Pitfalls Of Sharing Knowledge
Story based on facts, as a matter of a fact based on experience … my experience 😊
There is nothing wrong in sharing knowledge as such, however there are differences in the way of sharing itself, that I would recommend considering prior doing it.
When you are working with a group of people, sharing knowledge between each other is especially crucial, and you can do it in several ways, among others:
- presentations (static or interactive)
- live demo
- verbal (briefly mentioning about the stuff) – face to face communication
- passive – sending email / message with article
and they are all ok, you can adjust each of those, depending on the situation, your listener, and size of group.
However, never mind the way of communication, mind the way you are assuming people will read your message – kind of complicated, let me explain.
If you are a type of person (as me) that is reading all the messages, checking out all the articles – that’s cool, any way of knowledge sharing would be appropriate for you, as you will always take something for yourself out of it.
Unfortunately / Fortunately, most of the people, have slightly different approach especially when knowledge is shared passively – as a plain message with limited description. In 80% of the cases message will be ignored, maybe in 20% it will be saved for later (someday maybe list) and no action will be taken.
This would lead to two things:
- first – as a sender / giver you may feel as your time and effort was wasted – “c’mon I’ve shared this cool article, nobody cared – will not send it in the future”;
- second – listeners / receivers will feel bored and kind of forced to listen / read what was shared with them – “Oh he / she has shared something again I will check it out, most likely it will be reproached someday”;
that’s not the way.
I’m personally learning that the hard way, learner and input are my key strengths (based on Gallup® Strengths Finder®), thus the need of learning more and sharing it is all the time with me, and I was doing that, unfortunately in a wrong way.
To share the knowledge, I’ve been using passive way of communication – share the link, brief description, that’s it job done – expecting that people have the same character (approach) as I have, and they will read my blabbering all the time from top to bottom (huge ego you may say 😊). Guess what maybe 20% of what I’ve shared had a positive outcome, meaning people have actually checked it and used that knowledge, and I had a feeling of wasted time and effort due to that, blaming not myself – of course. Fortunately, I’ve good friends (team members and managers) that gives an honest feedback, plus a bit of self-retrospective that has changed my point of view.
I’ve started analyzing how much different would it be if instead of passively sending messages I would show knowledge that I wanted to share based on real life examples, maybe sharing 50% of content but in a “proper” way would be 100% more beneficial than sharing all of it in this “weak” way that I was doing.
I’m right now on the path of changing my approach, will share with you my findings and outcomes in the near future, but if I may advice you something – don’t be like myself, don’t expect that all the people are like you or will read everything that was sent to them.
Share the knowledge if you want in a fun, interesting way, select 20% of the stuff, but prepare for it as if it would be the most important thing that you want to share, effects may amuse you.
Do you have similar experience, maybe you’ve already walked that path? Let me know, what do you think.
Thanks,
Krzysztof
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