Week 44 Day 1: Writing Down How You Work Is Leadership Infrastructure

You know how you work. You know whether you are a morning thinker or an afternoon executor. You know whether you prefer to process information by reading or by talking it through. You know whether you need silence to think or whether you think best in conversation. But your team does not know these things unless you tell them, and telling them once in passing is not enough. Write it down.

Here is why writing it down matters more than saying it. Verbal communication is lossy. You tell a team member in your first one-on-one: 'I prefer written updates before meetings so I can pre-think.' Six months later, that team member has forgotten because they have processed thousands of pieces of information since then. The same preference, written in a document that the team can reference, persists indefinitely. New team members receive it on day one. Existing team members can revisit it when they are unsure. This is the difference between a one-time communication and permanent infrastructure. The 'how you work' document is distinct from the Leadership Operating Manual (Week 43), though the two are related. The Operating Manual tells the team how to work with you -- it is outward-facing. The 'how you work' document tells you how you work -- it is inward-facing. The Operating Manual says: 'I prefer written updates before meetings.' The 'how you work' document explains why: 'I process new information better through reading because I can control the pace. In live verbal presentations, I often miss nuance because I am formulating my response while still receiving the information. By reading the update beforehand, I separate the intake and processing phases, which produces better questions and better decisions in the meeting.' The 'how you work' document is your self-knowledge codified. Some of it goes into the Operating Manual for the team. Some of it stays private as your personal leadership development reference. All of it matters because you cannot optimize a system you have not described. This week, you describe the system -- how you work in your default mode, in your best mode, in your worst mode, and in between.

The distinction between outward-facing documentation (Operating Manual) and inward-facing documentation (how you work) maps to what Argyris and Schon (1974) call 'espoused theory' versus 'theory-in-use.' The Operating Manual represents the espoused theory -- how the leader intends to operate and presents themselves to the team. The 'how you work' document maps the theory-in-use -- how the leader actually operates, including the mechanisms and preferences that drive the outward behavior. Their research found that the gap between espoused theory and theory-in-use is a primary source of leadership ineffectiveness, and that reducing the gap (through systematic self-documentation) improved leadership consistency and team trust. The permanence advantage of written documentation over verbal communication follows what psychologists call the 'generation effect' (Slamecka and Graf, 1978) for the writer and the 'external memory' function for the reader -- the writer encodes the information more durably through the act of generating it in writing, while the reader gains a persistent reference that eliminates the decay inherent in episodic memory. Research by Pennebaker (1997) on 'writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process' provides additional evidence that the act of writing about one's own patterns and preferences produces greater self-insight than verbal reflection alone, because writing requires the author to organize thoughts into a coherent narrative structure that exposes contradictions and gaps in self-understanding.