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Help colleagues understand how to work with you.
Participants work through a series of prompts to create their own User Manual: a simple framework that helps colleagues understand how to get the most from them, how to communicate, and what support they need.
This session is deceptive in its simplicity: it reliably surfaces new insights into colleagues, even in teams that have worked together for years. Enabling people to name and discuss their values is particularly powerful.
Send the User Manual template to participants at least forty-eight hours ahead and confirm everyone has completed it, chasing anyone who has not, because the session works far less well if some people arrive empty-handed. Frame it simply, give everyone roughly equal time to walk through their manual, then reflect together on what has surfaced.
Frame the session simply: we spend a lot of time working out how to use tools and systems, and surprisingly little understanding how to get the best from each other, and this is what the User Manual is designed to address. Set one ground rule: what is shared in the room stays in the room.
Give each person roughly equal time to walk through their manual. With a group of four to eight, five to seven minutes each leaves space for brief questions without losing momentum. Invite one or two short responses from the rest of the group after each person shares. Do not rush this round, because the conversation in the room is the exercise. If someone is being vague or overly safe, ask them for an example of when that has really mattered, or what you would need to know about them that most people get wrong. If a manual reveals a genuine tension with another person's working style, acknowledge it in the room.
After everyone has shared, ask what has surprised people and what they now understand about a colleague that they did not before. Invite one or two observations. The values part of the template is usually the most powerful, and colleagues often recognise a value in someone for the first time. Senior teams often gain the most here, because they have spent the longest behind professional masks. Close with: this conversation does not end here; you now know a little more about what each person needs to do their best work, and the challenge is to actually use that.
Use User Manual when a team wants to understand how to get the best from each other, even where people have worked together for years and still misread one another. Each person shares how they work best, what they need, and what matters to them.
Using this tool with a skilled facilitator means that discussions are focused, time is used efficiently, and the group moves toward consensus, making the session productive and impactful.
