Show and tell
If you’re a Help Scout customer, you might have talked to this week’s podcast guest, Kristi Thompson. If you have, then you’ll know how warm and skillful her responses are. In the first episode of season 3, she tells me how sharing her work internally led to a whole new job.
This season you can watch the full discussion on Youtube, as well as listen in your podcast app of choice. Kristi has some practical advice for anyone who wants to develop influence and be more effective in their role, even if you don’t want a new job.
“Show your work” is advice we get as kids in math(s) class; if you show how you were calculating, you might get some marks even if the final answer is wrong. As adults there are different pressures at play, and we can be tempted to not show anyone anything until we think it’s perfect.
When I’ve acted in that way it’s often been about fear. Fear of looking dumb, of being vulnerable, or just of revealing all the stumbling missteps on the way to the nice clean final piece. I preferred to pretend that I went in a perfectly straight line from initial idea to end product. Nobody needed to know how the sausage was made.
That fear, in most cases, is unfounded. People actually love learning how the sausage is made. Whether it is how Paul writes a song, how Jerry writes a joke, or how Benny makes a sausage.
Showing your work, at work, helps to reveal some of the depths of your role and your process to people who may have no idea what you really do. People who have never properly done support tend to think it is much simpler than it actually is, and that lack of deep knowledge makes it easier to dismiss the importance of the work. It takes a certain level of skill to judge how much more there is to learn.
Showing your work isn’t just to inform your boss, though. It’s helpful for yourself too. In the interview Kristi mentions referring back to her own notes to see what she’s done, how she has improved, and how people have responded to it.
I have a similar document on my computer with the kind words people have sent me about my work. There are days when a quick scroll of that document is what finally gets me unstuck. Everybody should have one of those. Even you, friend.
What could you be showing people? Where’s the right place to share it?
Start today.
