Showing your work: Benefits to organizations
These notes are part of a series for the book.
Outline
- Overcoming traditional organizational communication traps
- Learning from mistakes
- Preserving institutional knowledge
- Improving public perception and awareness of work and effort
- Better customer service
- Reducing space between leaders and others
- Other benefits of showing work
- Organizational communication case study: NASA’s Monday notes
- Benefits to organizations?
Notes
This chapter gives several examples of showing your work, along with a discussion of how each example benefited the organization.
Example 1
One example is a video that a teacher created and shared with a network of teachers, showing what happened when her planned lesson failed. Instead of sharing a video of a perfected lesson plan, her video shows it failing, how she fixed it for the next class, and a debriefing discussion she had about the failure and recovery with a fellow teacher. The video is on a website that includes questions a viewer should consider when reflecting on the video and what they can learn from it.
- See: The teacher’s video is at https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/when-lesson-plans-fail
- My reflection: How often do project postmortems gloss over issues encountered during a project because nobody wants to highlight, document, and publicize mistakes or problem areas?
Example 2
Another example is a website for a wildlife center. On that website, they share details, updates, and photos of the work they are doing with animals. This explains to the public what they do with money donated to their organization, and also provides a stronger connection between the organization and their supporters.
- My reflection: This could be equally true within a department of a corporation.
Example 3
Another example is a weekly blog written by a CEO, explaining his current (and even evolving) thinking on various matters and inviting comments.
- See: The “6 A.M. Post” are at http://www.edelman.com/p/6-a-m/
- My reflection: I’ve seen this done by department heads in at least two different corporations, and noticed that the posts were sometimes met with skepticism as employees wondered about hidden motivations. Corporate culture affects how this is received, but may also have a shaping influence on the culture.
Example 4
A last example comes from NASA in the 1960s. A director asked his managers to submit “Monday notes”, which were one-page summaries of the week’s work (progress and problems). The director would read each submission, make notes in the comments with encouraging words, questions, or feedback. A copy of all submissions and the margin notes would be sent as a package to every person who submitted a report, so that everyone could read everyone else’s notes and their comments. This continued to be an effective means of sharing information and arbitrating disputes until the process was formalized with a form and a newer director stopped making comments.
- See: The Monday Notes and their margin notes are archived at https://history.msfc.nasa.gov/vonbraun/vb_weekly_notes.html