We help small businesses with technology, strategy, and leadership and have a passion for sharing what we have learned. Subscribe to our newsletter to get helpful weekly content.
Team User Manuals
|
Team issues are often caused by a lack of understanding. We often assume others know how we work, how to help us succeed, and if they don’t, they just figure it out over time. Team member user manuals can help with this though! A team member user manual is a short, personal guide that explains how to work well with someone. Think of it as the user manual for a human being. A user manual answers these questions about each team member:
When done well, they:
How to Create a User Manual There’s no right format for a team member user manual and they can be a simple document or an elaborate, creative slide deck, or anything in between. Each team member should write out the following information about themselves (in no particular order):
Some people will keep this a practical document and others will tell a story. Both are acceptable and valuable. Sharing User Manuals After each team member writes their user manual in the form of a Word document, PowerPoint, SharePoint site, or another format, they should be posted in a place that’s easy to share with their team. If the team is small enough, the next best step is to schedule a meeting where everyone shares their manual to enhance understanding and build a stronger team. PS: A shared space like Microsoft SharePoint is a great place to store and organize team member user manuals so they don’t disappear into inboxes or folders no one remembers to look at. If you want help setting that up in a clean, simple way, that’s exactly the kind of thing we help teams do at The Outlier Team. Just reply to this email for more information. Perry Myers |
The Outlier Team
We help small businesses with technology, strategy, and leadership and have a passion for sharing what we have learned. Subscribe to our newsletter to get helpful weekly content.
Could your business operate for two weeks without you? That’s a question I’ve been asked and tested on throughout my career and one that has kept coming to mind over the last several weeks as I’ve been working with small business owners. Maybe they took a vacation, got sick, or just decided to take two weeks away from work. Would their business keep running or would important things have to wait until they came back? I’ve started calling this The Two-Week Test and its a tool I’ve used to...
A few weeks ago, I was talking with a local owner about growth. Like many owners, he was feeling the pressure of competition. New competitors seemed to be everywhere. As we talked, he said, “I compete on price. It’s what everyone competes on.” I’ve thought about that conversation several times since then. Price does matter, as does quality. But if those are the only two ways you compete, you’re playing a very hard game. There will always be someone willing to charge less, and, eventually,...
Recently, I was talking with someone about technology adoption and how they could better integrate Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 tools into their daily workflows. As we talked, I showed her several features and shortcuts that I use regularly. To me, they seemed completely ordinary. But over and over, her response was “I didn’t know you could do that.” It reminded me of a quote that’s been attributed to several people: “What’s ordinary to you is extraordinary to others.” The same...