Introduction
In April 2024, joined a high-performing team of 9 designers and UI engineers as their manager. As a “servant leader”, I’m always trying to get out of my team’s way — especially when they’re already operating at an extremely high caliber with high trust. My first goal was to get to know each report’s personal working style so I could best support them on an individual level. The parts make the whole.
The team loved this exercise. Most of them said they’d never been asked these questions before by a manager. Some of them had never even thought about these questions for themselves!
How to do this exercise
-
Introduce the template in a regularly-scheduled 1:1 call. Use whatever format works best for your team and your tooling.
-
Give them a week to fill it out on their own time. Encourage them to do what feels most natural to them: speed through with their instincts or take time to deeply think through the answers.
-
Go over their answers together in your next 1:1. Schedule an hour for this one. It’s cool if you finish early (no one’s ever upset to have time back from a call with their boss), but you want to leave plenty of room for the conversation if it flows.
- Ask clarifying questions. Make sure you’re not misinterpreting their responses. When you ask a question, let them talk. Don’t lead them to a specific answer with your own biases or assumptions.
- Share your own answers to the exercise in a linked document so they can read it on their own time if they wish. Mutual vulnerability builds trust!
- Ask them if they found the exercise valuable and if they have any feedback to improve it (or if they’d like to see more [or fewer!] exercises like this in the future).
When to use this exercise
I presented this template at our first 1:1 together. As new temembers joined, I changed up a few questions and presented it to them, too. I’m sharing the updated version because it’s more generic; the first iteration was largely focused on maintaining the team’s existing high trust as a new manager.
A couple friends asked to use the updated one with their teams, even without new reports. The exercise works at any time you want to dig into personal working styles, values, and motivations.
Download the template
- Figma
- Figjam
- Google Doc
- Google Sheet