The Role Of Individuals

While managers have an important role to play in setting the context and in creating the environment within which individuals can develop and share their knowledge, individuals have an important role to play too in building the organisation’s knowledge base.

Share Insights And Reflections With Others

When running development programmes one of the things that developers often encourage delegates to do is to share their insights and reflections, so why then do we not do this as a matter of course as part of daily business life?

The HR team within one of the major consultancies that I have worked with have adopted a practice of e-mailing their ‘What struck me’ thoughts to colleagues at the end of each week, as a way of sharing knowledge.

Let Others Know What You Are Interested In Knowing More About

It is very easy in today’s high-tech world to suffer from information overload and a sense of being overwhelmed by the vast amount of information that possibly needs to be located and absorbed. However, there is a lot to be gained from sharing what we know, and what we are interested in knowing more about, with others. In this way you can each act as another pair of eyes, or ears, helping to connect each other with valuable information sources. This approach is particularly important for those working in more autonomous/independent roles, as the opportunity for informal knowledge exchanges may not occur through the course of daily work. My own doctoral research which investigated how selfemployed HR professionals manage their learning and knowledge identified that these individuals come to rely on contacts in their knowledge networks for circulating information that matches with their areas of interest and business (Evans, 2001). Equally all professionals can benefit from sharing the learning task, as the following case study illustrates.