July 6, 2010
Credit Union Management’s online-only “HR Answers” column runs the first Tuesday of the month.
Think you’ve had a tough day? Irma Becerra-Fernandez, Ph.D., spent a year at NASA after the Space Shuttle Columbia accident trying to figure out what went wrong. “It was painful. People weren’t bad. They lost sight of the big picture.”
Becerra-Fernandez, who taught the inaugural class at CUES International Leadership Academy at Florida International University in April, is the Knight Ridder Research Professor of Management Information Systems at the FIU College of Business Administration in the Decision Sciences and Information Systems department.
“If your product is decisions, you are a knowledge worker; assembly line workers are not knowledge workers,” Becerra said.
Potential Problems
Unfortunately, several problems confront knowledge workers and need to be addressed to help them succeed in their decision making.
Complexity: “Frequently things are more complex than they need to be. Consumers enjoy simple. Simplicity is frequently less expensive.” She challenged leaders to determine whether added sophistication is worth the loss of simplicity.
Lack of Focus: “Knowledge workers are needed to handle gray areas. Capturing knowledge base and sharing helps others handle decisions so experts don’t have to solve the same problem over and over. Then experts can handle decisions only they can make.” Becerra-Fernandez referenced a credit union example, noting routine loans should be handled routinely by staff. “Gray area ones need to be handled by experts to evaluate circumstances” such as medical problems or job history.
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Do we belong to learning organizations? Check out the http://los.hbs.edu Web site. It is a free Harvard Business School survey of an organization’s culture. Credit unions can have multiple people or departments take the survey and compare the results, which tell where an organization needs to focus to capture greatest value. |
Lack of Tools: Knowledge workers take pride in their work and want to do the best work they can. “Our job as leaders is to see they have the right tools so they can make the right decisions in the most effective manner,” said Becerra-Fernandez. Frequently, knowledge workers are pressured to make quick decisions, but they lack tools to make the right decisions. Knowledge management gives them the ability to make the right decisions in the most productive manner.
Outmoded Leadership Practices: The world has changed, but in some cases leadership practices have not. For example, a company will fund two investigators to do the same work. Neither investigator knows of the other one. “Why didn’t they have them work together to produce better results?” asked Becerra-Fernandez. “Putting two minds together will normally produce better results, but that is not the way business is done. This made sense 50 years ago when communication was expensive and distance collaboration was not possible.”
Chains of command were created when communication was required to be more face-to-face. Technology has flattened organizations and allowed anybody to communicate with anybody. Leaders should facilitate this collaboration.
Knowledge Management
Becerra-Fernandez labeled the process of helping knowledge workers succeed “knowledge management.” A simple definition of the term is “doing what is needed to get the most out of knowledge resources.”
She said four forces are driving a move toward knowledge management:
- increasing domain complexity (processes, competition, technology);
- accelerating market volatility (pace of change increasing);
- intensified speed of responsiveness; and
- diminishing individual experience--employee turnover rates result in deciders having less tenure/experience.
She noted the formula:
Latest technology + social/structural mechanisms (mentoring, on the job training) = knowledge management systems.
She emphasized knowledge management is 80 percent organizational culture and human factors, such as competition and other organizational barriers, and 20 percent technology.
Thriving Workers
Three concrete practices contribute to developing a workplace where knowledge workers can thrive and do their best work:
1. Supportive learning environment: Managers can help teams by having a learning environment reflected in characteristics like psychological safety to ask questions, to float wild ideas and to admit mistakes. She referenced a nearby hospital that established blame-free reporting to explicitly help people be comfortable.
Becerra-Fernandez said the supportive learning environment is “not about being nice; it’s about being open and respecting each other enough to engage in openness.” And being able to talk directly about what works and what doesn’t work.
2. Concrete processes and procedures: One example of this step is military after-action reviews. The goal is to allow employees to reflect on what they’ve learned: What did they set out to do? What actually happened? Why was there a difference? What do they do next time? Which activities should be sustained? Which should be improved?
3. Leaders need to model best practices: As always, leaders need to set the tone, supporting the learning environment and participating in the processes and procedures that lead to sound decisions.
“Knowledge is the key resource of countries and corporations,” according to Becerra-Fernandez. “The competitiveness of each depends on the job we do in knowledge management.” She used positive and negative examples to emphasize her point. Microsoft’s valuation depends on its knowledge: patents, trademarks and information. “Toyota’s problem was not technology; it was that they did not deal with feedback fast enough … get in front of the problem fast enough. Their stock is on the floor.”
Four Main Processes
The essence of knowledge management is that knowledge is first created in people’s minds. Knowledge management practices must identify ways to encourage and stimulate employees’ ability to develop new knowledge. Knowledge management methodologies and technologies must enable ways to elicit, represent, organize, reuse and renew this knowledge.
The four main processes of knowledge management are:
- knowledge discovery systems, such as data mining,
- knowledge capture systems,
- knowledge sharing systems, and
- knowledge application systems.
“Product, services and processes can be copied,” Becerra-Fernandez said. “But learning faster than competition can allow firms to get ahead and stay ahead. The rate of learning needs to be greater than the rate of change.”
Barb Kachelski, CAE, is CUES’ SVP/chief operations officer. She also wrote a blog post about CUES International Leadership Academy here.
