Knowledge Flow & Flourish

Do you want to be a Knowledge Management (KM) leader? What does it mean to be a one? What skills do you need to have?

Or, are you looking to hire KM leader for your organization? When do you need one? What should you look for in a good leader of KM?

These are all very relevant questions, especially when you’re working in the following situations, as I called out in my first post, Leading people to insights & effectiveness, an intro:

• People work in silos
• Information is everywhere, it’s duplicated, and out of date

You might also see other opportunities, like:

• We have too many meetings, or our meetings aren’t effective
• All the crucial information to our organization is in a select few people’s heads, and they are leaving, resulting in a loss of knowledge
• We aren’t making effective decisions based on what we know
• The right side of the organization doesn’t know what the left side is doing

What is a KM leader?

To define KM leadership (or what I’ve called Knowledge Exchange Leadership), I’ll use the technique I’ve been using in this blog to merge and build on concepts: convergence. Let’s take a look at the definition of leadership and of KM that I previously discussed:

Leadership

Being a leader is about being reflective, strategic, and intentional about where you put your time, energy, and resources.

On Leadership – from The Leadership Research Institute as quoted in Leadership and the importance of rest

Knowledge Management (KM)

Leading the effective exchange of knowledge within an organization to enable its ability to solve problems, make decisions, and do better work based on learning and experience.

On Knowledge Exchange Leadership – from What is Knowledge Management and how can it help?

KM Leader

Let’s put these two together:

A KM leader is reflective, strategic, and intentional with resources, time, and energy to enable the effective exchange of knowledge within an organization.

Qualities and skills of an exceptional KM Leader

How is KM leadership done? It requires the skills of a leader, as well as those of KM. You’ll see that many of the KM skills would serve any leader well, as well.

Skills and qualities of a leader

First and foremost, I firmly believe that all leaders need a balance of all kinds of intelligence (e.g., intellectual, emotional, psychological, spiritual). A leader needs to be capable and competent. As servants to those they lead, they need to have empathy to understand themselves and those around them emotionally. They need to show up authentically, whole, and with presence as an ally with love for self and others. Their selves are their instrument of leadership that model how others should behave, follow, and co-create.

Secondly, leaders need to have highly developed business acumen. They need to know how to navigate the politics of their organization, build relationships, and speak to the value of the work they and their teams do in a way that connects with their audience. I believe that studying product management and strategic communication is a great way to development these skills.

Much has been written on leadership in general, so I won’t go into much more detail here for now. Here are a few of my favorite books and resources if you want to dive deeper:

• Dare to Lead – Brené Brown
• Five Dysfunctions of a Team – Patrick Lencioni
• Positive Intelligence – Shirzad Chamine
• The Inner Edge – Joelle K. Jay
• The Complete Approach – Victoria Verhey

Skills required for KM leadership

When I interviewed KM leaders across industries, I heard common themes regarding required skills for success (listed in order of frequency mentioned):

1. Problem solving
2. Communication, storytelling, and persuasion
3. Change management, mentoring, and teaching
4. Strategy
5. Ability to quickly learn and work on other related disciplines (KM leaders often take on other work when there isn’t specific KM work to be done)

KM is not for the faint of heart. It requires a lot of work to evangelize the value of what you do over and over again. You are not only leading teams but every person in your organization to adopt certain KM behaviors. It often isn’t recognized, so you must not desire to be in the spotlight. Instead your motivation comes from knowing that doing KM well will transform an organization, often in subtle and profound ways.

Notice what isn’t on the list – technical writing, documentation management, SharePoint. These are all peripheral skills used only after you determine that these are the interventions required by the organization. Remember, the goal is more effective knowledge exchange, not creating beautiful documentation.

Skills for KM Leaders in High Tech

Based on my work in high tech, here are the most common skills & KM interventions I see (in addition to what was already mentioned above). I mostly see KM needed for customer or employee support or self-service use cases. I also often see the need for organizing information so employees can find and access the information they need to do their jobs.

• Knowledge-Centered Service
• Taxonomy
• Communities of practice
• Enterprise search
• Data-driven decision-making / data management
• Systems thinking
• Process creation or improvement, such as Six Sigma
• Technologies – Collaboration platforms, SharePoint, Wikis, knowledge graphs, search engines, survey platforms, Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning to build topic models and make sense of information & data

Emerging skills for the world of ChatGPT

In addition to the above skills, I foresee emerging skills required for the new wave of incoming technology, such as generative AI and Large Language Models. We as humans need balance. As more and more technology enters the workplace designed to help us do work and make decisions, we will also need to ground this with our humanity and connection with each other to remain healthy as people and organizations. We’ve already seen the impact social media has had on our young people’s mental health. I believe the same will happen in our work if we don’t balance. These new emerging KM skills might include the following:

• Industrial-organizational psychology
• Mindful communication, conversation, and collaboration
• Self awareness
• Coaching & mentoring as a form of knowledge transfer
• Diversity & inclusion
• Human-centered workplace design

Overall, how are we designing the exchange of knowledge within the organization to include access to the information & data needed and to keep a healthy connection between people alive?

Please share!

It’s time for you to share! What skills and qualities do you think are crucial for KM leadership? What needs to be added to the list? Which are you working on today? Please connect in the comments below.

A note on the feature image for this post – The chimes were given to my mother-in-law to remember her late husband, Dr. James H. Stephens, who was my first leadership mentor. He was a CEO of hospital systems and later taught Healthcare Administration at Georgia Southern University. When the chimes ring, I hear his voice amidst the peace of the chirping birds and the wind through the trees. Thank you, Papa Stephens, for everything you taught me.