4.1 Stage 3, part 1: Leadership, people and process
4.1.2 Leadership
First, what is a knowledge worker? Here’s a definition that is loosely based on the thoughts of Peter Drucker, who is credited with inventing the term back in the 1960s:
䊉 A knowledge worker is a worker who knows more than his/
her boss about how to do their job, or alternatively. . .
䊉 A knowledge worker is a worker who can do his/her job better than the boss could.
Figure 4.1 Five levers and enablers of KM change
The authors have tested this definition out in many situations and there are some that it doesn’t fit – for example, in work situations where the ‘boss’ is a craftsman surrounded by apprentices or semi-skilled support staff. But the principle remains, as these are the exceptions that prove the rule: workers now know more than their bosses, indeed they are expected to do so – the notion of ‘team working’ or workgroups assembled from a range of people with different skills relies extensively on the concept of deploying specialists with relevant knowledge to tackle specific situations, managed by someone who does not have the in-depth knowledge of the individual team members.
Leadership and change
But where does this leave the ‘boss’? In the days of Henry Ford (and of the division between white collar and blue collar workers, and trade unions who saw the world in very clear terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’) the division was clear cut. Managers managed, workers worked, and leadership primarily existed at the level of the foreman (rather like the army model of non- commissioned officers).
To help us understand more on leadership and change we will briefly look at some descriptions from some of the leading writers on the subject. Philip Kotter, in a Harvard business review article examining ‘What Leaders Really Do’ (2001) noted that
Management is about coping with complexity, whilst leadership is . . . about coping with change.
Within any change programme (such as a knowledge manage- ment initiative), leadership is an essential component. In his book Leading Change, Kotter defines a leader’s responsibilities as
䊉 establishing the direction of the change
䊉 aligning people to that direction, and
䊉 motivating and inspiring people to overcome major political, bureaucratic and resource barriers.
Kotter held the view that successful change programmes are ‘70 to 90 per cent leadership’ (as defined above) and ‘10 to 30 per cent management’. In Kotter’s view, it is really wrong to talk of change management: more accurately it should be about change
leadership. If we accept this definition, then it has substantial implications for how we think about projects – instead of the traditional emphasis on budgets, planning, discounted cashflow and so on (important though they are), project management (project leadership) becomes much more focused on motivating, inspiring, informing and enabling people to do what they do best – using their skills and experience to good effect.
This is reinforced by the work of Robert Goffee and Garath Jones in the same issue of the Harvard Business Review (December 2001). The role of the change leader is to ensure that people involved with and affected by the changes must be led willingly, and to do this three key responses must be felt:
䊉 First, workers need to feel valued, to feel significant, to feel as if they really matter – enough effort must be invested to ensure this comes through.
䊉 Workers also want to feel like they belong in a community. Communities of practice have been a key component of many knowledge management initiatives, and the work in taking them forward is strongly in the hands of the change leader.
People need to feel a unity of purpose around work and be willing to relate to one another as human beings. This is best achieved when the leader is successful in fostering a feeling of community and trust.
䊉 Lastly, the people involved need to feel some kind of buzz, excitement, and challenge from the programme. Creating this feeling tends to come easiest from leaders who are more extroverted, energetic, and committed to the change.
So if this is the role of a leader of a change programme, what sort of specific implications are there for leadership of knowledge management projects? The first element is obvious enough: there has to beleadership of an organization’s knowledge management efforts. This may seem obvious – but in our experience, lack of leadership (or the wrong kind of leadership) is one of the main causes of failure in knowledge management efforts.
KM leadership roles
So what kind of leadership roles are appropriate? These depend largely on the kind of organization, its culture, the scale of the project, its importance and relevance to the organization’s future, and the degree of top-level buy-in and visibility that it has.
There are a whole variety of possible roles in a KM initiative, each of which exert some kind of leadership at different levels in the organization and require different skills.
Chief knowledge officer (CKO)
More often seen across the Atlantic than in the UK and continental Europe, this role is generally at senior level – most often a direct report to an executive board member. There are many interpretations of the role, but the most common one is one of formal responsibility for tailoring KM strategy to organizational strategy, for developing and designing the overall KM programme, and for the allocation of resources.
