This sounds like a recipe for disaster.<p>Manager: “I appreciate straight, direct communication. Say what you are thinking, and say it without wrapping your message.”<p>Employee 1, taking the advice literally: “I like hats! Do you like hats? Also green, green is good. And chocolate. But everyone likes chocolate, so that doesn't count.<p>Manager: “You’re mad. Security!”<p>Employee 2, taking it honestly but not literally: “Our product is making people’s lives worse. Every study ever made of our business says so. Why don’t we spend all this money doing something worthwhile?”<p>Manager: “Not a team player. Security!”<p>The rest of the employees either keep their heads down or take this as an invitation to get chummy with the manager, offering sage advice from the last tweet they read.<p>I hope I never work at a place like that.
This method seems to rely on the assumption you can trust everyone. If one person shares his personality information and another doesn't, it puts the first person at a disadvantage. Manipulative coworkers are a thing. Narcissistic and psychopatic people thrive in corporate environments.
We did this and it is really great. I can understand that you don’t want to do this in a dysfunctional team or in an organization that has a broken culture (not feeling save to share personal stuff for me implies a fundamental flaw).<p>Of course if done right, nobody is forced to do this. But it is a great experience for the team to get more effective in working together and also reduce possible conflict.
Writing down ideas is always a very useful exercise. Having introspection is a good trait, so writing a "User's Manual" for yourself is a very good thing.<p>Now, having these User Manuals in a company, I don't know if they are any useful; you may get the one tidbit of information that somebody you don't interact much with says they prefer email to chat or something.<p>I propose an exercise: if you have people's "README's", go through them, if possible without seeing their names and test if you could match what they say they are/like/etc to who they are and what they actually are like. I simply find no correlation; everybody says they value honesty etc (including myself) and you still have no idea of how to interact with that person, or what they really value. We are really bad at judging ourselves.
I launched ManagerReadme because I believe that sharing your "User Manual" as a manager can reduce a lot of the stress in figuring out how to work with you. Leah Fessler suggests that you'll spend time with your team and let everyone take 30 minutes to answer a few key questions to reduce "guess time" and increase the depth of your conversations.
But does it really help communications, or does it just make people less anxious? When two communication styles conflict, this ‘blunt’ writer says to a less blunt coworker: “I told her I wouldn’t want her to change her communication style to match mine, and that I valued learning from her softer approach.” Is anyone really going to respond “actually, boss, yes, I would prefer you to stop waffling on. You need to change how you talk to me.” I would predict that this doesn’t change anyone’s behaviour, it just gives people less guilt/anxiety about acting as they already act.
This is a standard agile exercise called “Rules of Engagement”. Should be run with any forming team. I’m always surprised that this knowledge isn’t more commonplace.