Personal User Manuals

Personal User Manuals (aka “Personal README” or “Manual of Me”)

What is a “Personal User Manual”?

One of our favourite practices for building psychological safety is the use of personal “user manuals” (also know as README’s, manager guides and other names). These user manuals, if written well, can significantly help build psychological safety through understanding each other’s needs, behaviours, and personalities on the team. They make what is usually implicit and unknown, explicit and known. They’re also a great tool for self-reflection – we rarely think deeply about trying to articulate our own desires, needs, preferences and expectations. Even if you don’t end up sharing it with anyone, a personal user manual can be a powerful exercise in its own right.

Here’s the updated psychsafety.com Personal User Manual template as part of the Psychological Safety Playbook add-ons for the action pack, for you to download and use with your teams.

However, as with any practice, there are dangers and pitfalls. They can, in certain environments, be used to excuse certain counter-productive behaviours – so they should probably be done alongside a team charter or social contract.

They can also be wrong: you may be tempted to write (even subconsciously) what you want other people to think about you, not what is true about you. If this happens, the way people work with you may not be constructive, because their understanding of you is not aligned with reality. Also, they go out of date – this may occur over a long period of time as we mature, develop and change, or it may happen quite quickly, as with the birth of a new baby or other major life event. All documentation incurs debt – and personal user files are no different.

Take personal user manuals to the next level and carry out a Team Charter Exercise with your team too!

Here’s a good article with a personal user manual template from Future Forum. 

Here’s a good piece about personal user manuals for developers from arc().

I LOVE this version of a personal user manual from Steph Smith:

Here’s a great example for managers joining a new team, – a manager manual from Rands: 

This is a great personal user manual template from Shopify that includes good sections on assumptions and feedback:

This personal user manual by Molly White is a great example, and as it’s on Github, you can fork it easily and create your own.


And this is a great example by my wonderful colleague at Red Hat, Aidan Cammies:

Psychological Safety In the Workplace:

I went and did an actual in-person meetup this week at DevOps London, organised by the fab folks at Broadlight, discussing what tech teams can learn from aviation, healthcare, and heavy industry in respect to safety science. One of the examples was the Challenger disaster in 1986, where engineers raised concerns about the O-rings in the SRBs becoming brittle at low temperatures, but in part due to time and commercial pressures on management creating a psychologically unsafe environment, those concerns were either not communicated to leadership, or were diluted so much that nobody considered them serious enough to address.
 

In project management, we often call this “greenwashing”, where red statuses (when RAG – Red, Amber, Green status signifies risk) get gradually diluted to amber and green as information flows up the chain, until leadership sees a field of green that started off as a sea of red.

Tim Beattie, founder of Stellafai, a new platform that helps team track success towards their North Star, talks about the same thing here with “the watermelon effect” – where it looks green, but inside it’s actually very, very red!

This is great, shared by Timothy Van Goethem – a company in Belgium includes the following in their employee terms: “I acknowledge that from time to time it is completely normal, human and to be expected that mistakes will be made. And if they do, I will not feel overly guilty about them.” I love this explicit calling out of psychological safety to make mistakes. I’d love to see more organisations doing this.

I had a great chat with Bazil Arden this week, discussing psychological safety and life in general. Here’s a great piece by Bazil that highlights the three “lenses” through which we can view psychological safety: the Academic, the Commercial, and the Personal. I like this framing – and I think it may be useful as a way to set the tone of a discussion on psychological safety – sometimes we want to dive in to the academic: we want to play with semantics, meaning, correlation and causation. Sometimes we’re addressing the commercial benefits: the impact on team and organisational performance. And sometimes we’re primarily addressing the human, personal, lived experience of psychological safety. These three lenses overlap, are interdependent and cannot stand alone, but I think are definitely useful.