Many firms are entrusting their knowledge and learning to teams.
Many different formats of teams are used. The two most common formats within knowledge programmes are:
● project teams– usually formally constituted to solve particular problems
● community of practice – a grouping of individuals who share a common interest. Communities of practice can be either formal or informal, though there was a tendency previously to Fig. 4.1 Stages in commitment
consider communities of practice to be primarily voluntary and informal.
Typically, these teams and communities of practice are multi- functional, and may even include external representatives from leading suppliers, customers, and re-sellers.
Leadership strongly influences communities of practice and proj- ect teams. Generally, we can say that team leaders enhance the impact of such groupings by:
● clearly communicating the organization’s expectations to team members
● fostering high levels of communication within and outside the team
● creating a climate that raises morale and energizes team mem- bers
● taking responsibility for the team’s goals
● guiding and sharing the team’s burdens, and interfacing with key external constituents
● ensuring they are provided with high levels of autonomy and support from their superiors in the organization
● involving participants with differing and multiple perspec- tives
● balancing demands made by different organizational con- stituents
● ensuring adequate technical support
● facilitating a high degree of human interaction
● reducing destructive conflict.
Knowledge and learning holds little significance if it takes too long or costs too much. Effective knowledge leaders are those who increase creativity and deliver knowledge to the right person at the right time in the right format, quickly and cheaply.
Knowledge managers often find their companies to be com- partmentalized, functional entities that resemble a salad bowl of subcultures with disparate thought-worlds and functional processes. In these instances knowledge creation and sharing is inordinately difficult. The problem is that such independently made decisions may make micro-sense to one department at one time yet make macro-nonsense to other departments and the organization. The role of knowledge leaders is to overcome func- tional differentiation and foster collaborative decision making.
Leaders must create a social environment in which teams come to resemble less a battleground embedded with turf protection behaviours, and more of a sanctuary in which people with diver- gent orientations and talents can share hidden agendas, ask for
help, take risks and develop collaborative relationships with others. Leaders must build trust, foster openness and encourage risk taking so that people’s creative talents are constantly focused towards improvement actions.
Managing teams and communities of practice
The advice on how to manage teams and communities of practice is both varied and vast. Nevertheless, a few guidelines can be sur- mised. According to Jassawala and Sashittal (2000) these are to:
● ensure commitment
● build information-intensive environments
● act as facilitators not heroes
● focus on learning.
Ensure commitment
Ineffective knowledge processes result from low commitment to decisions and disconnection between processes and sub- processes. The challenge is to get team members to own the knowledge-sharing and learning process, i.e. get people to commit to the inputs and also take responsibility for the outputs.
If this can be done then significant improvements are likely.
Knowledge leaders must:
● increase participants’ personal, emotional commitment to the team/community of practice
● during interactions with team communities, shape people’s vocabularies and language to favour the view that all individ- uals and functional groups, as well as key customers and sup- pliers, are insiders
● interact with team members in ways that makes their interde- pendence apparent
● act in ways to ensure that members feel a greater sense of con- trol over their community’s destiny by loosening control over information and resources
● encourage community members to develop their own protocols, identify their own criteria, assign their own priori- ties, make their own decisions and design their own work flow.
This often newly acquired autonomy is instrumental for trans- forming a group of disinterested participants into a team of mem-
bers who hold a stake in their interdependence and social rela- tionships, and the outcome is knowledge sharing and dissemina- tion of learning. Ensuring commitment has much to do with team leaders’ efforts to facilitate the process by which team communi- ties blend their loyalties and develop integrated identities of departmental and team membership.
Build information-intensive environments
Communities work most effectively in open information-rich environments. Information-poor environment are characterized by:
● senior management’s actions suggesting tight control and releasing information on a need-to-know basis
● constantly supporting one dominant functional group or coali- tion
● supporting safe decisions that are devoid of insights or vision
● a tendency to rely on innuendo and soft data (i.e. using infor- mation that people with differing views cannot reconcile)
● a propensity to use information as a weapon that prevents others from succeeding and helps people hide from responsi- bility.
Good managers favour information sharing, airing of divergent views, openness and holistic thinking.
Act as facilitators not heroes
There is a clear link between senior management’s propensity to micro-manage and shape community activities with disinterest of team members. Senior management’s direct exercise of power over knowledge structures such as communities of practice often leads to feelings of powerlessness among team members. The out- come is apathy and responsibility shifting. Community partici- pants lose interest in taking the initiative and risks because they feel powerlessness. Under these conditions team participants often feel absolved of their collective responsibility towards cre- ating new outcomes.
Managing for knowledge and learning necessitates a funda- mentally different type of leadership than the customary view of the leader as central actor in the unfolding drama. The limelight hero in the knowledge and learning drama is replaced by the leader as facilitator. The view that leaders ought to control and
orchestrate work activity is replaced by the view that leaders act in ways that make them redundant.
Leaders as facilitators take steps to shield community grouping from the bureaucratic tendencies of the larger organization.
Although many of these actions may scarcely be noticeable, since most of these actions may occur outside of memberships’
purview, they are important to the success of the community. In one sense, the leader’s role is that of insulator from outside forces.
Focus on learning
Inflexibility, rigidity and maintenance of the status quo leads to poorly managed learning processes. The hustle of the day-to-day task environment and frequent involvement in fighting fires usu- ally deflects attention from attempts and thoughts towards learn- ing and improvement. Unless, there is an explicit effort to continually test and question assumptions and actions, then few learning insights are likely. Indeed, without such emphasis on learning and change, communities of practice can fast become forums existing only for acting out rivalries.
Knowledge managers need to transform the nature of learning that occurs within their teams and communities. They can do this by enhancing the community’s ability to adapt and improvise through:
● investing in training about the process of learning
● asking community members to identify and evaluate the key premises that guide their thinking and actions
● asking team members to regularly and in a meaningful way assess their knowledge creation performance
● constantly checking for double-loop learning. For instance, effective team managers often explain the premises guiding their decision making and actions. They also make questioning fundamentals permissible among team members. This creates a double loop of thinking and learning because, first, the link between their actions and outcomes is examined for insights and ,second, implicit theories of action are examined and eval- uated in order to understand how and why those decisions were made and those actions were taken in the first place.
Open discussion of premises and theories of action is the key difference between teams that learn and adopt new behaviours as opposed to those that resist learning and resist change
● placing emphasis on experimentation and risk taking.