Law In Business: The change agents

Interesting article in Legal week by Catherine Flutsch. The article brings out the challennges of establishing KM in organisations and the people managment characterstics required to establish the necessary culture. Enjoy...

Law In Business: The change agents

A knowledge management practitioner not only needs the right skills — they also need the right personality, writes Catherine Flutsch
At the end of last year’s European Knowledge Management Thought Leaders’ Forum, chairperson Victoria Ward remarked that working in knowledge management can be utterly exhausting. This stimulated a huge amount of discussion among delegates about the personal challenges of being a knowledge management practitioner and what strategies, if any, fellow delegates found successful in addressing those challenges. It seemed a pity to bring the conference to a close in the midst of such animated conversation. At this year’s forum, held in London at the end of September, it was again encouraging to see such a wide variety of industries represented. Organisations that were represented included Fujitsu, Rolls-Royce, the British Nuclear Group, Nestle, Ericsson, Mars, the Department of Health, the BBC, Lucent, Siemens Medical Solutions, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and Bird & Bird. Most of the presentations and case studies at the forum outlined organisational barriers (such as those mentioned below) to effective knowledge management and the strategies used by knowledge management practitioners to overcome them. This year, as one of the chairs of the forum, I wanted to build into the final session an opportunity for the delegates to discuss the personal challenges of being knowledge management practitioners and what strategies, if any, they use to address those challenges. At the end of the session, I asked each table to write down the salient points covered in their discussion. While not a rigorous or scientific survey, the results were somewhat unexpected to me. Despite the varied industries represented, almost all of the delegates faced the same major challenge — the need for sustained, high energy levels, persistence and self belief to get, and maintain, buy-in from the people in their organisation, whose support is vital for knowledge management to make a positive difference to their organisation. Without this buy-in, typically demonstrated by direct reporting lines from the knowledge management team to the CEO/managing partner/man-aging committee, an appropriate knowledge management strategy cannot be formulated. Gretta Rusanow, in her work, Knowledge Management and the Smarter Lawyer, says buy-in at this level, "ensures that knowledge management is viewed as impacting all aspects of the firm and is directly linked to driving business objectives". The challenge identified by the delegates seemed to reflect the overall tone of the forum, which is that employees in delegates’ organisations broadly understand that managing their know-how appropriately may be the key to achieving competitive advantage. However, the organisations have much less of a consensus on what constitutes the appropriate management of their know-how. To address this issue, many of the delegates are wielding leadership tools (such as charisma, salesmanship, role-modelling, negotiation) to create their knowledge management strategies and programmes and to obtain consensus that those strategies/programmes are the most effective way to use knowledge for competitive advantage in their organisations. Therefore, delegates’ written comments showed that a successful knowledge management practitioner needs to have: . high energy levels; . persistence; . optimism; . a thick skin when it comes to taking flack; . a pragmatic approach when coping with political pressure; . a very sensitive approach to colleagues; and . the ability to celebrate every success. I discussed these results with Sally Gonzalez, director of Navigant Consulting, who commented that all these qualities are the essential personal characteristics of a successful change agent. A successful knowledge management practitioner needs to be a change agent with at least the skills identified by the forum delegates if they are to be robust enough to help an organisation overcome any barriers to a pro-sharing culture. In professional services organisations, such barriers can include high billable hour targets, structural silos and certain types of senior executive/ partner compensation models. All of these have been historically successful solutions and, therefore, can be deeply ingrained in the culture of an organisation. Some commentators go so far as to say that crisis and failure are the only ways to destroy those barriers. The delegates’ written opinions on this point reflect the general view taken in the ever-increasing amount of literature about the management tools necessary to effect organisational change. However, the literature often seems to me to yield an unspoken orthodoxy that anybody, as long as they are using appropriate management tools, can learn to effect this type of change. It was interesting to me, therefore, to see anecdotal evidence from forum delegates concluding that successful change and successful knowledge management requires not only the right tools used at the right time, but used by the right kind of person. Catherine Flutsch is head of knowledge management at Bird & Bird.

Author: Catherine Flutsch
Source: Legal Week
Start Date: 23/11/2006
End Date: 18/01/2007