Week 44 Day 7: Assignment: Write Your 'How You Work' Document

Create a document with six sections, one for each topic from this week. Write honestly, not aspirationally. The document should describe how you actually work today, not how you wish you worked. Include your development areas alongside your strengths. Share the finished document with yourself first -- read it in a week and check whether it still feels accurate.

Here is the assembly process for your 'How You Work' document. Section 1 -- Default Mode vs. Best Mode (from Day 2): write a paragraph each describing your default operating mode and your best operating mode. Identify the 2-3 specific behavioral gaps between them and rank them by impact. For the highest-impact gap, write a specific action you will take this month to narrow it. Section 2 -- Decision-Making Style (from Day 3): describe your speed, input preference, involvement level, and reversibility awareness. Note the team dynamics your style creates and the specific adjustments you make for high-stakes decisions. Section 3 -- Meeting Style (from Day 4): describe how you run meetings, what you expect from participants, and which meetings you should and should not attend. Note the tendency you are actively working to improve. Section 4 -- Conflict Style (from Day 5): identify your default conflict mode, your underused mode, and the triggers that activate your default. Describe the conflict scenarios where your default serves you well and where it does not. Section 5 -- Feedback Style (from Day 6): describe your feedback-giving patterns (timing, balance, specificity) and your feedback-receiving patterns (initial reaction, defensiveness triggers). Include the norms you want the team to follow for giving you feedback. Section 6 -- Integration: look across all five sections. What patterns emerge? Most leaders find that the same underlying trait (for example, a preference for speed over thoroughness, or a tendency to avoid discomfort) shows up in multiple sections -- in decision-making, conflict, feedback, and meetings. Identifying the cross-cutting pattern gives you a single leverage point for development rather than five separate areas. The integration paragraph might read: 'The pattern across my work style is a preference for speed and forward momentum. This shows up as fast decisions, meeting impatience, conflict avoidance (because conflict slows momentum), and delayed feedback (because feedback conversations slow down the day). The single development focus that addresses all four areas is: pause before proceeding. Build in deliberate pauses before decisions, at key points in meetings, when conflict surfaces, and when feedback is warranted.' Store this document alongside your Leadership Operating Manual. Review both quarterly.

The cross-pattern integration (Section 6) implements what personality psychologists call 'trait coherence' (Fleeson and Jayawickreme, 2015) -- the finding that apparently distinct behavioral patterns in different domains (decision-making, conflict, feedback) are typically expressions of a smaller number of underlying personality traits. Their research demonstrates that identifying the underlying trait produces more efficient behavior change than addressing each domain separately, because modifying the underlying trait changes its expression across all domains simultaneously. The single-leverage-point approach to development is supported by research by Zenger and Folkman (2002) on 'the extraordinary leader,' which found that leaders who focused their development on 1-2 competencies improved their overall leadership effectiveness scores by an average of 0.5 standard deviations over 18 months, while leaders who attempted to develop 5+ competencies simultaneously showed no statistically significant improvement -- the distributed effort was too thin to produce measurable change in any single area. The quarterly review cycle for both documents (Operating Manual and How You Work) implements what Kolb (1984) calls 'reflective observation' in the experiential learning cycle -- the practice of periodically stepping back from daily behavior to review, analyze, and update one's mental models of how one operates. His research demonstrates that the reflective observation phase is the most frequently skipped in practice (leaders prefer concrete experience and active experimentation) but is the phase that produces the most durable learning, because it transforms episodic experiences into generalized principles that can be applied across contexts.