A Quick Word On Showing Your Work

Wherever the phrase ‘show your work’ comes up, images of two types of students you remember from high school pop into your head.

No one like to show their work, but these two stand out in their sheer hatred of the act. There were the smart kids with advanced abilities who actually did most of the work in their head, and the kids smart enough to know they couldn’t get the work done and cheated off the nearest available student.

Both had trouble showing their work. The former had difficulty because the process of documentation slowed down the process of working the problem. The latter because they didn’t do the work in the first place and had no idea how to document their efforts.

Unfortunately, showing your work is a skill that if you can maintain it, does you good as an adult.

Showing your work as an adult, also known as documentation or continuity, allows you to quickly transfer procedures and knowledge from an expert to a novice. Experience needs time, of course, but in the absence of the time it might take to learn the nuances of a process, a continuity binder wit step by step instructions will do just fine.

But the two groups of haters still exist.

For the manager that has problems with his employees keeping pace, taking the effort to slow down once for just enough time to write out the steps will find them in a more excellent position to hire people that can keep their pace by offering a blueprint for them to follow before being put to work. For those workers who are still a half step or more behind, they now have a map to follow.

For the manager who is just cloning random procedures and hoping they work and that no one will notice the lack of conformity . . . your team knows. Your supervisors probably know. Your customers probably have some idea that something is wrong, and they look to you to be the source or magnifier of the problem. Start writing down your procedures and let your team give input on how things could run better. And if you want to turn it into an action that will endure you with all that suspect your fallacies, make this an official project of a team member.

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