Show Your Work: The Payoffs and How-To's of Working Out Loud

by Jane Bozarth

New comfort with social sharing, combined with the proliferation of new social tools, offer easy, useful means of sharing not just what we do but how we get things done. This title supports productivity, improves performance, encourages reflective practice, speeds communication, and helps to surface challenges, bottlenecks, and that elusive tacit knowledge. For the worker it illuminates strengths, talents, struggles, and the reality of how days are spent. For the co-worker or colleague it solves a problem, saves time, or builds on existing knowledge. And for management it helps to capture who does what and how.

The book features guidelines, case studies, recommendations, exercises, tools, and dozens of examples.

 

1. Show Your Work: What is it?
It is an image, or video, or blog post, or Yammer chat, or use of another tool to describe how you solved a problem, show how you fixed the machine, tell how you achieved the workaround, explain how you overcame objections to close the deal, drew the solution to the workflow problem, or photographed the steps you took as you learned to complete a new task. Some of the most effective examples show someone explaining how/why they failed, and how they fixed it.
2. Benefits
As explained above, showing our work helps others understand not just what we do but how we get things done. This supports productivity, improves performance, encourages reflective practice, speeds communication, and helps to surface challenges, bottlenecks, and that elusive tacit knowledge.
3. What to Narrate (includes workbook/practice activities)
Problem solved, challenges met, execution of a common task, execution of a new task, exemplary performer executing a task, improving a process, etc. Narrating work is not so much a list of one’s activities but how one spent a particular moment or handled a particular thing. It answers the question: “Show me how you did that.” Features many examples from all areas of work -- executive to housekeeper.
4. How to Narrate (includes workbook/practice activities)
Examples of narration and tools suited for each type, plus and minus of each, considerations in choosing tools, publishing and publicizing. Examples of different tools used to narrate.

5. Implications for L&D
Workers showing their work can help L&D get a handle on what real performance looks like, and what real challenges and constraints a worker encounters. It can expand the role of L&D as one who helps capture, publish, and promote examples. It can position learners to help in generating and developing instructional content. It can promote partnerships between L&D and other business units.
6. Organizational Considerations
Effective narration won’t happen in a vacuum. It depends on culture, particularly whether people feel encouraged and supported to do it, and can operate with enough trust to discuss failures or false starts. Workers will need time and space and place for it.
7. What’s next?
New tools such as Pinterest and ever-improving speech-to-text apps are leveling the playing field so that everyone can participate comfortably and equally in the social space. Increased global work and telework will demand that we do a better job of surfacing what people really do all day, and how. Narrating work has long-term implications for hiring, career development, and self-directed learning.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Communication, Productivity

191 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Jane Bozarth, M.Ed., is North Carolina's self-appointed "E-Learning Goddess". While her specialty is in finding ways to cut the high costs of e-learning, Jane is also a popular classroom instructor and motivational speaker. Recent work travels have taken her to Ireland, Canada, and Australia. She enjoys business writing; her book reviews appear monthly in Training Magazine. She has additionally published feature articles in Training, Journal of Educational Technology and Society, Law Enforcement Trainer Magazine, and Creative Training Techniques Newsletter.

Jane's first book, E-Learning Solutions on a Shoestring, was published by Pfeiffer in 2005, and has been followed with Better than Bullet Points: Creating Engaging E-Learning with PowerPoint and From Analysis to Evaluation: Tools, Tips, and Techniques for Trainers. She has also contributed to the 2008 Pfeiffer Annual on Consulting, The ASTD Handbook for Workplace Learning Professionals, The E-Learning Handbook, and The Trainers' Portable Mentor.

Jane and her husband live in Durham, NC, USA with Donald the Answer Dog.

Reviews

[Massimo Curatella · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best way to learn is to teach.
The best way to teach is to show your work.

[Alyona Trotsenko]

Эту книгу читать лучше не цифровую, а бумажную. Общий смысл, когда вы рассказываете своему колеге о своей работе, это хорошо и вам, повышаете ораторские способности и показываете логику своего мышления, но и для слушающего, так как вы могли что то упустить. И компания радуетсячто у нее вырастают такие умненькие сотрудники)

Отмазки:
"Нечего мне там показывать"
"Загрузка на проэкте и просто нет времени"
"Та кому это интересно?"
"А если скажут что фуфло? Страшно!"

[Penny]

ebook https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib...

[Stan Skrabut · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was totally jazzed about Jane Bozarth's ASTD presentation called "Show your work" that the first thing I did when I got home was read her book called, surprisingly, Show Your Work*. This book mirrored the presentation quite well, yet it provided much more detail. The book is peppered with lots of examples of how to show your work in support of transparency in the workplace. Read more

[Kelly Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great work and I need to spend some time writing a more detailed note here. Many great ideas backed with descriptions and example with many examples with links. I will add more detail in the future. Send a copy to your favorite C level person.