Community
The CEO’s role in knowledge management
Arun Hariharan writes that “having helped a number of organizations and their leaders with knowledge management (KM), I’ve observed certain leaders who are able to achieve greater and more sustainable results from KM than others, despite having similar KM experts and technology at their disposal”.
He lists the qualities that he sees as setting these leaders apart from others:
- Expecting significant business results from KM. Leaders with high expectations know that it’s worth spending their time on KM, and this gives them results.
- Treating KM as a strategy and not a task. KM is a strategy to achieve sustained success in business, not a task to be left to junior staff or consultants.
- Involvement and reviews. Leaders with high expectations from KM get involved; their involvement is primarily in the form of regular reviews and guidance to their teams engaged in KM initiatives.
- Making KM a key part of performance appraisals. Making KM part of employees’ performance appraisals and linking employees’ growth and bonuses to it sends a very powerful message.
- Making senior people accountable for KM results. The greatest business results through KM are achieved when business leaders make their senior staff accountable for KM in their respective areas.
- Investing in KM talent. Successful leaders recognize the value of investing in KM specialists or facilitators who bring the requisite experience and aptitude to help the company with the cultural and the technical aspects of KM, and to translate this into business results.
- Spread the KM culture. Consciously and deliberately involving people from various departments and across the hierarchy in knowledge-sharing and replication activities helps to create and spread an organizational culture of good practice.
- Invest in rewards and recognition. Rewards and recognition, given in a visible way, play an important role in encouraging a culture of knowledge sharing and replication.
- Set personal examples. Another quality of successful leaders is that they set personal examples.
Article source: Quality Digest.
Image source: CEO Leaders’ Club with Luann Pendy by Mich Bio is licenced by CC BY-ND 2.0.
Also published on Medium.
