Thanks for this!! I will create one as I am returning to work soon after maternity leave. I can see the benefit of sending this to the juniors but unsure if my seniors would appreciate it. I can only try!
Congrats on coming back off maternity leave. Yeah, I recommend for people above and across, it can be better to share if they ask or if it comes up naturally as something that might be helpful. For teams, it can be a really nice way to reintroduce yourself and frame it as a very light "I put this together to help you / make it easier for you to get what you need from me" type thing. As a manager, I always encouraged my reports to make them too and it was a really fun team exercise we did. Good luck
This is a really interesting idea but walking that tight rope between creating another self-indulgent gotcha doc and making it something really useful feels like the most important part. Since it's a tool I'm not familiar with, I'm scared of trying for risk of putting another "task" on people's to-do list without knowing exactly how to connect the dots. That said, the idea of having an explicit set of instructions on how to interact feels like it would help a lot, especially as you noted, when working with engineers who think like instruction manual readers most of the time anyway. Thanks for sharing this idea.
Fully agree. I've actually seen people come into a new team sharing their instruction manual in a way that felt too forthright, and it didn't go down well. I think it can work well as something that you have and share with people if they ask about your preferences, or as I mentioned in the article, when it's done as a team thing, or is already pre-baked into the company culture. Definitely agree you've got to feel it out and take a gentle, fully optional, approach to it.
Thanks for this!! I will create one as I am returning to work soon after maternity leave. I can see the benefit of sending this to the juniors but unsure if my seniors would appreciate it. I can only try!
Congrats on coming back off maternity leave. Yeah, I recommend for people above and across, it can be better to share if they ask or if it comes up naturally as something that might be helpful. For teams, it can be a really nice way to reintroduce yourself and frame it as a very light "I put this together to help you / make it easier for you to get what you need from me" type thing. As a manager, I always encouraged my reports to make them too and it was a really fun team exercise we did. Good luck
This is a really interesting idea but walking that tight rope between creating another self-indulgent gotcha doc and making it something really useful feels like the most important part. Since it's a tool I'm not familiar with, I'm scared of trying for risk of putting another "task" on people's to-do list without knowing exactly how to connect the dots. That said, the idea of having an explicit set of instructions on how to interact feels like it would help a lot, especially as you noted, when working with engineers who think like instruction manual readers most of the time anyway. Thanks for sharing this idea.
Fully agree. I've actually seen people come into a new team sharing their instruction manual in a way that felt too forthright, and it didn't go down well. I think it can work well as something that you have and share with people if they ask about your preferences, or as I mentioned in the article, when it's done as a team thing, or is already pre-baked into the company culture. Definitely agree you've got to feel it out and take a gentle, fully optional, approach to it.