What If We Came With An Operating Manual?

I’ve been training an AI lately.

And I mean really training it.

Telling it how I think, what I value, what drives me crazy, how I like to work. Being more specific and honest about myself than I probably am in most conversations.

And it works. Immediately.

Which got me thinking.

I have never once done that with the people I actually work with!

Why is it so easy to tell a machine how to work with us and so rare to tell each other?

The Silence We Mistake for Strength

I think there are two reasons.

First, self-disclosure got coded as weakness somewhere along the way. Leaders were rewarded for projecting confidence and certainty, and being too known felt like it cost your authority.

Second, there’s no clear path to do it. The intention to share might be there but the process isn’t, so it stays on the list of things that feel important but never quite happen.

So the vacuum persists.

And here’s what fills it.

The Story They’re Making Up

Think about your last hire. Regarding the job expectation, they got it, they wanted it, they had the capacity to do it. You hired well.

And chances are it still took the better part of a year before communication felt truly fluid.

Not because they were a slow learner. Because they were working with incomplete information.

When others don’t know how we think, they don’t wait. They assume.

They build a version of you from available clues — your reactions, your silences, your patterns — and they work around that version instead of with you.

Your silence isn’t neutral. It’s an invitation for interpretation.

That gap doesn’t have to stay open. I ran an exercise with a client and their team a while back.

Simple enough: everyone named their top five values and said what they actually meant to them. Not the dictionary definition, the real one. The one that drove their choices.

People saw each other differently. A new kind of ease settled into the room. Nobody lost authority. Nobody overshared.

They just became a little more known to each other.

That kind of exchange gets richer when there’s a shared experience behind it.

Because when a team discovers together, they don’t just learn about each other.

They build a common language for how they operate.

And that language makes everything easier: feedback, conflict, collaboration, expectations.

You stop guessing. You start knowing.

💡Are you ready to share yours?

You’re already writing an operating manual. You’re just writing it for software.

What if the people you work with got the same version? And what if you got theirs?

Assumptions shrink and ease grows.

You might as well hand them the draft.

If you want help designing that conversation for your team, hit reply to this email and let’s talk.

Laurie