What Leaders/Managers Can Learn from Show Your Work
Leaders and managers often present decisions only after they've been fully worked out, smoothing over the messy reasoning, the discarded options, and the uncertainty that came before. That habit of showing only the tidy conclusion leaves a team guessing at how decisions actually get made and starves them of the context that would help them make similar calls themselves.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Share your process and work-in-progress regularly, not just the polished result
A manager's job includes making the reasoning behind decisions visible, not just announcing the decisions themselves.
A manager quietly weighs three different approaches to restructuring a project, picks one, and announces it in a single meeting with no context. The team assumes the choice was arbitrary and pushes back harder than the decision actually warranted.
When announcing a decision, spend two minutes walking through the options you considered and why you ruled the others out, even briefly.
Be generous with what you're learning — teach and share it, not just the finished outcome
A manager who has learned something the hard way — how to run a better retro, how to catch a risk earlier — passes on more value by teaching it than by simply applying it quietly themselves.
A manager develops a useful way of catching scope creep early, uses it privately in their own planning, and never explains it to the team. Other leads on adjacent projects keep hitting the same problem the manager already solved.
When you find a technique or checklist that works, write it up in a page or two and share it with peer managers, not just your own direct reports.
Share thoughtfully, adding real value rather than promoting yourself relentlessly
Updates from a manager should orient the team or add clarity, not function as a highlight reel of the manager's own leadership.
A manager's project updates focus heavily on their own decisions and instincts being vindicated, with little space given to what the team actually did or learned. The team starts skimming past the updates.
Before sending a project update, check the ratio of "here's what we learned" to "here's how well I called it," and rebalance toward the former.
Handle criticism and stay consistent over the long haul
A manager who shares their reasoning openly will sometimes have that reasoning challenged in front of the team, and the ones who hold up well treat that as useful pressure-testing rather than a threat to their authority. Consistency matters here too — a team learns to trust a manager's transparency only after seeing it show up reliably, in easy weeks and hard ones alike, not just when a decision turns out well. Over the long run, that steady visibility into how a manager thinks becomes one of the most valuable things they offer a team.
Being transparent about uncertainty can feel like it undercuts the confidence a team needs during a hard stretch. In practice, teams tolerate visible uncertainty about the path far better than they tolerate discovering later that certainty was faked — so share the reasoning honestly, and reserve confident framing for the commitment to act on a decision once it's made.
Name one thing, honestly
Think of your last significant decision as a manager — how much of the reasoning behind it did your team actually see?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Before sending a project update, check the ratio of "here's what we learned" to "here's how well I called it," and rebalance toward the former.