The fastest way to improve your whole team is to design it around the person it fits worst. Not the average performer nor the culture fit, but the one whose brain grinds against your defaults—because every system built to remove their friction removes everyone’s.
Curb cuts are the proof. Wheelchair users fought for years to get those small ramps poured into sidewalk corners—petitions, protests, lawsuits. They won, and then something strange happened. Parents with strollers started using them. Travelers with rolling luggage. Delivery workers with loaded carts, kids on bikes, older people with canes. Nobody who designed the original sidewalk planned for any of that. The accommodation became the standard because the standard was worse.
There’s a name for this: the Curb-Cut Effect. Build for the person the system fails hardest, and everyone else inherits the upgrade.
Now look at your team, because it runs on sidewalks without ramps. Most workplace systems are designed for a median worker: someone who focuses steadily from nine to five, absorbs verbal information on the first pass, remembers every detail of every meeting, and switches contexts without dropping a thing. You’ve never met this person. Neither have I. They don’t exist—but the meeting cadence, the reporting format, and the always-on chat were all built for them, because the median looks clean on a spreadsheet and scales across a thousand employees without anyone having to think.
Real people bend to fit the phantom, and bending burns fuel. I’ve written about what that costs—the masking tax, the invisible bill you pay to perform an operating mode your brain doesn’t run natively. This piece is the other half: what to do about it if you run a team, or want to fix one from below.
Because here’s the reflex when someone grinds against the defaults: fix the person. Coach the deficit. Send them to a communication workshop. Put them on a plan. It sounds responsible, and it guarantees the friction survives—because the friction was never in the person. It’s in the default, and everyone on the team is paying some version of it. The outlier is just the one paying enough for you to notice.
Run a quick audit if you don’t believe me. Does your team’s best thinking happen in meetings, or after them? How many of your recurring meetings would survive a written-agenda requirement? When somebody underperforms, is your first move to coach the person or to check the environment? If those answers make you wince, your defaults are taxing people you can’t afford to lose.
Part of the resistance is the word itself. “Accommodation” sounds like a cost center—an exception carved out for one person, with paperwork attached. That framing has it backwards. An accommodation, done right, is a design constraint, and design constraints are how good products get built. Nobody calls the curb cut a favor to wheelchair users anymore. It’s just how sidewalks are made.
Maybe that outlier is you. Maybe it’s the sharpest person on your team, the one whose output you’d protect in any layoff and whose calendar you’ve never once audited. Either way, the alternative is the same: flip the lens. Stop designing for a middle that doesn’t exist and start designing for the highest-friction case you actually have—the person with the Spiky Profile, real peaks next to real valleys, whose collisions with your defaults are the visible ones. Remove their friction and watch what happens to everyone else’s.
I’ve watched this play out at the software company where I work.
Every important meeting on my team runs with transcripts on. We didn’t adopt that because a productivity blog recommended it. The transcripts went on as an accessibility accommodation for all teammates—what started because one person needed them to participate fully, they went on for everybody.
I lean on those transcripts for a completely different reason. My memory doesn’t hold a meeting. I can follow the discussion, contribute, push a decision forward—and an hour after I walk out, the specifics are gone. If you’ve ever left a meeting confident and reached your desk with nothing, you know the feeling. What I can’t replay, I lose. So I search the transcript, find the exact wording of the decision, and keep moving. Over time the transcripts became the team’s record, the thing people go back to when two memories of the same meeting disagree. One curb cut. Two people who needed it for different reasons. A benefit the whole team inherited without anyone planning it.
The same thing happened with reporting. For a stretch of months my team ran weekly written updates—what shipped last week, what’s coming next—because our biweekly meetings couldn’t cover the ground, and details kept dying in the gap between calls. The written format existed because somebody needed the explicit version; implied milestones weren’t landing. And the whole team got more organized. Nobody worked harder. Nothing was added to anyone’s plate except a few lines of writing. The structure changed, so the friction dropped—and most of us quietly realized we preferred a searchable record over the perfect memory we’d all been pretending to have.
Both times, we built a ramp where there used to be a step. The step wasn’t malicious. It just assumed a brain none of us actually had. And every step you remove speeds up the whole group, because your best people stop spending their energy on the climb. Nobody had to become a different person. The environment did the changing.
You don’t need an HR mandate to start this. No committee, no budget, no rollout plan. The protocol is called Cut the First Curb. It takes five minutes, and you do it once. Five minutes is deliberate—a protocol that needs a quarter to roll out dies in the planning doc. A curb gets cut in an afternoon.
You write your own User Manual of Me. Four lines, nothing else—not a personality test, not a confession. My Peak: the work you’re genuinely best at, the zone where your output is undeniable. My Valley: what drains you fastest, named plainly, so nobody burns you out on it by accident. My Friction: how you best receive information—text, voice, video—so requests reach you in a format your brain can actually use. And My Burst Pattern: whether you produce steadily or in concentrated bursts. Some people lay bricks all day at an even pace. Others stare at the wall for three days and then build the house in one twelve-hour run. A team that knows which is which stops panicking when the second kind goes quiet.
Then you send it to your team—before you ask anyone for theirs. Going first is the whole move. Ask people to fill out a form and they get defensive. Hand over your own manual unprompted and the exchange turns safe instead of extractive. You’ve shown the room what it looks like to name your operating conditions without apologizing for them—and you’ve cut the first curb: one person, changing the default.
If you’re not the manager, send it upward. The same four lines convert a private struggle into a design request. You’re not confessing a weakness or asking for special treatment—you’re handing your manager the schematic they’ve been guessing at. Most managers want the team to run smoothly; they’re just missing the data. “I process complex problems best in writing” isn’t a limitation. It’s routing information, and it changes behavior fast: the team stops pinging you for live answers and starts sending documents, and you stop apologizing for closing the chat window to think.
What comes back is operational intelligence. A team that knows each member’s manual routes work to peaks instead of valleys, sends requests in the format that lands, and reads a quiet stretch as a burst winding up, not a person checked out. The teammate whose valley is presenting live hands the room to the one whose peak is exactly that—and both of them get faster. None of that required a diagnosis, a disclosure, or a training day. It required four plain lines and one person willing to go first.
The long-game payoff isn’t a smoother Tuesday. It’s that the accommodation you design today quietly becomes the standard tomorrow—the way the transcripts became the record, the way the ramp became the sidewalk. Your four lines are the first curb. Somebody on your team has been paying a tax you can’t see, and the system that stops charging them will run faster for everyone. Including you.
We’ve spent decades teaching talented people to climb steps and calling it professional development. The ramp was always cheaper. And a ramp, once poured, never serves only the person who asked for it—that’s the whole effect. The curb cut outlasts the fight that created it, until nobody rolling through the corner remembers there was ever an edge there at all.
The User Manual of Me is the first module in the Manager’s Field Guide. The guide hands you what this piece couldn’t: the blank manual itself, plus calendar architecture, peak-valley pairing, and the conversation framework for the manager on the other side of it. Free, fillable, and tagged for screen readers — Get the Manager’s Field Guide.
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