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Leadership Shouldn't Require People to Guess
Published about 3 hours ago • 5 min read
Reflections on Leadership
Leadership Shouldn't Require People to Guess
Leadership Drift This Week
Create Your Leadership User Guide
Most leaders assume they're easy to work with.
After all, they know their intentions. They understand why they make decisions, how they communicate, what frustrates them, what inspires them, and what they expect from others.
But everyone else has to try and figure it out.
Your team doesn't have access to your internal operating system. They observe your behavior, interpret your decisions, and fill in the gaps with assumptions. Sometimes they guess correctly. Often they don't.
One employee may see thoughtful deliberation, while another mistakes it for indecision. Your candor may feel like criticism. Your quiet concentration may be interpreted as frustration. Your high standards may be mistaken for dissatisfaction.
Most workplace friction doesn't begin with bad intentions. It begins with misunderstanding.
When people spend more time interpreting the leader than understanding the work, Leadership Drift begins. Communication weakens. Trust erodes. Accountability becomes inconsistent. Collaboration slows.
Effective leaders remove unnecessary guesswork. One practical way to do that is by creating a Leadership User Guide.
What Is a Leadership User Guide?
A Leadership User Guide is a concise document that explains how you lead.
Think of it as an owner's manual for your leadership, giving people a practical understanding of how you think, communicate, make decisions, collaborate, and respond under pressure. More importantly, it forces you to become intentional about those same things.
The clearer people understand how to work with you, the less energy they spend navigating uncertainty.
Why Every Leader Should Have One
Leadership creates expectations whether you define them or not.
If you don't explain how you operate, people will create their own explanations.
Some will assume you're unapproachable or don't care. Others will decide your silence means approval … or disapproval.
Most of these assumptions are wrong.
A Leadership User Guide replaces assumptions with understanding and gives people permission to stop guessing and start asking.
Just as importantly, writing one requires an uncomfortable level of self-awareness. You begin asking questions every leader should ask:
What do you consistently value?
How do you actually make decisions?
What behaviors earn your trust?
What behaviors create unnecessary friction?
What strengths can others depend on?
Where are you still growing?
What might people misunderstand about you?
What kind of leader are you trying to become?
Those answers strengthen your leadership long before anyone else reads the document.
What Belongs in a Leadership User Guide?
Every guide will look different, but the strongest ones answer the questions people naturally have about working with you.
Your Leadership Values
What principles consistently guide your decisions? Values are the standards that influence what you reward, tolerate, challenge, and protect. When people understand your values, your decisions become easier to understand.
What You Believe
Every leader operates from a set of beliefs, whether they've articulated them or not. Your beliefs become the lens through which you interpret nearly every situation. Sharing them helps people understand why you lead the way you do.
How You Think
People like to understand how you arrive at your conclusions. Understanding how you think often reduces more friction than understanding how you communicate.
Your Strengths
Help people understand what they can confidently rely on you for. People work better together when they know where each person creates the greatest value.
What People Might Misread
Every leader has behaviors that others interpret incorrectly. Naming these possibilities or quirks doesn't excuse poor behavior. It simply reduces avoidable misunderstanding.
What Others Can Expect From You
Leadership is a promise. Tell people what they can consistently rely on. Reliability builds trust faster than charisma.
What You Expect From Others
Healthy leadership is reciprocal. Don't leave people guessing what success looks like. Explain the behaviors you value. Mutual expectations create healthier partnerships than unwritten rules.
Communication Preferences
Explain how you prefer to communicate and why. When should someone schedule a meeting instead of sending an email? When is a text appropriate? How quickly do you typically respond? What conversations deserve face-to-face discussion? Simple expectations eliminate countless unnecessary frustrations.
What Concerns You
People should understand what genuinely troubles you as a leader. Not to avoid your frustrations, but because your concerns reveal what you're committed to protecting. For some leaders, it's declining quality. For others, it's weak accountability, wasted talent, or people being treated poorly. Your concerns reveal your priorities.
What Gives You Hope
What future are you trying to help create? What reminds you that the work matters? Hope tells people what you're building, not just what you're fixing.
SAMPLE LEADERSHIP USER GUIDE
Keep It Human
A Leadership User Guide is an honest explanation of how you work so others can work with you more effectively. The goal is understanding, not perfection. The leaders who are most willing to acknowledge their imperfections are often the easiest people to trust.
The Real Value Isn't the Document
The document itself is only the beginning. The deeper value comes from the conversations it creates. When leaders share their User Guide, they invite others to do the same. Teams begin discussing expectations before misunderstandings occur. Feedback becomes easier. Collaboration improves. Accountability becomes clearer because people understand one another instead of making assumptions. Organizations become stronger when people stop trying to decode one another.
Get Started
Set aside an hour and write honestly. Then ask several people you trust one question:
"What should someone know to work effectively with me?"
Some answers will confirm what you already know. Others may reveal blind spots you've never considered. Both are gifts.
Effective leadership doesn’t require people to guess how to succeed.
The clearer you are about how you think, communicate, make decisions, and lead, the easier it becomes for others to contribute their best work.
Manage Better. Lead Well.
Drift Pattern of the Week: Communication Breakdown
Leaders may believe they have communicated clearly, but employees are still left to interpret priorities, standards, or what the leader's behavior means.
People repeatedly ask for clarification, make different assumptions about the same expectation, or hesitate because they aren't sure what the leader wants.
Leaders often overlook this because their own intentions and expectations feel obvious to them.
Left unaddressed, small misunderstandings accumulate. People compensate by guessing, work becomes less aligned, and communication becomes less reliable.
Leadership Practice
Identify one expectation you believe is obvious. Ask someone on your team to describe it in their own words. Compare their answer with yours.
Diagnostic Question
What are you assuming your team understands that you have never actually made clear?
From My Desk
One of the interesting things about leadership is how much happens in the space between intention and interpretation.
A leader can genuinely believe they're being clear while their team is spending considerable energy trying to figure out what a pause means, whether a question is really a criticism, or whether bringing forward a problem will be welcomed.
Effective leaders don't necessarily make themselves completely predictable. They make the things that matter understandable.
That requires humility. Your intentions don't automatically determine how your behavior is experienced.
Sometimes leadership improvement isn't changing what you mean. It's making sure people don't have to guess what you mean.
Recommended Resource
Leadership User Guide
If people regularly have to figure out how you communicate, make decisions, respond under pressure, or define expectations, the problem may not be a lack of effort. It may be a lack of shared understanding.
A Leadership User Guide gives you a structured way to explain how you work and what others can consistently expect from you.
More importantly, creating one forces you to examine your own leadership assumptions before asking others to work within them.
The result isn't a perfect manual. It's a clearer starting point for better conversations, fewer assumptions, and stronger working relationships.
Leadership Drift Quote
“Your intentions explain your leadership. Your behavior reveals it.”
Karl Bimshas on Leadership Drift
Leadership is a responsibility. Use it to strengthen others.
Hi Reader, The longer leaders work together, the easier it becomes to normalize unhealthy patterns. Meetings become less productive. Expectations become less clear. Feedback becomes less frequent. No one notices because everyone adapts. That's why I created the Leadership Drift Situation Board. It helps leadership teams pause, compare observations, and recognize what may have quietly become "normal." Sometimes that's all it takes to change the conversation. Manage Better. Lead Well. -Karl...
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