How to Establish Strong Working Relationships: Minutes vs Months

One of the biggest challenges in any business isn’t the product, the process, or the strategy, it’s the people. We spend months, sometimes years, learning how colleagues think, what motivates them, and how they like to work. But what if you could skip six months of guesswork and start with clarity from day one?

That’s the idea behind a simple but powerful tool I recommend every leader and team member create: a “Working With Me” guide.

The Working With Me Guide Inspired by Scaling People

In her book Scaling People, Claire Hughes Johnson (former COO at Stripe) shares her own “Working With Claire” document. It’s pages long, covering her leadership style, values, communication preferences, and more.

The idea is brilliant: instead of leaving colleagues to figure you out over time, you give them the cheat sheet. They can understand your motivations, quirks, and ways of working in minutes, not months.

But here’s the thing, you don’t need 10 pages. You need one.

A Single Page That Saves Everyone Time

I recommend creating two versions of your “Working With Me” guide:

• As an Employee: Share how you like to receive feedback, your preferred communication style, what motivates you, and what frustrates you.
• As a Leader (if it applies): Share how you make decisions, your expectations of your team, and how people can best work with you.

Keeping it to a single page forces you to focus on what matters most and makes it practical for others to actually read and use.

What to Include in a “Working With Me” Guide

Here are some sections you might cover:

• Background: A quick snapshot of your career, experience, or what drives you.
• Personality: I recommend taking something like a free DISC test and putting your result on here or something similar. Just make sure you're consistent among those creating the sheets so you can all understand. Another one is similar to the Love Languages for relationships but it's for work and provides insight into how you're motivated and appreciated.
• Values: The principles you prioritize in work and life.
• Motivations: What energizes you and keeps you engaged.
• Working Style: How you prefer to communicate (email, Slack, meetings), decision-making style, and how you handle conflict.
• Expectations: What people can count on from you and what you expect from them.
• Pet Peeves: Things that frustrate or slow you down.
• How I Learn/Process: Whether you like time to think, prefer brainstorming live, or need written context first.

The point is not to cover everything, but to give bullet points to others a fast-track understanding of how to work with you most effectively.

Why This Matters

Creating and sharing a “Working With Me” guide:

• Builds trust faster – people don’t have to guess what you value.
• Reduces friction – teammates know your preferences upfront.
• Improves collaboration – when motivations are understood, it’s easier to align.
• Sets the tone for culture – when leaders do this, it signals openness and accountability.

Instead of waiting months to discover how someone thinks and works, you can learn the essentials in minutes.

Ready to Build Yours?

To make this easy, I’ve created a Working With Me Template you can download and fill out. It’s one page, simple to use, and designed for both employees and leaders.

👉 [Download the Working With Me Template here]

The sooner you and your team complete this, the sooner you’ll save months of trial-and-error in building stronger, more effective working relationships.