🥁 The OffBeat #87: How, and Why, to Create Your Personal User Manual
Sharing your soundcheck settings (plus a template)
This is The OffBeat, where music meets leadership. I’m Allison Stadd—jazz drummer, marketing leader, and very tired/highly caffeinated mom of two—and each week I deliver a fresh take on work, creativity, and connection, like how to hire like Duke Ellington. It’s like HBR, but with better taste in music.
Every other edition of The OffBeat is a think piece structured like a jam session in jazz (naming the tune—a punchy idea; soloing—exploring different takes on a central theme; outro—a thought-provoking closer).
Opening Note | A track that captures the vibe of this edition of The OffBeat:
Tech-meets-human, eerie but tender. One of those songs that feels like it was engineered to evoke emotional calibration.
At a recent brand marketing leadership forum I had the chance to hear Adam Lambert—yes, he of the 2009 season of American Idol, new Queen frontman, and Emcee in the revival of "Cabaret” on Broadway—perform an intimate acoustic set for about 40 people.
There’s nothing like seeing a rock star belt an anthem (“Whataya want from me?”) from two feet away accompanied only by an acoustic guitar. The dude can sing.
I arrived about a half hour early, in the midst of Adam’s soundcheck. The event organizers quickly checked me in and ushered me, along with the few others who’d entered at the same time, to a different area of the venue to hang out and caffeinate while we waited for the session to officially start.
Why the kerfuffle? Because the soundcheck is an important, and sensitive, thing for musicians.
Before any live performance, every musician does a soundcheck to fine-tune their setup and make sure they can hear and be heard. It’s a little vulnerable, because it’s basically a stripped-down rehearsal in a public setting.
During the soundcheck musicians are testing things out without the energy of a crowd. They’re more exposed. Every missed note or fumbled lyric feels extra raw. There’s no adrenaline or showmanship to hide behind.
The soundcheck is also where the sausage gets made. It’s when musicians tweak volume levels, test arrangements, give cues to tech teams. It’s messy, iterative, and very human. It’s not the polished final product audiences are used to.
Hence why Adam wanted as much privacy as possible.
In the workplace, sometimes you’ll have to use your ears and your instincts to attune to those around you, like when you’re pitching a new client or presenting to an executive you don’t know very well. Other times, you may have access to a one-pager that serves as a cheat code to working with someone; and they may have the same for you.
Your personal user manual, or one-pager, is like a workplace soundcheck: a way to set expectations, adjust levels, and ensure smooth collaboration.
It can include things like, metaphorically:
Volume control: Do you thrive on high-energy collaboration or need quiet focus time?
EQ settings: What do you need more or less of in your environment to perform at your best?
Monitor mix: How do you prefer to receive feedback and communicate?
Latency: How quickly do you expect people to respond to requests? On the flip side, what slows you down?
Sharing your soundcheck settings helps everyone work in harmony, avoiding feedback loops (the bad kind) and keeping the workflow smooth.
Personal cheat sheets, or “About Me” guides, have been around for a while.
The idea of a “personal user manual” was popularized by New York Times journalist Adam Bryant, through his series of interviews with business leaders for his Corner Office column.
A 2013 interview with Ivar Kroghrud, then-CEO of Questback, outlined how the founder created a User Manual for working with him. He told Bryant in the piece,
“I tried to think of a way to shorten the learning curve when you build new teams and bring new people on board. The worst way of doing it — which is, regrettably, the normal way — is that people just go into a new team and start working on the task at hand, and then spend so much time battling different personalities without really being aware of it. Instead, you should stop and get to know people before you move forward.”
Kroghrud took inspiration from his experience in the Norwegian Navy, where part of the leadership training was about getting to know yourself and how you react under different circumstances. Kroghrud created the personal user manual in order to shorten the cycle of sharing that self-knowledge with his team.
So a personal user manual is basically a “how to work with me” 101.
And it’s more important than ever, as emotional intelligence has emerged as the most important leadership skill particularly as AI plays more and more of a central role in so many of our workplaces.
There are a lot of ways to execute the personal user manual—see here, here, and here for examples—but I like to use a single slide that includes:
My 3 leadership principles
My StrengthsFinder Top 5, Sparketype, Adobe Creative Type, and 16 Personalities types to help illustrate how I work and think
Firsthand quotes from current and former direct reports; who better to learn how to work with me from than people who’ve done it before?
So my personal user manual is primarily intended for my team members, but you can absolutely make yours for a broader audience or else version it for different uses.
You can also include additional soundcheck-inspired elements like:
Your communication preferences (channels, times, formats)
Your feedback preferences (medium, format, heads up beforehand vs. in-the-moment)
Your personal values
Your personal quirks, what makes you you
Your interests and hobbies outside work
What energizes you and what drains you
Make it your own. It’s your soundcheck, and if it feels a little vulnerable or awkward, make like Adam Lambert and kick people out until you’re ready to share—but recognize how important it is so you can nail your job performance.
For a link to my personal user manual, which you can make a copy of to repurpose for yourself, see below.