Managers unlock their team's superpowers with this one tip

02 February 2022

"Create a strong company culture that brings out the best in people."

That was one of the ten tenets BGBO Co-founders, Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson, wrote down when first starting the company in 2018. When merging their previous software company with another company, they found out what a poor company culture can do to teams.

Their goal with BGBO Co, which stands for Biggest Goal, Biggest Obstacle, was to help improve company culture at other businesses by improving their operations and processes. Internally, the company is a remote-first, hybrid and asynchronous team with people working for the company all over the world.

With workers leaving by the millions during the “Great Resignation”, which record 4.5 million workers left their jobs in November 2021, according to the Labor Department’s latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover report, many of them will be starting new jobs in the near future. Companies that want to stand out to those workers and be a positive part of the “Great Reimagination.”

When managing a company via Zoom for meetings and Loom, Slack, and ClickUp for asynchronous communication, team members are not getting a well-rounded idea of the personalities they are working with, which causes misalignment in expectations, communication between teams, and the quality of work. After reading a First Round Review article, The 30 Best Pieces of Advice for Entrepreneurs in 2021, they got an idea from the very first piece of advice related to managers.

"Great managers demonstrate self-awareness and empathy by sharing their working style preferences and development areas. I've always appreciated when managers provide an onboarding guide to who they are as a person and a manager. This should include their work styles, expectations of their directs, values and motivations, areas of feedback they are working on and decision-making preferences," says Dennis Yu, VP of Program Management at Chime.

Using the Arvo software platform for building beautiful playbooks, their managers built personality playbooks about themselves. Not everyone in the world communicates and reacts to their environment in the same way so why would we expect that everyone is going to understand who they are working with. On Boyd’s personality playbook, you’ll find things like what is her 16 Personalities type and her leadership personality type, how she likes to be communicated with, and fun non-related things about her. You can view her personality playbook here.

One of my biggest challenges when people first start working for us is writing me a very long description trying to explain themselves. It is a challenge for me to read through those. I prefer summarized bullets and if more is needed, then a quick call to get to what is needed from me. Now that we have these personality playbooks, team members don’t have to guess on how to communicate with me and feel more confident in the work they are doing.

Boyd, President, BGBO Co

Now the manager’s personality playbooks are part of the onboarding process for new employees. New employees are also invited to create their own personality playbooks so that managers and other team members can better understand them too. A structure is given for the employee creating their first Arvo playbook but employees are encouraged to have fun with it, after all, it is a playbook on their personality!

Now that we’ve worked almost exclusively via Zoom and Loom for the past two years during the pandemic, we realized how much was missing without ever meeting co-workers in person to see their different nuances and why they are the way they are. These personality playbooks have helped tremendously break down barriers and intimidation between employees. And as an added bonus, we’ve also found out how much people love taking personality tests and finding out who they are on paper

Boyd, President, BGBO Co

Boyd and Johnson don’t just have these playbooks available during new employee onboarding, they’ve made it so that everyone can add their personality playbook link to their Slack profile. If anyone needs a quick reminder on how that person likes to communicate or it is a new team member you are working with, their personality is always available to read.

Growing a team always has it challenges but you can ease frustrations between team members by giving access to how each other works.

If you want to build your own personality playbooks or playbooks on anything for your company, check out Arvo. Arvo is a SaaS product for creating your own playbooks to teach anyone how to do anything.

Build your own personality playbooks with Arvo

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About Arvo
Arvo (askarvo.com) is a cloud-based platform that reimagines business process documentation for today's hybrid workforce.  Through the use of pre-built "smart components", Arvo makes converting existing processes into easy-to-follow playbooks extremely easy.  It's powerful enough to incorporate all forms of media (images, GIFs, emojis, diagrams, videos, audio, and more) while also ensuring that any page, playbook, or library of playbooks can be embedded or shared directly in popular work management systems such as Asana, ClickUp, and Monday.com so that the "how to do it" works directly with the "what to do."