Showing your work: Benefits to workers
These notes are part of a series for the book.
Bozarth, J. (2014) ‘Ch. 3, Workers: What’s in it for you?’ in Show Your Work: The payoffs and how-to’s of working out loud, San Francisco, CA, John Wiley & Sons.
Outline
- Establishing credibility/expertise
- Raising your profile
- Improving performance
- Creating dialogue
- Replacing resume with something more meaningful
- Explaining your thinking helps you learn
- Teaching others improves practice
- Reflection improves practice
- Paying it forward
Notes
It’s easy to see the argument against taking time to show your work: ‘clients pay us to produce, not reflect; organizations want activity, not journaling’ (Bozarth, 2014, p. 31). But, there are benefits to taking the time.
When you are able to explain why and how you made decisions related to a work activity, this establishes your expertise among others and can position you as an expert within your organization.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, explaining your work in context helps highlight for others how to work through exceptions, which is obviously beneficial to coworkers. When you pose a question to others while showing your work, this can launch a conversation for social learning.