Who withholds the knowledge ? part1

Why would some of us be afraid to share the knowledge they had gained? It is important to notice this mentality in your team and to find some simple solutions for it. When you ignore this attitude, the team suffers Scarcity mentality. It is reflected in their attitude and interrelations. We shall chat around this topic today and provide some insights and possible solutions.

Elaboration of the knowledge definition

We had explained the difference between dat, information and knowledge in our previous chat Seamless Knowledge transfer. We had brought the below definition from Oxford languages in that chat.

Actually that’s a great integrated definition for the knowledge but when it is applied in the maintenance field it need to be broken down into two parts:

You can create a system that contains all the available data extracted from the maintenance manuals, reached during planning and found during execution. We had covered this in depth in our training program at Udemy. You can reach it through this link: English Course for secrets of building a Maintenance Program. Actually without such a system, there is no knowledge transfer as there is no organized and well structured source for the specific maintenance knowledge of the workplace. However, there is another difficult part of the knowledge transfer mechanism. Which is the willingness of the team to feed the system with feedback data and to improve current maintenance items. The difficulty increases when you try to asses or transfer the skills. It is all about the psychology of the workplace.

Why we may be afraid to share our knowledge?

In the old days, there was fear that this knowledge would reach the hands of the enemies or the public. In both situation, the knowledge owner is afraid to lose his superiority. Unfortunately, still in some work places that’s valid. Mainly the reason is still fear which is the absence of love and trust in the workplace. Those who withhold the knowledge they had gained from executing certain jobs, believe that their job security lays in being the only ones who can do those jobs.

It depends on the business environment. If it praises the superheroes and the firefighters, this denotes the absence of clarity. In an unclear working environment, you are not sure what is really required from you. Moreover, Some usufructuary make the sign that you are doing well when they are pleased from what you do. Then, this is actually converted to benefits for you. Others do not really know what they can do to get the boss pleased. That a chaos environment where there is no clear systematic approach to follow so you can grow. Consequently, everyone wants a secret ingredient in his pocket to gain more points. That’s how knowledge withholding starts.

Sometimes, it is not that much of chaos. Simply, work runs without any available or updated procedures. The boss relies on his subordinates to convey how work runs from mouth to mouth. This creates goddesses in the workplace. Whomever misses those goddesses steps will feel always that he is not belonging to the team.

How to implant trust instead of fear?

It all depends on the level of clarity. In absence of clarity, the work will look like a confined space. Everyone is trying to gather as much as he can inside his small space to feel safe. Moreover, everyone is withholding what he know whether as information or skills because he feels that he will need it in the future. And, he might be able to find it again if he let it out of his hand. Or, may be someone use it to gain benefit. So, if he withhold this information, he is expecting that he can use it to show off his importance to the workplace.

When you make the knowledge sources for the maintenance data available in the work place, you will withdraw a healthy contribution from your team to add to it. Some will put there hands out to get it and some will be careless about it. Those who grasped the data you made available easily through documents, manuals and system will not think about withholding it. That’s because they know that it is open and available for everyone. That’s totally opposite to when your team can’t find the basic data sources and it all depends on the individual effort of some team members to collect some knowledge and lock it from all others. Continue to make basic data available for everyone. With time, those how try to hold some data foe themselves will find no point in this and will share their knowledge freely with others.

However, each one of your team is different. You need to understand the general groups of the workforce in the work place. Then you need to have an idea about which psychological groups each one of your team belongs. This way you can deal with them individually and correctly. Each group has its internal intentions and personal keys to their lock boxes.

We shall explain the groups and the outline of an approach to harmonize all the groups in the coming chat.