Alliance of individuals
I saw multiple leaders from respected Silicon Valley based companies mentioning they create User Manuals to themselves. It’s a document where they describe how to best work with them, communicate with them, what their quirks are, and what can be easily misunderstood because of the way they communicate. You can see a post about this with an example of a User Manual to a person here: My “user manual” – Zachary Rosen.
Last month I decided to try that at SwingDev but with a small twist: don’t ask leaders, but rather everyone in the company, no matter their position, to make one and have those documents public on the company wiki. It also means that co-workers are now expected to adapt to each other's communication style and quirks.
This decision stems from a very important cultural dogma we believe in at Swing: that everyone is equally important and our differences make us work better, not worse. These manuals focus on what is special about each person. For example, they can have different ways of communication they prefer, which means we now don’t have a standard of passing information that works for everyone. From one side it’s a problem, but I don’t really think so. It’s super important for us to not create too many processes and forms to which a person needs to “fit in.” The main reason companies do that is so that they can replace people easily, as the “API” to interacting with a person in a given role stays the same no matter who is fulfilling it. We don’t want to make people “fit in,” we want them to stay as much themselves as they can. We are ok with making replacing employees painful. It is very troublesome for us right now, as every person in the company is a major contributor to it’s success and it doesn’t change much with us growing in terms of size of the team. Fortunately, it’s a small price to pay for working with the most talented and motivated individuals. These are usually people who don't want to have a “work-persona” and“after-work-persona” and shouldn't need to pretend to be someone else throughout the 1/3 of life that people spend working.
This is what we want to be: an alliance of individuals working towards a common goal that has to sacrifice nothing along the way. We want everyone to have the environment to become the best version of themselves, not being forced to make any compromises. Personally, I love that this is the way we can have it: it’s extremely fun and interesting (and a great learning experience too) to work and hang out with our SwingDev fam.