Week 13 Day 7: Assignment: Build Your Leadership Operating Manual (Draft 1)

In Week 1, you wrote down who you actually are as a leader. In Week 2, you discovered your Working Genius profile. In weeks 7 through 10, you identified your gaps, frustrations, and the systems that compensate for them. In weeks 11 through 13, you learned to connect your team's work to business value. Now pull it all together into a single document -- your Leadership Operating Manual. This is Draft 1. You will revise it multiple times throughout this course.

Here is the template. Section 1: Who I Am as a Leader. Pull from your Week 1 exercise. Write three sentences about your leadership identity -- not your title or resume, but how you actually lead. 'I lead by asking questions, not giving answers. I am energized by new ideas and drained by follow-through. I default to optimism, which sometimes means I underestimate risk.' Section 2: My Working Genius Profile. From Week 2. State your two genius areas and two frustration areas. Explain what this means for the team in practical terms. 'My genius is Wonder and Galvanizing, which means I am at my best when exploring new possibilities and rallying the team around a vision. My frustrations are Tenacity and Enablement, which means I need someone else to drive follow-through and provide hands-on support.' Section 3: My Known Gaps and Systems. From weeks 7 through 10. List your two or three biggest leadership gaps and the systems you have built or are building to compensate. Section 4: How I Think About Value. From weeks 11 through 13. Describe how you connect team work to business outcomes and what you expect from the team in terms of business literacy. Section 5: How to Work With Me. Write specific instructions. 'Give me bad news early. Challenge my ideas in private. Do not wait for me to ask for status -- push updates to me.' This document is not a contract. It is a communication tool. Share it with your team and ask them to add anything you missed. You will revisit and expand this manual in weeks 43 and 44 as a capstone exercise.

The Leadership Operating Manual concept draws on several established frameworks. Bregman's (2012) 'user manual for me' exercise, popularized in executive coaching, asks leaders to document their work preferences and communication styles to reduce friction with direct reports. Abrams and von Frank (2014) in 'The Multigenerational Workplace' recommend written leadership documents as a tool for managing teams with diverse communication expectations. The specific structure prescribed here -- identity, strengths, gaps, values, and operating instructions -- maps to the Johari Window model (Luft and Ingham, 1955), specifically expanding the 'open area' (known to self and others) at the expense of the 'hidden area' (known to self but not others). Research by Schein (2010) on organizational culture demonstrates that explicit artifacts -- written documents, visible behaviors, stated norms -- are the most accessible and actionable layer of culture. The instruction to share the manual and invite additions leverages what Edmondson (1999) calls 'leader vulnerability' as a psychological safety intervention: when the leader openly documents their gaps and invites correction, it signals that the team environment rewards honesty over impression management. The cross-course scaffolding -- Week 1 identity through Week 44 capstone -- follows Bloom's revised taxonomy (Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001), progressing from 'remember' (Week 1 self-reflection) through 'create' (Week 13 draft) to 'evaluate' (Weeks 43-44 revision based on accumulated course experience).