How can we encourage knowledge sharing?
- Recognition – Knowledge Management needs to be given status as an important part of the job, through the creation of KM roles, and through active encouragement by management.
- Example – This is not something ‘the troops’ do. Management needs to lead by example.
- Payback – People who use a knowledge management approach need to find that they get local, personal benefit. By accessing the knowledge of others, they find that it makes their own job much easier.
- Reward – Although any attempt to ‘bribe’ people into managing knowledge is unlikely to be sustainable in the long term, reward systems need to be compatible with knowledge management. We need to identify and reward the team players rather than the lone heroes, the knowledge sharers rather than the power hoarders, the re-users rather than the re-inventors.
“Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.”—Howard Aiken
“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”—T.S. Eliot