How to Work With Me: The Unexpected Benefits of Writing a Personal Scouting Report
I spend a lot of my time working with our portfolio executives to create organizational clarity using questions like “Why do we exist?”, “What do we do?”, and “What is most important, right now?” The ensuing dialogue helps us bring focus, alignment, and certainty to the unavoidable chaos that comes with growing any small company. But we don’t stop there. We also work with our executives to create a different, more personal kind of clarity: Clarity on what they’re actually like to work with.
Earlier this year, I began working with many of our portfolio leadership teams to help them capture their strengths, triggers, and how their teams can get the most out of them. We compiled this information into a simple 2 x 2 document — a personal “Scouting Report” — for each leader, and built on the guide using peer feedback.
Our portfolio execs loved it, and so did their teams. Writing, sharing, and getting feedback on their Scouting Reports helped our leaders clarify working styles and bring their direct reports closer together — not an easy task during a global pandemic.
In the months that followed, the Scouting Report has become a central piece in the toolkit we use to build stronger, more focused, more cohesive teams.
I bet it can help you too.
What is a Scouting Report?
The Scouting Report is a simple one-page document that uses a few short prompts to summarize your leadership style: The strengths, likes, dislikes, and blind spots that describe “what you’re like” at work. Managers fill it out, share it with their teams, and then ask for feedback on what’s missing, what’s unclear, and what seems most important. Over time, leaders can update their page with feedback from peers, new teams, and insights from personal assessments and other reflective tools.
Why should I do this?
There are plenty of benefits to writing and sharing a guide to your working style— here are the three that matter most.
Speed: Sure, you’ll eventually learn what makes each person on your team tick. But without a structured approach, identifying each others’ strengths, triggers, and blind spots takes time. Working remotely only elongates the process. Creating and sharing a scouting report on your working style accelerates your ability to learn about each of your teammates, shortening the time required to build team cohesion and start working as a single, cohesive unit.
Certainty: When you don’t understand your boss, agonizing over how to bring something up can be just as exhausting as doing your actual work. In his book 12 Rules for Life, author Jordan Peterson lays out the cost of this workplace guessing game: “When you don’t know what to do, you must be prepared to do anything and everything in case it becomes necessary…The physical demands of emergency preparedness will wear you down in every way.” A Scouting Report cuts through this ambiguity, providing clear guardrails and freeing your team to solve the problem instead of worrying about how their message will land with you.
Safety: High-performing teams are different. They make it safe to speak up, ask questions, and offer dissenting opinions. Sharing what makes you tick (including what you’re like “at your worst”) is a great way to build a trusting team environment and create a working environment where it’s safe to take risks and surface important information.
How can I use it with my team?
Fill out the Scouting Report template. You can find a copy of the template we use in our portfolio here. I’ve also included my own Scouting Report, as well as a more detailed facilitator’s guide that will help you share this exercise with your team.
Share it with your team and ask for feedback. Get people to share their view on your management style by sharing your Scouting Report and asking three open-ended questions:
- What’s missing?
- What’s unclear or surprising?
- What seems most important?
Ask the team to do the same. Looking to break up the monotony of the never-ending-Zoom-status-update? Asking your team to fill out and share their Scouting Report is a great change of pace. And when the leader goes first, they make it safe for the team to get vulnerable, share their own working styles, and create space to talk about who they’re working with, not just what they’re working on.
Where can I learn more?
Here’s the template in case you missed it above.
If you’re interested in reading some of the research on “why this works” and how I used Scouting Reports in my athletic career, check out the longer-form article we published last month.
If you’re more of a podcast person, you can check out the Scouting Report episode of the Private Equity Funcast.
If you do choose to share this with your team, I would welcome any feedback via LinkedIn. We’re always thinking about how to build stronger portfolio teams. Any ideas? We’d love to hear them.
Want to learn what Dolly Parton can teach you about building a strong culture? Click here to read what the queen of country music taught me about building an effective team.
