Knowledge Hoarders

I heard a short story in one of the Tamil speeches by Parveen Sultana. There was an old woman in a village, who knew the remedy for any snake bite…..but she did not have a disciple, who she shared her knowledge with.  One day, one of the snakes who was watching her saving all the victims with her knowledge, decides to bite her and did it successfully. She cried of pain and everyone around her wanted to help her - but even at her death bed the woman decided to keep the remedy a secret and died.  SAD!  What do you call the old lady -   "knowledge hoarder”

There are 2 types of people in any workforce - knowledge hoarder and knowledge Sharer.

Knowledge hoarder:  Person who collects and save information for future subjective use.

Knowledge Sharer: Person who proactively, purposely and pleased to share their learnings / information with others.

Knowledge hoarding is very common in workplaces.

Signs of Information Hoarding in a company

1)    If the same handful  of  people are answering critical  questions always

2)    Whenever we prepare for a presentation - we need to reinvent everything.

3)    Associate make themselves indispensable. Company knowledge is lost, when employees leave.

4)    Answers /Solution to any and every problem lies in an individual’s laptop / emails.  We hear in  the meeting  - ‘I  have the details , I will  mail it you after this’

5)    Transparency is NOT valued as a part of the company culture. The goal of transparency is to share not only the wins but also the failures this becomes a knowledge base to build the future.

 Why would employees deliberately hoard knowledge?

 Power:  People are power hungry. They believe safeguarding information, gives them an upper hand. They call it as a ‘Trade secret’ or want to be called ‘Guru’. They believe that- they are the keeper of the information, they have a complete control.

 Uncertain:  fear of being wrong and are afraid to share information. 

Trust: If the workplace suffers from lack of trust -   information sharing is very LESS. 

Ownership: when they have strong psychological ownership feeling over their knowledge. 

Job Security – be the only person to perform specific function. Make themselves indispensable.  Employees afraid to share their knowledge, as someone will be prepared to do their task and get easily replaced.

Organizational Culture - Some organizations succeed, by encouraging cut throat culture among team members. 

Time:  some feel they have less time to hold Knowledge sharing sessions or sharing their best practices. 

Less important: Some associates consider, conducting this Knowledge sharing session are less important. 

Benefits / No Benefit: They are not recognized by the organization - by the way of promotion / any other benefits.  The main reason people play this hiding game - Although the company pushes ‘Team work make the dream work’ but it rewards individual‘s performance ONLY.

Information are not shared, justifying that they are confidential.  The employee would say they will share the details later - but the ‘later’ never comes.  Sometime they share incorrect or incomplete details.

If the information is not discussed openly in the team 

·        This will hinder ‘creative idea’ coming from the team. 

·        This prevents a good organizational climate 

·        Demotivate the team - lowering the individual’s performance and eventually organization’s performance.

Organization put themselves in a risky situation, by becoming dependent on knowledge hoarders.

 In order to reduce the knowledge hoarders….

1) Have knowledge sharing session after any initiatives. Only organizations should drive the associate to do it.

2) Check with the team the success and failures - how they could mitigate the failures and what additional measures were to be taken, not to repeat failures.

3) Also give opportunities to new set of people and check the outcome, so the juniors can pick up the techniques and seniors can focus on new initiatives.

4) Have a common SharePoint / Repository that anyone and everyone can access the required documents and data and able to share his/her views and findings.

More information shared with the team member make them feel that they have a stronger connection to the organization.

Knowledge sharing helps to improve the company’s productivity and efficiency.

 

Happy to Share - Thank you.