Resources for mobilizing knowledge are seldom clustered under the command of the CKO. They generally are a mix of a ‘seed’
budget (for central infrastructure and support initiatives), and resources required to deliver specific benefits identified in business cases.
It follows that the CKO role needs to enthuse and engage business units and help them develop their own initiatives with their own budgets. The CKO needs to be far more than a thinker – he or she must also be an evangelist or salesperson for the benefits of mobilizing knowledge, making the case, explaining compelling examples from other organizations, and providing the passion that drives the effort forward.
Knowledge programme director
This is not quite the same thing as the CKO, and though the roles are often combined in a single individual, the skill sets are subtly different. While a CKO’s role is to enthuse and lead, a knowledge programme director’s role may have a greater emphasis on hands-on management, with more focus on delivering specific projects and having more of a responsibility in managing staff and budgets. Few organizations have the luxury of both roles, yet few individuals are expert at carrying both out, so support may be required depending on the individual and on the organization’s particular characteristics.
In any case, the titles are often confused, or substituted to make a particular symbolic point: for example, when Elizabeth Lank was appointed Director of the Knowledge Programme by ICL in 1996 she was the incoming chief executive’s first appointment.
Her role was, however, very much like that of a chief knowledge officer (not that the title was a common one at the time). The
idea of a programme in this case was to some extent symbolic, in the sense that it conveyed the intention to deliver change – an important leadership message.
Information professional/knowledge officer
Organizations have a variety of information professionals – from librarians and file and records management specialists to database administrators – who bring a variety of literacy, numeracy and technical skills to bear on the enterprise-wide management of information. This has been the case for a long time – but increased use of technology, as well as better skills in searching, sifting and using information tools, is changing these roles, bringing people out of the back office into a much more prominent role within the business.
Indeed, many people driving knowledge management pro- grammes in organizations have been information professionals – highly appropriate given the depth of understanding required about how the many information sources needed by today’s large companies interact and are managed.
As an example of this changing role: one of the authors worked in a newspaper office which simultaneously introduced both a web-based ‘cuttings’ library (a fully searchable text archive to replace a large room full of manila folders stuffed with newspaper clippings and bound volumes going back 200 years), and a digital photo system that was used to manage current/
recent pictures. The library staff had once spent their time finding files, putting them away, adding new items into files, and generally organizing information. The new system took away the need for much of this – and with conventional management thinking, its introduction would have led to some redundancies. But all the staff were kept on – and suddenly emerged, blinking, into the light of day to become a fantastic resource for journalists who could suddenly interact far more with these information professionals, getting far better value from the encyclopedic knowledge of the archive they had at their disposal.
As digital information technologies proliferate across an organi- zation, if the temptation of cost saving is resisted and instead the changing role of information professionals is exploited, then there is huge potential to mine vast, currently unexploited reservoirs of corporate knowledge. The professionals them- selves will have plenty of ideas on this score!
Knowledge broker
Of course, information professionals are not the only workers who concern themselves with the gathering, making sense of, and sharing of knowledge and information: this is the very stuff of knowledge work. But in every workplace, every team, there is an individual who excels at this: who knows precisely who is doing what, or what article appeared in what publication, or who knows their way best around the forest of paper or the myriad folders on the shared drive. At one time their role might have been the source of some amusement, and depending on the environment, might have earned them the name of office gossip . . . but smart organizations are beginning to see the benefits of developing these people into an entirely new breed: the knowledge broker.
It makes sense to develop and build these skills and talents, and to recognize in them essential things that every workplace needs. Within Fujitsu Services, for example, such individuals are identified and given project coordination roles, or roles as intranet ‘community’ administrators (we’ll come to the role of communities of practice later). In the Department of Health, plans are afoot to identify and use these natural knowledge sharers to help deliver the programme – it makes a great deal of sense to build knowledge projects around the very people who would bring massive commitment. In time, such individuals may be given a formal role or developed as information professionals – but we have found in Fujitsu that it is more likely that, due to their talents in ‘networking’ at the centre of activities, they will be promoted and move on to other things in the organization, leaving a gap for new blood.
