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1-Page Summary of Show Your Work

“Show Your Work”

As a child, you were probably told to show your work in math class. That meant that the teacher wanted to see how you arrived at an answer and what mistakes or innovations you made while doing so. Showing your work at the office does the same thing; it allows others to see your process instead of only seeing your final product. Organizations value documentation that codifies steps and processes because they want their employees to show them how they do things rather than having them figure it out on their own. However, people spend as much as two-thirds of their time at work dealing with exceptions – problems, extenuating circumstances or information gaps – which takes up most of our time when we could be focusing on other tasks such as innovation and problem solving.

Showing your work can help others understand what you do, how you do it and how you react to challenges. You can use spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and top-down reports to document your processes or provide information. Some knowledge is proprietary and should remain so; some work isn’t relevant for everyone in the organization, but a number of resources that are designed to serve specific purposes can help you decide what to show and where.

These easy to use tools can help you share your work with the world. You can choose to share it through social media, email or a social site where you have an open or restricted group of people who will see what you post.

• Instant messaging or IM is a way to get answers quickly and easily. It’s also used to share work for future use but not for feedback.

The Upside for Organizations

Showing your work is a necessary part of the job. It makes it easier to meet with people, reduces unnecessary meetings and paperwork, and helps keep things in order. The most important part of showing your work is that it encourages innovation by making processes more transparent, which allows for suggestions from others. This improves relationships between workers and their clients or co-workers as well as helping them learn new skills in real time instead of waiting until they’re needed again. When information isn’t shared properly, workers can feel disconnected from each other and create silos where ideas are kept away from others who could make use of them.

Sharing mistakes can be a great learning experience. For example, the US Teacher of the Year, Sarah Brown Wessling, videotaped her classes when she made an error in one of her lessons and was able to learn from it before giving that lesson again. She also posted that video on the Teaching Channel site for others to see what she did wrong and how she corrected it.

The Upside for Workers

Showing your work is important because it helps you get feedback from others, identify your best practices and mistakes, showcase what you know about a certain subject or industry, explain how you do things to help others learn more about it, share knowledge with people who are in the same situation as yourself so that they can benefit from your learning experiences.

For example, a business team asked their new employee to help them with a presentation. He improved the slides and showed how his changes would enhance the presentation. This impressed his managers because he was able to provide real solutions to real problems. In another example, an agency hired a writer for an assignment that required her to define professionalism in writing. She used social media (Twitter) and Google Docs so she could collaborate on it with others who had experience in that area. They were able to come up with a definition of professionalism that suited her needs better than if she’d done it alone.