Follow these steps: 1. Identify the current culture and values of your organization 2. Understand why people don’t share their knowledge 3. Help them see why they should share their knowledge 4. Overcome reluctance to ask for help 5. Increase trust 6. Work out loud 7.Create a vision of the culture you want 8. Get executives to lead by example 9. Motivate knowledge sharing 10. Reuse good examples of other organizations

1. Building a Knowledge-Sharing Culture
April 8, 2019
Presented by:
Stan Garfield

2. STEPS TO TAKE
2
1. Identify the current culture and values
of your organization
2. Understand why people don’t share their
knowledge
3. Help them see why they should share
their knowledge
4. Overcome reluctance to ask for help
5. Increase trust
6. Work out loud
7. Create a vision of the culture you want
8. Get executives to lead by example
9. Motivate knowledge sharing
10.Reuse good examples of other organizations

3. 3
WHY IS CULTURE IMPORTANT?
• Culture has more impact than
• Corporate strategies
• Executive wishes
• Employee performance management
• Culture endures
• Outlasts leaders and regimes
• This too, shall pass
• USPS example

4. WHAT DO WE MEAN
BY CULTURE?
• How people interact with each other
• Typical styles of behavior
• Fundamental operating principles
• Code of conduct
• The way things are done here
4

5. KNOWLEDGE-SHARING CULTURE
• Knowledge reuse is valued over reinvention
• Sharing knowledge helps you advance in your career
• In the process of innovating, failure is encouraged –
as long as the lessons learned are shared so that
similar failures are prevented
5

6. CURRENT STATE
• Most organizations define and communicate widely
• Codes of conduct
• Core values
• Ethical standards
• In the post-Enron world, there is pressure to
• Train all employees on expectations for behavior
• Repeat this training every year
• Make this mandatory
6

7. TYPICAL CORE VALUES
1. Delight customers
2. Respect others
3. Achieve exceptional results
4. Work collaboratively
5. Move quickly
6. Be creative
7. Act with integrity
8. Embrace diversity
9. Deliver with high quality
10. Be decisive
7

8. CODE OF CONDUCT:
RULES FOR HOW TO…
1. Conduct business
2. Treat employees
3. Treat customers
4. Work with partners
5. Deal with competitors
6. Avoid conflicts of interest
7. Care for assets
8. Interact with local
communities
9. Treat the environment
10. Handle
• Personal data
• Confidential information
• Intellectual property
8

9. NEGATIVE ATTRIBUTES
1. Insensitive
2. Selfish
3. Undermining
4. Not invented here
syndrome
5. Cover your rear
6. Old-boy network
7. Reticent
8. Secretive
9. Closed
10. Dictatorial
11. Waffling
12. Uncooperative
13. Isolated
14. Manipulative
15. Exclusive
16. Blaming
17. Ridiculing
18. Usurping credit
19. Hierarchical
20. Controlling
21. Resistant to
change
22. Hoarding
23. Siloed
24. Passive aggressive
25. Critical
26. Making excuses
27. Backstabbing
28. Complaining
29. Lying
30. Pessimistic
9

10. POSITIVE ATTRIBUTES
1. Caring
2. Collaborative
3. Cooperative
4. Networked
5. Decisive
6. Egalitarian
7. Supportive
8. Sharing
9. Trusting
10. Transparent
11. Fair
12. Inclusive
13. Willing to try new
ways
14. Giving credit
15. Adopting good ideas
16. Volunteering
17. Communicative
18. Bold
19. Respectful
20. Honest
21. Responsive
22. Thorough
23. Nurturing
24. Generous
25. Helpful
26. Altruistic
27. Appreciative
28. Pleasant
29. Responsible
30. Optimistic
10

11. HOW TO START
• Review the published values
• Compare to the observed culture
• If they are not consistent
• Use change management
• Better align corporate culture to the stated core values
11

12. ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE,
ELIMINATE THE NEGATIVE
• If culture includes primarily positive elements
• A KM initiative will fit in well
• Reinforce how KM is part of the prevailing behavior modes
• If culture includes mostly negative attributes
• You have your work cut out
• Culture change will be a critical success factor
• New ways of behaving are needed to support KM
• If culture is a mixture of positive and negative elements
• Use the positive ones to support your efforts
• Use change management to address the negative ones
12

13. THE GOOD, THE BAD,
AND THE INDIFFERENT
• For a new initiative, people in your organization will
• Support it, or
• Ignore it, or
• Undermine it
• Your goal is to attract as many supporters as possible
• Watch out for and neutralize detractors
13

