How Trust and Blame Affects Knowledge Transfer

Trust is one of those concepts, like organizational culture, that most of my clients react to by saying..."Yes, this is critical but too big to tackle". Often that means they ignore the issue, thinking somehow magically it will take care of itself.

The truth is that the longer we wait to identify and address issues in these areas, the more ingrained they become and the harder they are to shift. From a business perspective, not addressing issues like trust can impede speed, decrease the ability to collaborate and enhance organizational silos. Employees who work in a culture of little trust keep knowledge to themselves. Why shouldn't they? If they share, they may not be taken seriously. The knowledge they have to share may be wasted on those who believe they have to know the answers themselves and are therefore not willing to listen or learn, much less be involved in good, rich dialogue.

One of the signs or symptoms of lack of trust is the 'blame game.' Yes, you recognize this, I am sure. And, I am sure you realize what a powerful detriment to innovation and collaboration the blame game is. To be honest, I not only witness the blame game in many client organizations, but have seen it evolve to the 'shame game' as well.

Somewhere along the line some organizational cultures have shifted to where employees forget that they have a business arrangement with their companies, a contract, to provide their working hours, time and skills to increasing success and share price while upholding the values and ethics of the organization. When the culture allows or encourages people to put their own success ahead of the good of the company, employees are not fulfilling their obligations to their employers or to the shareholders. In truth, this is not a win for anyone. This is not the formula for sustained success.

The blame and shame games make it quite difficult, and certainly not safe, for innovative thinkers to come up with new ideas, new ways of addressing persistent and critical business problems. If the price of implementing a well considered new idea might be public criticism or humiliation by fellow employees, why would anyone take the risk and try something new, no matter how important it might be to the sustained success of the company?

I am deeply concerned that behavior such as talking behind people's back. feeling like for you to win someone else must fail, being rewarded for keeping yourself both safe and visible is allowed. how do we move forward, create agility, enhance collaboration and innovation in a culture of such deep distrust.

And how do we share the critical knowledge needed for our organizations to survive and thrive?

To that end I have now intertwined the great work being done around trust into the practices and processes for transferring knowledge. These issues can be addressed but they must first be acknowledge. Integrating work of such talented practitioners as Paula Love and Richard Hews allows me to create even more impactful and practical practices to help my clients sustain success. I am committed to being honest about the trends and patterns I see, and working with great collaborators to develop practices and processes to help clients address those patterns. We are all in this together.

Trust and Managing Knowledge

When Knowledge Management as a 'discipline' was first discussed, we were most concerned with documents and how to manage them. We then moved into codification- how could you write down everything the company knew. From there we moved to dialogue and conversation.
Underlying each of these aspects of knowledge management is the need to have an environment of trust. This is an aspect of all collaboration, communication and learning which we have not yet fully embraced or understood.

Trust allows us to be willing to share our knowledge with the assumption it will be utilized and valued. We have to trust that the knowledge being shared is accurate. We also have to trust that the organization will not punish us for telling the truth. Each of these is fundamental to the sustainability of managing knowledge.

Yet we do not understand the dimensions of trust. We might trust someone, for example, to be late to meetings, yet we must trust that same person to keep the deepest secrets of our being confidential. We might trust that someone will not organize their information well, but we can trust that the information and knowledge they share is absolutely as accurate as is possible.

Each of the dimensions of trust are vital to understand and to create. They can be won or lost and they will immediately impact our ability to share and use knowledge. We should never under estimate the value of trust but instead make it one of the areas of focus for each of our companies.