Users guide to me

Motivation

"My User Manual is one of the ways I practice leading out loud. It’s a living document that describes my innate wiring and my growing edge, while putting it out to the world that I know I am – and aim to always be — a work-in-progress." - Abby Falik, founder and CEO of Global Citizen Year

In the spirit of working together to build a learning culture of problem solvers, listeners, writers and speakers, we will create a “User’s Manual” describing your goals, work style, values, and preferences. It will give you an opportunity for self-reflection that will help your colleagues understand who you are and how to engage with you most productively.

Overview

In our class, you will be working very closely with your team over the semester. Building on your interactions thus far, what would you tell your teammates about yourself that will improve how you work together? These thoughts will be the basis for your User’s Manual -- a document of up to two-pages that you will create and share with your teammates and staff. Importantly, you will share your insights with teammates in class and in Lab 4.

Instructions

Please create a Google doc and address the questions below in your User’s Manual. When finished, place your doc in your team Google Driver folder.

Use headers to help visually guide readers through the document. The tone can be informal, but should be professionally appropriate.

Questions to Ask Yourself (and Answer)

You will struggle to answer all of the questions below in the space of your user’s manual. That challenge is deliberate. Be succinct, and give the most focus to the questions you think will be most helpful to your teammates.

• What are my overall goals in this class?
• What do I consider to be my strengths as a communicator?
• What communication & interpersonal skills am I working on and how could my team help me?
• How do I prefer to communicate (e.g., style, channel, frequency, time of day)?
• What do I value in a working relationship?
• Which of my cultural and/or language norms are important for me to share?
• What do I find easy and what do I find challenging when giving feedback? Receiving feedback?
• How do I tend to react to conflict?
• What are my idiosyncrasies—that is, what are the individual quirks that anyone working with me should know about?
• What is important to me, outside of a professional context?