14. SUPPORTERS
Search for supporters to embrace KM, including:
• Connectors —those with wide social circles
who connect people to each other
• Mavens – knowledgeable experts
who connect people through sharing knowledge
• Sales people – charismatic people with powerful
negotiation skills who use knowledge to engage
and persuade
14

15. DETRACTORS
• Be vigilant for those who will oppose, delay, or stall
the KM program, including
• Naysayers: those who are negative, contrary, and
pessimistic
• Whiners: those who complain about anything and point
out defects, flaws, and obstacles
• Snipers: those who attack new ideas, are threatened by
others, and who actively oppose change
• When detractors are identified, try to engage them
constructively, e.g., join an advisory board
• If that fails, contact their leaders to coach them
to improve their behavior
• If all else fails, be prepared with responses to the
most typical objections, criticisms, and complaints
15

16. 16 REASONS PEOPLE DON’T SHARE
THEIR KNOWLEDGE
1. They don’t have time.
2. They don’t trust others.
3. They think that knowledge is power.
4. They don't know why they should do it.
5. They don't know how to do it.
6. They don't know what they are supposed to do.
7. They think the recommended way will not work.
8. They think their way is better.
9. They think something else is more important.
10. There is no positive consequence to them for
doing it.
11. They think they are doing it.
12. They are rewarded for not doing it.
13. They are punished for doing it.
14. They anticipate a negative consequence for doing
it.
15. There is no negative consequence to them for not
doing it.
16. There are obstacles beyond their control.
16

17. 10 REASONS TO SHARE KNOWLEDGE
1. Helps you learn
2. Improves your personal
brand
3. Creates demand for your
expertise
4. Encourages people
to request that you apply
the information you shared
5. Comes back to you in the
form of help when you
need it
6. Gets others to also share,
which may ultimately benefit
you
7. Increases your personal
morale
8. Strokes your ego
9. Strengthens your knowledge
10. Aids your career
17

18. RELUCTANCE TO ASK FOR HELP
• What do people do when they need help?
• They try searching their hard drive, an FAQ database,
or the Internet
• They turn to the person sitting next to them
• They call or instant message a trusted colleague
• They send an email to a few people or a distribution list
If the first four options don't work, they give up
• People are afraid of asking a question
in public because it may
• Expose their ignorance
• Make them appear incompetent
• Subject them to embarrassment
18

19. REASONS TO ASK QUESTIONS
IN A COMMUNITY
• Allow multiple answers to be provided
• Allow others to benefit from the
exchange
• Provide a public record of the exchange,
which can later be
• Searched for
• Linked to
• Reused
19

20. EXCUSES FOR ASKING PRIVATELY
• These questions are more back-end questions,
not front-end questions
• I just need a quick answer
• I figured you would have the answer
• I don't want to bother with all that
• I didn't know where to post
20

21. REAL REASONS PEOPLE
WON’T ASK IN A COMMUNITY
• I'm embarrassed
• I don’t want to appear ignorant
• I should know the answer
• No one else needs to know that I had to ask
• I don't want to bother figuring out where to post
21

22. HOW TO HELP PEOPLE
RELUCTANT TO OPENLY ASK
• Post on their behalf
• Facilitate ways for people to establish trusting relationships
• Make it easy to figure out where to post a question
• Provide ways to ask questions on behalf of others
• Redirect queries and ask others to do this as well
• Ask call centers to answer in communities, not by email
• Use a combination of ESN groups and FAQ lists
• Make sure questions are answered
• Recognize those who ask in public by thanking and praising them
• Train people on how to find the right place to ask questions
22

23. INCREASE TRUST
• Facilitate conversations between people:
make time in meetings
• Encourage frequent storytelling
• Schedule regular face-to-face meetings
• Support communities of practice
• Implement an Enterprise Social Network
with open groups
• Be active in the Enterprise Social Network
• Enable better interaction and collaboration
• Connect people
• Give them a voice
• Allow them to express their individual personalities
23

24. 8 REASONS FOR
WORKING OUT LOUD
1. Multiple people may need to know what
is going on, to read updates, and to reply
2. Provide transparency in thinking, decisions,
and processes
3. Enable and exploit serendipity
4. Allow others to benefit from seeing discussions
5. Keep a record of discussions
6. Build your personal brand
7. Avoid fragmentation into different email
threads and different sets of people
8. Move from old ways of working to new
and better ones
24

