Preventing Interaction Breakdowns

Working with other people involves far more than coordination, collaboration, and process. We constantly interpret tone, timing, silence, and intent. And that’s where a lot goes wrong.

In tech, some people address this with a “how to work with me” document, often called a Manager Readme (or Developer Readme, etc.) The name goes back to the explanatory readme.txt file that used to accompany software deployments.

The point of this brief document is to optimize and smooth out an organizational reality: despite having formal processes, we interact with human beings.

Theoretically, you wouldn’t need a readme if others knew you closely (family and friends don’t use them :-)) But in organizations, many factors add anxiety and error to everyday interactions: politics, power distance, workload, urgency, and more. These are often compounded by modern conditions like remote work, matrix management, rapid growth, or high turnover.

As a result, people assume a lot about their colleagues and managers, and infer meaning where it doesn’t exist. But ambiguity is not neutral, especially when power is involved. The explicitness of a readme can reduce unnecessary conflict and tension, and thus increase safety. If you’re a manager, providing that clarity is part of your responsibility.

A readme helps by making implicit expectations explicit. For example, yours might include:

What you value most (e.g., taking thoughtful action)
Behaviour patterns others should be aware of (e.g., you’re extraverted — you speak in order to think)
What to expect from you in meetings (e.g., you take time to explore options)
When and how you interact (e.g, “no news is good news” — not one I personally subscribe to)
How you handle emergencies and incidents (e.g., prefer all hands on deck)

It’s important to emphasize what this document is not. It’s not about how others should please you or defer to you. It’s not about how to make you personally successful. And it’s certainly not a way to avoid accountability for poor behaviour (“I told you I’m like this”). It’s about how to work with you productively, in service of the organization.

Some managers use readmes to define their team’s process, and some developers use them to declare their own personal process. I wouldn’t. Rather, I’d cocreate team process, practices, templates, and working agreements and capture them in a live, shared document. The manager and team members would each have readmes focused on the kinds of personal working patterns described above. These, too, should be live documents, revisited and updated as people, constraints, and reality change.

For a very thoughtful example, click here.

If you’d like to create such a document and are staring at a blank page, someone has configured AI (surprise surprise) to help you get started. Just make sure to rework the result so it’s true to you and relevant to your specific circumstances.