BY TONY FONTANA

Whether you classify your company as strictly B2B, B2C, or some combination of the two, knowing who you are as a brand is everything. On many occasions, Hencove has acted as a copilot with clients to guide them through a journey from brand confusion to brand confidence. A newfound awareness that leads to the evolution of a brand’s identity, story, or both is an inevitable and necessary path forward. The only constant on this flight of organizational self-discovery is that any change must be driven by the people and teams from within.

The people aspect of branding is one of the most important elements of all. The best brands treat their key audiences like first-class passengers. Great storytelling, purposeful brand decisions, and exceptional digital experiences elevate your brand in ways a sell sheet or a product presentation never will. Choosing the right colors for your brand matters just as much as developing a fine-tuned website or including the voice from one of your company’s thought leaders into your marketing activities. The right creative mix ensures that your key audiences have a smooth landing and feel an authentic, long-lived connection to your brand.

To keep this analogy in the air just a little bit longer, sustained brand excellence isn’t possible without committed and high-functioning teams all flying in the same direction. Ideally, at the 30,000-foot level, everyone is on board with your brand values and (hopefully) an explainer about your company’s how and why. At the end of our brand discovery journey, we created a brand playbook so that people throughout the company have a single source of truth to know how to speak about and represent the brand.

Having also done this with clients, it got us thinking: is there a personalized playbook to help teams work better together? Just like there are manuals that show us how to assemble products or operate just about anything and brand playbooks to guide how a brand should sound and look, a personal user manual can be a valuable tool to increase transparency, team communication, and collaboration.

Creating a Personal User Manual and the Art of Introspection

We all bring our unique, personal brands to the workplace—it’s the cargo we carry to work every day. Each person’s values, communication styles, and preferences often serve as a barometer for our expectations. This is a two-way street: sometimes our colleagues’ actions, behaviors, and different ways of working can lift our spirits, and at other times they can send us into a nosedive if we perceive a lack of alignment.

A personal user manual gives colleagues a baseline understanding of who you are and how to engage with you most productively.

Thanks to a friend and former colleague who recently published her user manual, I had a blueprint to work with when creating mine. This format is one of many ways to answer these questions about yourself; for those who prefer a more visual approach, Nick Mrozowski’s user manual is super creative. No matter which path you choose, a good rule of thumb is to keep your responses succinct and specific. My personal manual had the following six sections, with three to five bullet points in each:

Writing my user manual was harder than I expected. It forced me to be vulnerable. I also had my readers in mind—my colleagues—and at times I felt twinges of guilt that someone may take my answers too personally. But the point is to dig deep for the benefit of yourself and the people you work with; to create a common ground to be more open and honest with one another.

I presented my personal user manual to the Hencove team this fall, and I think it was well received. Pulling back the curtain to reveal things I don’t have patience for (e.g., complacency with the status quo because “that’s how we’ve always done it” is like hearing fingernails on a chalkboard) and to explain how best to communicate with me (be honest and direct; no compliment sandwich please!) felt great. I don’t expect anyone to save a copy of my user manual to their desktop, but I feel better about my honest, unfiltered quirks being out in the open.

As an agency with a mix of hybrid and fully remote employees, we’re always searching for ways to up our communication and collaboration game. A personal user manual may not be a perfect solution, but it can be a guide to better understand yourself, relate to others, and say, “Here’s how we can work better together.”