Knowledge Hoarding: A Cultural Phenomenon

One major operational issue is the driving philosophy that knowledge is a form of power to leverage. While at face value this concept does not appear to have any concrete outcomes, the reality of this doctrine is that it creates many deficiencies within the work place. These deficiencies materialize in the form of knowledge leverage through possession and lack of dissemination. Essentially, individuals will hold on to the knowledge they’ve either helped produce or have attained over time in order to be one step ahead of all other employee’s. This tactic not only creates division between employees who are supposed to be working on teams together, but also invokes a culture of distrust. This culture in turn slows down efficiency and invokes individualism in work production – making the process of doing things more time consuming and difficult.

One way to address this glaring issue is an evolution of culture. This is an easy cop out concept, but, moving beyond this basic idea one could infiltrate culture through a varying array of programs. One current program that has been employed is called Thayer, it is an empowerment leadership program put on by the military which we send employees to. While this was a good step in the right direction and a large piece of the legacy the current president will be leaving behind, it has yet to intrinsically change action and build trust within teams. Therefore, a different way that this problem could be addressed is through Chris’ Ignite programs. A program that is organizationally cross-functional in terms of having a diverse population of employee’s across many roles and positions coming together to grow networking within different organizations by using experiential learning and leadership training. There is a need for programs such as Ignite to grow in scale in order to reach more people and effectively advance positive culture shift.

I have taken the initiative to help support this growth by conducting research on social franchising and social enterprises in my time here. And am now working to build the skeleton that will essentially act as a baseline to scale Ignite into a global leadership program through the use of social franchising. Due to my background in leadership studies, I was able to conduct research in a timely and effective matter, as well as prepare the content needed to help share the potential of this outcome with Chris. With the potential to scale Ignite programming into an internal global leadership program there is growing hope that the current culture gap of information hoarding and defective team operations will be thwarted in due time.