Technology and process specialists
A major theme of this book is that knowledge management is about changing people’s behaviour – and that the use of technology is very much subordinate. However – as we established in Chapter 1 – the principal reason for the interest in knowledge management over the past 10 years or so has been (and to some extent remains) a wish to exploit the potential of the revolution in information capture, search and retrieval that has accompanied the bursting forth of a raft of digital technologies, from HTML and global email, to collaborative applications and powerful new data mining tools.
To manage technology selection, system design, implementation and roll-out, or ongoing support and user training, requires
input from technology specialists. Likewise business analysts are required to make these systems function and to achieve other benefits that may not be so heavily technology dependent.
Experts in analysis and review of business processes must form part of any implementation team.
Leading from the top
Beyond the KM-specific roles, of course, leadership in knowl- edge management can be at any level, and indeed must be present at more or less every level of the organization in some form or other. One big mistake that senior management can make is to appoint a chief knowledge officer – even one at senior level in the organization – dedicate a few helpers and some budget, and think that that individual can deliver knowledge management. No – things will change only if the leadership in the organization demonstrates, though the vari- ous communications channels at their disposal, that knowl- edge management is important. This brings us to another of our Golden Rules:
Golden Rule #3: Nothing happens without leadership – Those responsible for running the organization must inspire and encourage all staff throughout the ‘voyage of discovery’
that is the change programme, continuing on after imple- mentation to ensure lasting change.
Although senior management can delegate the burden on matching the vision for knowledge to the wider needs of the organization, developing the change programme, and even managing the fine detail of implementation, what they cannot do is opt out of their responsibilities to lead. The appointment of Elizabeth Lank at ICL was backed with a clear statement that mobilizing knowledge was vital in transforming the business from a product-focused company (selling mainframes and computer hardware) into a services delivery organization where all it had to sell was the knowledge, expertise and experience of its people. This was a classic case of a knowledge management initiative being put at the heart of corporate change.
In addition to this kind of large-scale, ‘on-message’, rather symbolic kind of support, the wider management circle are also responsible for more practical steps – such as aligning targets and measurements – which we’ll discuss shortly.
Building a KM delivery team
So what sort of team do you need to deliver KM? We’ve looked at the typical roles above, but what of the wider balance of the team? Any change effort is not just about leadership, but also about supporting roles. In 1995, the writers Michael Hammer and Steven Stanton came up with a list of change roles which focus the responsibility for success and help drive through change in a balanced manner. Table 4.1 paired these up with possible roles in a typical KM delivery programme.
These five roles are essential as part of the change team, and it can be seen from this that they do not necessarily form part of the core KM team – in fact, participation from people on the ground in business units is critical, as is appropriate top management support. The usefulness of the table is that through anticipating the need for specific roles, it becomes easier for you to plan the resources required.
Table 4.1 Comparison of roles for a knowledge management team Hammer and Stanton’s five
Roles
Possible management or KM team roles
Leader of change Board sponsor; chief knowledge officer or knowledge
programme director Process owners who have
end-to-end responsibility for change within specific process areas
End users (from business units working with the KM team);
knowledge officers
Insiders who bring knowledge, experience and credibility
Information
professionals/knowledge brokers
Outsiders who bring creativity that flows from a fresh, objective perspective
External consultants; external KM, technology or process specialists
Czar who provides advice to the process owners and helps coordinate the teams within the programme
Chief knowledge officer
In the authors’ experience the time commitment requirement by those people taking part in the change, to think through, unpick and reconstruct the way business is conducted, is almost always underestimated. Not least people must understand the need for, and the detail of, the changes required. The worst thing that can happen is that those running the programme come to believe that involving staff on the ground is an unnecessary burden and do not invest the required time and effort – this can only be a recipe for failure.
Building the team, appointing leaders, and making individuals accountable for the carrying out of various elements of delivery is a key part of any KM initiative – indeed, in a consultancy situation we typically specify this as the first step in launching any knowledge management programme. Without leadership, accountability, and some kind of goal, any initiative is doomed.