Share Knowledge Across Your Company To Beat Your Competition

The value of knowledge sharing to an organization is well known, yet much of the knowledge within an organization remains unshared. Knowledge sharing is the process by which individuals exchange tacit and explicit knowledge in order to create new knowledge.

If you don’t share knowledge within your company, your customers will suffer. Many managers are unaware that the team that sits right next to theirs is doing some great work that that could help the business deliver a better service to customers, or open the door to a new market.

Host regular knowledge-sharing sessions – whether virtual or real; keep your knowledge management system updated and make it interactive. Or invite individuals from totally different parts of the business to team meetings and then reciprocate. Start with some of the managers. Proactive knowledge sharing is one of the key ways to remain one step ahead of your competitors – and senior people need to make the time to lead by example.

Even in a small company, silos emerge. A policy of more sharing will help everyone stay in touch with what others are doing, and create a collective expectation. Keeping everyone pointed in the same direction is hard; sharing more about what’s going on, how you’re doing things, reasoning behind decisions, etc. will help.

Actively managing knowledge can help companies increase their chances of success by facilitating decision-making, building learning environments by making learning routine, and stimulating cultural change and innovation.

Learning is the key to success—some would even say survival—in today’s organizations. Knowledge should be continuously enriched through both internal and external learning. For this to happen, it is necessary to support and energize organization, people, knowledge, and technology for learning. A learning organization values the role that learning can play in developing organizational effectiveness.

By engaging in the knowledge sharing process teams create a new unique knowledge resource that competitors cannot easily imitate. Knowledge sharing leads to superior team performance and is a source of competitive advantage for organizations.