What to do instead
Build the directory you actually need
Every organisation has a directory of who people are. Almost none has one of what people know, which is the thing anybody actually searches for.
The people this page is about, and which of them have ever worked together
- 01The senior engineerThe pair that came out of a shared on-call week
- 02The second engineer
- 03The designer
- 04The data analyst
- 05The product manager
five people · 10 possible pairs · 1 of them has worked on something together · 3 have only been in the same meeting · 6 have never done either
Five of the eight, with the manager left out so that what remains is what the team has without them.
To keep measurement transparent, teams can visit the product page and agree together which information is useful, who can see it, and how long it should be retained.
Teams can compare this approach with the practical guidance available from Berkeley Haas.
The directory says: name, title, team, manager, location, start date. Everything on it is an attribute of a person's employment.
Nobody has ever searched a directory for any of that. What people search for is who knows about the thing in front of them, and no directory anywhere answers it, so they ask their manager instead, which is how a wheel stays a wheel.
What the useful version contains
One line per person, written by them, answering a question nobody usually asks: what should people come to you for.
Not a job description. The test of a good line is that it contains at least one thing that is not implied by the title. The QA engineer's line should not say "testing"; it should say that they know how the release process actually works, that they have read more of the customer complaints than anybody, and that they understand the two systems nobody else wants to touch.
Add what somebody used to do. Previous roles are often the most useful information in the whole directory and they are never recorded. The person who spent three years in support knows things about the product that nobody else on the team knows, and nothing in their current title says so.
And add what they would like to do more of. This is the line that produces pairings, because it gives anybody with a relevant task an obvious person to ask and a reason to believe the ask is welcome.
Why it has to be self-written
Three reasons.
- Only the person knows what they are quietly good at. A manager writing these lines produces eight job descriptions.
- Writing your own is an act of permission. It is how somebody says that it is all right to ask them about something, which is the barrier that actually prevents cold requests on a sparse team.
- And it is the only version anybody keeps current. A directory maintained centrally goes stale in a quarter; one where people edit their own line is updated whenever somebody's work changes, which is exactly when it should be.
Keeping it small
The failure mode is a template with nine fields that takes an hour to fill in, produces paragraphs nobody reads, and is abandoned after the first round.
Three lines per person. What to come to me for. What I used to do. What I would like more of. Short enough to read all eight in two minutes, which is the only length at which anybody will ever read all eight.
And put it somewhere people are already looking — the channel topic, the team page, the top of the weekly note. A directory in a document nobody opens is the handbook problem again.
What it does for the grid
It does not make pairs. It lowers the cost of making one, which is a different and smaller claim.
The specific thing it removes is the search cost described in the note on routing: the reason people ask the manager is not deference, it is that the manager is the only index. A three-line directory is an index that anybody can consult without asking anybody, and it converts "I do not know who would know" into "that is probably the analyst".
It is therefore the natural companion to answering questions with names. The routing habit teaches people that their colleagues contain information; the directory lets them act on that without going through you.
What people write when nobody prompts them
Left alone, most people write a slightly formal restatement of their job title, because that is what every form they have ever filled in asked for.
Two prompts fix it. Ask for one thing you know that is not obvious from your role, and one thing you used to do. Both questions are specific enough that a job description does not answer them.
The other common failure is modesty. People under-claim badly in this format, and the line that would have been most useful — the system nobody else understands, the three years in a different discipline — is the one left out as boasting. Going round the room out loud fixes this too, because colleagues supply what people leave off themselves.
The version for a team of eight
Twenty minutes in one meeting. Everybody writes their three lines at the same time, reads them out, and the whole thing is finished in one sitting.
Reading them out matters more than writing them. Half the value of the exercise is the moment when two people discover something about each other that eleven months of meetings did not transfer — and the usual response, within a week, is that one of them asks the other about it. That is a near-miss becoming a pair, which is as much as any directory can do.