TL;DR. Personal user manuals are a good idea with one flaw built into the format rather than into the effort: they are self-reported. “I prefer direct feedback” never says direct compared to what, because nobody experiences their own setting as a setting. The document describes one end of a distance, written by someone who cannot see the scale. Keep writing them, and stop expecting them to do a job the format cannot do.
I have written one of these, and I have read a great many more.
The “how to work with me” document, the personal user manual, the small README that appears in a shared drive when a team is trying to be thoughtful about each other. I think they are a good idea. I would rather join a company that bothers with them than one that leaves people to work each other out by trial and error over the first six months, which is the actual alternative and is far more expensive than anyone accounts for.
They also carry a flaw that no amount of care fixes, because it is built into the format rather than into the effort.
They are self-reported.
”I prefer direct feedback”
That line, or something close to it, appears in almost every one of these documents I have read.
Read it properly and it is doing something odd. Direct is a comparison. The sentence does not say what the comparison is against, because the person writing it does not experience their own setting as a setting. They experience it as normal, and normal does not feel like a position on a scale. It feels like the absence of one.
So the reader supplies the missing half from their own scale, which sits somewhere else entirely.
Someone who learned to work in Amsterdam and someone who learned to work in Tokyo can both write “I prefer direct feedback” in complete sincerity, mean genuinely different things by it, hand the documents to each other, and walk away believing they have just avoided a misunderstanding. This is the ordinary shape of high-context and low-context difference, and it is invisible from the inside.
The document did not fail. It did what it was designed to do, and what it was designed to do was record one person’s view of themselves.
Where the measuring stick came from
The reason the scale feels invisible is that it was set a long time before any of us joined a company.
It came from where you grew up, the first workplace that taught you what competence looks like, the manager who either did or did not interrupt you, and a hundred smaller conventions nobody ever explained because to them there was nothing to explain. By the time you are senior enough to be asked to write a user manual, that calibration is so far underneath conscious thought that describing it accurately is close to impossible from the inside.
What makes that tractable is that the calibration itself is not mysterious. These defaults sit on dimensions that have been measured for decades, across a great many countries and a great many people, in peer-reviewed survey work such as the World Values Survey rather than in a personality quiz. They behave like patterns. And a pattern can be described from the outside, by something that is not you, which is exactly what you cannot do for yourself from the inside.
The part the format cannot reach
Here is the thing I keep coming back to, having run teams across the globe and watched this go wrong in all of them.
Cultural friction of this kind is never sitting inside one person. It sits in the distance between two of them.
When a piece of work goes badly across a cultural gap, the explanation we reach for is almost always shaped like an individual. She was not quite the right fit. He does not understand how we operate here. They do not speak up in meetings. Every one of those sentences puts the problem inside somebody, and each one is really describing a distance, measured from one end only, by whoever happens to be holding the standard.
That matters commercially, and not in a soft way. A problem located in a person gets solved by replacing the person, at somewhere between six and nine months of salary by most estimates, and the same friction then reappears with their successor, because the gap was never in the person who left.
A user manual, however well written, can only ever describe one end of a distance. It is a good faith account of one position on a scale, written by someone who cannot see the scale.
What two of them together can do
The useful consequence of putting the friction in the gap is that a gap has two ends, and two ends can be compared.
If you can describe how one person works across a set of cultural dimensions, and describe the second person the same way, then the distance between them is visible. Not as a personality clash, and not as an impression somebody formed in a meeting, but as something specific enough to talk about before it costs anyone a quarter.
That is what a Cultural Signature is for. It maps how you work across five cultural dimensions, and it becomes considerably more useful the moment there are two of them side by side, because that is the point at which it stops describing you and starts describing the working relationship.
The manual tells your colleague how you would like to be worked with. The comparison tells you both where you are actually going to trip over each other.
I would keep writing the manuals. They are a decent artefact and they signal something good about a team. I would just stop expecting them to do a job the format cannot do.
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We have opened early access to Cultural Signature. It takes about a minute, it maps how you work across five cultural dimensions, and it is grounded in peer-reviewed research rather than a quiz.