25. CREATE A VISION FOR A
KNOWLEDGE-SHARING CULTURE
• Create a vision of how things should work
in the organization
• Specify how everyone should
• Share
• Innovate
• Reuse
• Collaborate
• Learn
• Have the senior executive and the leadership team
• Communicate the vision widely
• Repeat this regularly
25

26. EXAMPLE OF A VISION: PEOPLE
• Managers regularly inspect, talk about, and directly
participate in knowledge sharing and reuse
• All employees belong to and regularly participate
in at least one community
• Desired knowledge behaviors are rewarded
significantly, regularly, consistently, and visibly
• Time is allowed for knowledge management tasks
• Employee promotions require demonstrated
knowledge sharing, and everyone knows this
26

27. EXAMPLE OF A VISION: PROCESS
• All project teams reuse standard, institutionalized
knowledge from previous, similar projects
• All project teams submit reusable content to the
appropriate repositories at standard milestones
• Knowledge management processes are integrated
with standard business processes in a way that is
transparent to users
• Proven practices are replicated
• All reusable content is checked for quality,
scrubbed to remove confidential data, and
provided in standard formats
27

28. EXAMPLE OF A VISION:
TECHNOLOGY
• It is easy for any question to be asked or any problem
to be posed such that a useful answer or solution
is provided rapidly, regardless of the location of the
requestor, the time of day, or the nature of the request
• Useful information is delivered to users when
they need it based on the work that they are doing
• Information flows are automated between all systems
and tools so that no data needs to be re-entered
• Users can access the knowledge they need even
if they are not connected to the network
• All teams collaborate using team spaces
28

29. ASK YOUR SENIOR EXECUTIVE
TO ENDORSE, COMMUNICATE,
AND EXEMPLIFY THIS CREDO
• I will practice and reward caring, sharing, and daring
– caring for others, sharing what I know, and daring
to try new ideas.
• I will insist on trust, truth, and transparency in all
dealings – earning and respecting the trust of others,
communicating truthfully and openly, and
demonstrating and expecting accountability.
• I will look for opportunities to help, thank,
and praise others.
• I will eliminate criticism, blame, and ridicule in all
interactions with others.
29

30. LEAD BY EXAMPLE
• Practice what you preach
• Model desired behaviors to show others how it’s done.
• Executives and their staffs should
• Not just communicate about the initiative
• Actually participate in a visible manner
• Employees are used to receiving messages asking them
to use some new process or tool
• They tend to ignore these requests unless there is some
obvious benefit to them, they expect to be directly
measured on compliance or punished for non-
compliance, or they have a personal interest or
emotional connection to the topic
• Another way to get the attention of employees is if they
see top management directly using the process or tool
30

31. LEAD BY EXAMPLE
• Members of the organization will watch the
actions of their leaders and supervisors
• If they perceive that the message is "do as I say,
not as I do," they will be unlikely to do what is
requested of them
• But if employees observe management actually
taking its own advice, they are much more likely
to follow suit
31

32. 1. Goals
2. Recognition
3. Rewards
4. Salary increases
5. Promotions
32
MOTIVATING KNOWLEDGE
SHARING
5 Types of Incentives

33. 33
Example: HP
• Internal blog platform was created as a skunk works
project in the imaging and printing group
• Initial participation was limited to a few early adopters
• Then the executive vice president of the group started
an internal blog, and it was obvious that he was
actually writing and posting himself, not through a
ghost blogger
• This triggered many members of the group to
comment on his blog, create their own blog posts, and
comment on each other's posts
• Morale increased, since employees could see that their
senior leader was soliciting their advice and reading
and replying to their comments

34. 34
Example: Mindtree Consulting
• Established five dominant organizational values
• The focus on values helped facilitate the
implementation of knowledge management
1. Caring: requires empathy, trust; needed to enable sharing
and individual push of knowledge
2. Learning: required for individual pull of knowledge
3. Achieving: high performance requires resourcefulness and
heavy reliance on knowledge
4. Sharing: active cooperation; requires fair process,
openness, transparency
5. Social Responsibility: an outward extension of all the above
values

35. My books and book chapters
• Join the SIKM Leaders CoP https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/sikmleaders/info
• Twitter @stangarfield
• Site http://sites.google.com/site/stangarfield/
• LinkedIn Articles https://www.linkedin.com/in/stangarfield/detail/recent-activity/posts/
• Recordings https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/august-11-webinar-lets-talk-online-engagement-stan-garfield/
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Implementing
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Successful Knowledge
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The Modern
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Gaining Buy-in
for KM (chapter
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