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How to Encourage Knowledge Sharing

There's no silver bullet to solving behavioral and cultural woes. You can't debug social, human behavior like you would a program. In order to get to the root of the problem, you need to know why certain individuals or groups are not willing to share knowledge. And it's important to differentiate between infrastructure causes — not having enough time, inadequate or overly complicated tools, lack of proper content taxonomies — and the psychological and behavioral causes mentioned earlier.

There are many things you can do within your organization to foster a spirit of cooperation and make it more conducive to knowledge sharing:

• Approach known knowledge hoarders and those unwilling to participate in the knowledge sharing initiative in a diplomatic and non-confrontational manner. Ask them what you can do to make it easier for them to participate, and work with them towards a suitable solution.

• Never confront unwilling employees with a "do it or else" attitude. This will only serve to alienate them further and cause resentment towards the project and all those involved with it.

• Implement a peer-to-peer support center for your knowledge community so that individual knowledge bears won't feel as though they're alone in their efforts. This also provides them with somewhere to turn to if they need help with a problem.

• Put a "face" to the knowledge community by creating an "About Us" section profiling key knowledge contributors. This will go a long way towards humanizing the system and will allow the members within the organization to get to know the people behind the information.

• Create a mentoring program so newcomers don't feel estranged from the established knowledge community. Let them know that they can rely on the knowledge veterans for help; and these newcomers will, in turn, become future mentors themselves.

• Lead by example. Knowledge bearers will be more likely to share if they see other sharing as well. This will create a rippling effect: The more you share, the more others will share.

• Acknowledge contributions so that active knowledge bearers have a sense of recognition for their hard work, and that they are being appreciated for the efforts.

• Implement a knowledge contributors "Hall of Fame" or "Contributor of the Month" to highlight workers who go above-and-beyond.

You may even consider it a worthwhile endeavor to seek the aid and advice of professional industrial psychologists who are experts in the field of behavioral science as it relates to worker-organization relationships.

But don't expect change to happen overnight; it takes time for cultural behaviors to evolve. And this evolution must occur on more than one level. A true change in attitudes must occur within the organization as a whole; within each department, workgroup, or project team; and within each individual knowledge bearer.

A Marriage of New and Old

A well-rounded knowledge sharing system is a marriage of modern technology-based tools and good old-fashioned people skills — and the two should compliment each other. But for all the advantages technology has given us, knowledge sharing will still survive without it. However, the same can't be said for a lack of a cooperative knowledge community.

We can't allow technology to become a knowledge sharing crutch — to use technology-based tools as an excuse not to talk to anyone. This can best be illustrated by my own personal experiences: Years ago, as a systems administrator, I would occasionally have to deal with problems with the corporate e-mail server. These problems would cause service interruptions ranging from several minutes to several hours. During these incidents, I would walk around personally and try to inform as many of my users of the e-mail server downtime as possible. On more than one occasion, a user would suggest, "Why don't you just send out an e-mail letting everyone know? It'll save you the time of having to walk around." It would take them a few seconds of afterthought to recognize the folly of their advice.

Technology is so ingrained in users' mindsets that they sometimes forget it's not the be-all and end-all of knowledge sharing and communication. Technology is only a tool used to support and enhance an organization's social-based knowledge sharing, not a replacement. Remember: technology is the icing, not the cake.

Final Thoughts

The true quality of a knowledge sharing initiative lies not so much with the tools, but with those who nourish it; and a cooperative knowledge community can form the backbone of many successful IT systems. British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell once said, "The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation." If it has the power to effect such a change in something as grand as all of humankind, imagine what it can do for something as mundane as corporate life.