the middle of the two.
• My deepest thinking happens best in a morning, after lunch I am better at more administrative tasks.

The best ways to communicate with me

• I use a mix of email, slack, F2F, phone and WhatsApp. If it is urgent and needs immediate attention use Phone or WhatsApp.
• We have too much slack activity, I can miss things, raise in 1:1’s if I haven’t responded or see point above.
• I like people approaching me at my desk, if I am wearing headphones/earbuds I usually don’t want to be interrupted.

Things I need

• Opportunities to collaborate with people and teams, co creating things.
• Time to think - making fast decisions is sometimes required, good decisions take more time.

Things I love

• Making decisions, when I see analysis paralysis I really like to get the facts required to make a decision and make it. Examples would be should we chose x or y? We don’t know what to do about x? anything that has uncertainty surrounding it I like to resolve by working through it with people collaboratively. If it becomes unclear, I will make a decision so we start and correct course rather than wait for everything to be perfect.
• Learning, if you have something cool to teach, I always want to learn about it. I like to know how things work under the hood, fundamental things. Learning is a life long journey and I like to take the time to understand the work people do. This helps me help them by making better decisions.
• Solving problems together on a whiteboard/miro board, solving code problems in IDE's together.

Things I struggle with

• Unkindness - there is no need to be mean to people
• Meetings where people are suppressed and don’t want to speak up
• Massive long messages when a quick call can do
• Not taking the time to understand different perspectives
• Not getting time to think
• Analysis paralysis, I would rather act, learn and correct course than plan for hypothetical situations that may not transpire