A Blueprint for Your Staff

Have you ever worked on a project where you felt extremely proud of your contribution only to have management disregard your work? What about if you felt that you were being helpful and inclusive by copying your manager on all of your emails, only to find out that your manager finds you annoying or thinks that you can’t make decisions on your own? The list of examples could fill volumes and I’m sure that you have a few that come to mind almost immediately. But what if there was a way to avoid doing the wrong thing when it comes to communication and contributions?

This would be amazing. No more working on things that won’t be valued or appreciated. No more waiting until a review point to hear that you need to improve on something. And no more mystery about why you don’t seem to be getting rewarded. Now I’m not saying that these issues will be reduced to zero, but great strides can be made with this idea of a simple blueprint to assist with communications.

Thus far I’ve framed this topic through the eyes of an employee and her frustrations with her manager. But everyone reports to someone, so if you’re a manager reading this, then hopefully you can apply this perspective to how some of your team members might feel. And with this perspective, you can take the initiative to open the lines of communication with your team, share some information about yourself to help them when communicating with you, and in return they can share some important things about themselves as well.

The Blueprint

For an employee-manager relationship, I wanted to find a way to fast-track my ability to understand my team and to reduce the potential for miscommunications. I wanted to create what I think of as a blueprint to helping both parties to succeed in communication and their respective roles. The idea is to be transparent and give your team ideas and examples of who you are, what you like, dislike, expectations, goals, and focus. For the employee, they would also do the same.

To create this blueprint, you can think of it from two different perspectives. The first perspective is about what you to receive and the second is about what you like to give. With these perspectives in mind, you can list out all sorts of things but it is probably best to build a framework around business aspects that people are commonly evaluated on. But I’d also be sure to include general beliefs, goals, and ideas around how you like to “work”.

Below is a list of a few categories that I think are important to cover. Feel free to think of your own categories.

• Communication
• Teamwork
• Work Hours/Flexibility/Time Off/Visibility
• Initiative
• Results
• Goals
• Getting ahead
• Life Priorities

The Goals, Getting Ahead, and Life Priorities might seem interesting to have on the list but I think that they are really important items to discuss right away with a new manager or new employee. Think about this scenario for a moment. Let’s assume that you inherited a new team member and after 12 months of working with this person, they just don’t seem to be performing at the level that you are expecting. This person gives the appearance that they aren’t very motivate because by your management definition, if the team member isn’t visibly working in the office until at least 6pm, they must not care about their job.

In reality this person may be a single parent with 4 young children and can’t possibly stay at the office until 6pm. Or maybe this person is very efficient at their job and doesn’t have a need to stay late. Whatever the reason, by having understanding this person’s goals and life situation, you might have a greater appreciation for them and be able to communicate more effectively.

Let’s start with communication as an example and break down how to develop this blueprint.

Communication

Questions

1. Do you like detailed response or short and to the point comments?
2. When do you need detailed responses?
3. What is your preferred means of communication?
4. What should/shouldn’t be communicated or when should I communicate over [email, chat, text, in-person]?
5. How quickly do you need responses (eg. if an email is sent at 10pm, should I be prepared to respond)?

Answers

1. I like a quick summary of everything to start but I’ll probably want to understand the details.
2. When something is new or complex. I want to fully understand the problem or situation.
3. If you’re educating me, use whiteboards or other visuals. If you’re giving me status updates, email is fine. If you have questions, in-person is great or over chat.
4. If the answer is going to be complex or the question is complex, I dislike using email. I find it faster and more efficient to just get on a call or whiteboard
5. For most things, acknowledgement and expectations set within 24 hours as a minimum. Prefer within a 4 working hours. If it’s urgent and after working hours, I’ll make a phone call or send a text. Otherwise assume that it isn’t needed until the next day.

At this point we have a list of things that you want. But if you’re a manager and you’re reading this post, it’s your job is to help other succeed. What you want really doesn’t matter. If you want to help someone succeed, you need to understand a lot about that person. But there’s a catch. In order to get others to disclose valuable information, information that could be viewed as political suicide, you need to create an environment of trust. Also, you’ll need to disclose some information about yourself to help bridge this trust gap.

For this part, you might want to communicate your goals and work style. For example, you might list items such as:

• My family comes first. This means that I always leave the office by 5pm to get home to make and eat dinner with them.
• I start my workday at 5pm, take a long lunch break to walk my pets and enjoy the sunshine, and then
• I work late into the evening.
• Vacations are important to me and I a week-long vacation every quarter. During this time I am complete off the grid.

I can’t stress the trust part enough. If you don’t have trust from your team members, asking your team members to give you their blueprint of how they like to communicate and work is not going to be well received. It would be best to communicate some vulnerable parts about you and help foster trust before ever attempting to learn some of these details about your staff. Sure, you could could attempt to explore how your staff likes to communicate (eg. don’t just drop by my desk. send me a Slack message) to improve your communication but digging deeper to some of the more valuable aspects of ones working preferences should probably be avoided for the moment.

By disclosing how you like to work and communicate and receiving the same information from your staff, you’ll be better equipped to understand the why behind how your team works. And this understanding will help to foster strong relationships, reduce miscommunication, and increase happiness, and success on your team.