Frequent readers of this blog will be familiar with my
take on military culture and KM.
Both the American and British Armies have invested resources into the
knowledge management capabilities that can facilitate organisational
learning. However, military culture
often prevents such investment achieving its intended value.
This is because whilst ‘heroic leadership’ can often be
useful, perhaps necessary, for getting scared and weary soldiers to engage in combat,
it is too often very hard for such heroes to admit to their own mistakes,
thereby sending out the example that euphemisms and cover-ups are okay. The cumulative effect of this is an exaggeration
of achievements and a wilful blindness when it comes to failure – neither of which
help successors to learn.
One of the KM capabilities with which armies have been
experimenting is the Community
of Practice (CoP) – a forum within which functional colleagues can collaborate,
seek mutual help as well as sharing ideas and lessons. The British Army’s dabbling in CoPs has yet
to bear the fruit for which many have hoped but these things take time and
require support, not least from above.
Interestingly, this
article by Dr Robert Foley of Kings College London, shows how the Prussian
Army was using Communities of Practice over 200 years ago. For me, a pertinent quote is, “While the membership was obviously as
self-selecting group — only those with the interest and the aptitude applied
and were accepted — being part of this society also clearly helped create
important professional networks that aided the careers of its members.”
People need to see that participating in CoPs is worthwhile
and, when they do so, they will join up.
That means it’s up to other members to spread the word and to use clear
examples of where pulling on the brainpower and know-how of several hundred
colleagues helped them get results far beyond what they would have achieved on
their own.
For information about Knoco’s
CoP services, please contact me direct or via the Knoco website.
Seeking help from colleagues at work is something that everyone has done; it's common sense.
When asking someone to share their knowledge, and thanking
them for doing so, we deepen the bonds that connect us at work. Moreover, we negotiate implicit deals whereby
we agree that we too will help them back, when the time comes.
Encouraging employees to share knowledge with one another like
this is at the heart of knowledge management (KM). It sounds like a good idea, right? So why do so few organisations actually do it?
One reason is a presumption that these things will happen
naturally, with no effort from anyone and certainly with no-one having to spend
either time or money to enable such sharing.
Such a presumption would be incorrect because without
deliberate effort, even small organisations develop unseen yet powerful
barriers to sharing. One such impediment
is the way in which we are rewarded at work, elements of which include:
- Salary
- Bonus
- Promotion
- Awards
Unwittingly, many organisations use rewards that discourage
knowledge sharing and effectively penalise those that seek to combine their
knowledge with others. This is because,
without firstly identifying and then rewarding the kind of behaviour they seek,
employers usually reward people for what they know.
It’s not uncommon for people to be paid more because they
have more experience. Nor is it unusual
for companies to encourage competition amongst their employees, either as
individuals or as part of wider teams and departments, paying more to those
that have gained more valuable knowledge relative to their ‘colleagues’.
However, if organisations actually want their employees to
share knowledge then rewarding people on this basis is both counter-productive
and confusing. It’s counter-productive
because such rewards encourage knowledge ‘hoarding’, not sharing and lead to
defensiveness and the many problems of internal politics.
If someone is rewarded primarily for what they know,
relative to their colleagues, why on earth would they share that knowledge with
anyone else?
If a salesperson is rewarded mainly for generating higher
revenue, relative to their colleagues, why on earth would they share ‘top tips’
or things to avoid with anyone else?
If a branch of a retail company is rewarded mostly for selling
more stock, relative to other branches in the region, why on earth would they
share good practice or ‘lessons learned’ with anyone else?
Furthermore, such reward systems are confusing because to
claim to encourage certain behaviour whilst actually encouraging the opposite
shows a lack of alignment between strategy and implementation.
People will actually do what they consider to be in their
best (often short-term) interests, so if organisations genuinely want knowledge
to be shared then rewards should be designed to encourage them to do so.
This doesn’t mean paying people less for knowing more but paying
them more for sharing what they know.
It means openly praising those that share what they learn
with their colleagues.
It means paying bonuses to people for coaching and mentoring
colleagues over and above their day to day work.
It means rewarding a branch for sharing its lessons with others,
perhaps by giving them a share of the other branches’ increased revenues.
It also means promoting those that demonstrate the right
behaviour (i.e. honesty, self-criticism, intellectual curiosity) and demoting
or firing those that demonstrate the wrong behaviour (i.e. covering up mistakes,
defensiveness, resistance to change).
The use of rewards and penalties to promote knowledge management comes under Governance element within Knoco's KM assessment framework, more details of which can be found here.
For a conversation about how to reward the right sort of
behaviour to encourage knowledge sharing, please get in touch via the Knoco website.
