Five tips for Team Leaders getting started with Manual of Me

When you’re starting out with Manual of Me, it can be tempting to jump straight into setting your questions, sending around the invite, and hoping for the best.

But based upon supporting over 70,000 people across 4000 organisations creating their Manual of Me - here are our five top tips for helping your teams to create a Manual of Me which is adopted and impactful.

1/ Be clear on your goals for using the Manual of Me

Are you looking to solve a specific problem, identify challenges, or simply get to know your team better?

Being clear will help you design your manuals and communicate the aims with your team.

You might want to use the Manual of Me to:

• Discover similarities and differences between team members
• Identify and address any challenges or issues within your team
• Improve communication and collaboration
• Increase engagement and motivation
• Build a stronger, more understanding team
• Add some humanity back into working together

Or perhaps you’ve heard good things, or used the tool before, and want to see how your team can benefit from creating their own Manual of Me too.

Make sure you’re communicating to your team early on what you’re hoping to achieve, why you’re asking them to complete a manual, and how it’s going to be used.

2/ Co-design with your team

The best adoption happens when you work with your people to think about how your Manual of Me will be used, what questions you’ll include, and how you’ll create space and time to find and share your answers.

Consider hosting a kick-off workshop where you’ll introduce the concept, discuss what questions you might want to include.

There are no right or wrong questions, but we often seen questions broken down into four categories:

• Operational - when, where, and how do you work?
• Preferential - how do you prefer to communicate, engage, connect?
• Emotional - how can you be supported, what motivates you, what gives you purpose?
• Personal - something about the individual, rather than just work

Having a mix of types of questions often helps - but don’t be too top down - try and get a mix of questions from across the team.

And don’t start with too many questions - you can always add more later.

If you’ve created a manual using our online tools, you’ll have access to a wide range of questions, as well as the ability to add your own custom questions.

3/ Create space and time

Don’t expect people to complete their manuals overnight, nor outside of working hours.

Give them adequate time and support to explore their answers.

Once you’ve invited your team to manualof.me, they’ll have access to coaching exercises and activities to find their answers.

And you can host your own working sessions and workshops to help people find their answers.

It’s worth considering hosting a number of working sessions, perhaps even one per question, for some of the more challenging entries.

You can combine exploring and sharing in a single session, so your team is discussing their answers, and any implications or insights you discover as a group.

4/ Integrate into your ways of working

Just sharing a link to your manual is rarely sufficient.

Whilst sharing your document can be a great place to start, expecting people to read them (especially for larger teams) might not be enough.

Create opportunities to share insights, hold discussions on questions, and integrate it into your ways of working.

Consider opportunities and moments like:

• New starter standups
• Team away days
• Regular team meetings
• Project kick-off or reviews
• 1:1s

Also gives some consideration to where people will find and share their manuals. Whilst we love manualof.me online - if you’ve got existing platforms like Slack, or Teams, you can use Manual of Me in your existing workflows, to help adoption.

5/ Keep it fresh

Don’t complete it and forget it.

Find ways to add new entries, discuss new questions and reflect upon what you’ve learned over the year.

People change, and their manuals should reflect that.

Finally…

Most importantly, don’t just create manuals, and move on.

As a team leader, learning from the insights you’ll uncover about your team is invaluable - ask yourself: Now I know this, what will we do with this information?

See Manual of Me as the starting point of conversations and action, not the end goal.

Getting further support.

We provide training for team leaders, coaching calls, design implementation programmes, introductory and exploration workshops and more, based upon years of working with Manual of Me in organisations.

If you’d like to discuss how we can support you and your team, please get in touch.