Everyone Needs Knowledge Management with Dr. Cynthia J. Young | 051

Everyone Needs Knowledge Management with Dr. Cynthia J. Young | 051

Welcome to Lean Leadership for Ops Managers, the podcast for leaders in Ops Management who want to spark improvement, foster engagement, and boost problem solving – AND still get their day job done. Here’s your host, Leadership Trainer, Lean Enthusiast, and Spy Thriller Junkie, Jamie V. Parker.

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Listen up: Everyone needs knowledge management.

Be real. What do you think of when you hear the term knowledge management?

Maybe you’re like, what the heck is that, I’ve never heard that term. Or maybe you’re thinking, oh yeah, it’s like a SharePoint site. Or maybe you’re like me and you’re thinking of some big organization, enterprise wide program. Well, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Today, we’re talking with Dr. Cynthia Young, who consults with organizations specifically on knowledge management. We’re going to learn a little bit about what it is, the different components, and how it can help organizations on a strategic level. But she’s also going to bring this home for every single person in the organization on an individual level for our managers out there. So listen up. This is going to be a good one.

Cindy, I’m so excited to have you joining the show today.

Dr. Cynthia J. Young: [00:01:32] You’re welcome, thank you very much. I appreciate you having me.

Jamie V. Parker: [00:01:36] Before we jump in to talk about knowledge management, just want to see if you can introduce yourself, let our listeners know who they’re learning from today.

Dr. Cynthia J. Young: [00:01:45] Ok, well, Jamie, I’m Cindy Young. I am a full time defense contractor. But on the side I run CJ Young Consulting, which is a knowledge management consulting firm. I offer workshops, speaking engagements, classes, just something to help people get better at managing knowledge in the organization to help trust and inclusion, as well as just help their bottom line. Because they don’t want to lose knowledge.

Jamie V. Parker: [00:02:14] I’m glad to talk about this topic. I haven’t told you this before, but when I was doing my Masters, I went to three universities because I was relocating for my company. Because I relocated from one to three schools. But the one class I loved the most was a class on knowledge management. It was such a fun topic. And the instructor was fantastic and it was a really cool class.
So I’m actually kind of geeking out to talk about this topic today.
So we’re talking about knowledge management. For a lot of folks out there, it might be kind of a vague term. What in the world is it? Let’s start there. When we say knowledge management, what are we even talking about?

Dr. Cynthia J. Young: [00:03:04] Well, kind of like we talk about communications and change. We’re talking about managing something. So where you’re going to store it, capture it, share, transfer it, what have you. But in this case it’s knowledge. Knowledge management in a quick sentence is taking the information you have and knowing what to do with it.
So say you’re a project manager and you have you’re you’re finding out you’re seeing your cost. Well, that’s good information to know that you spent so much money and you can spend a little money. Well, the knowledge you’ll have is that, oh, I got to cut back on my spending or I might have to reduce the amount of people on the project. That’s knowledge management. Also, knowledge management is going to share the lessons learned between teams. And you decide when you’re going to share because you know that sharing it later doesn’t always help people that work alongside you on similar projects.

Jamie V. Parker: [00:03:57] Let me ask you as we’ve got a lot of operations executives and operations managers tuning in. And when I’m talking with operations executives, I hear a lot about this kind of institutional knowledge, particularly with a lot of manufacturers or logistics firms out there that have a large group of team members who are nearing retirement age. And one of the things they’re learning is that it’s all kind of in their heads. Right?
There’s this institutional knowledge, that stuff in their heads, and there’s actually some nervousness of what happens when this whole swath of folks start to retire and we lose that. Does that have any relation here to knowledge management?

Dr. Cynthia J. Young: [00:04:48] Yes, it does. In fact, I ask people, what do you do if you want to go on vacation or if you are hit by a bus, the same thing, you’re going you’re going to be out of the office and people may or may not be able to get a hold of you. Sometimes companies will keep retirees on as a part time, part time contractors to help ease the transition. If their leaving is immediate and if they’re going to stay in the area and they want to make a little bit extra cash, whereas you look at the succession planning also.
So I talked with a guy last week, he’s an executive recruiter. I asked: Do you ever talk to these companies about what they’re going to do for replacing knowledge, or do you just look for somebody that just knows everything that person knows.
He said, yeah, people want to pay high dollar to get the amount of knowledge from their hire that they already have, whereas they could save a lot of money by just teaching our people there behind them also allows you to have that.
That was a factor because if somebody quits, you know, I’m not talking retirees out, but somebody who just walks off the job. Where are you going to go?
You’re going to spend a lot of time hiring that person. Look for a person, a person has to give notice, and then they’re going to come to you and they’re going to not know anything.
So there’s just a lot of knowledge sharing that has to happen. And that’s just one aspect of knowledge management.

Jamie V. Parker: [00:06:11] Yeah, OK, I feel like we can really see that connection there and how knowledge management could be important in that scenario. But tell us a little bit more about why I should care. Why do I care about this? There’s so many things I could care about. What’s important here with knowledge management, and why does this matter?

Dr. Cynthia J. Young: [00:06:32] Well, what matters, and I’m not even talking about the organization. What matters to them is corporate knowledge. But for you, if you want to go on vacation and you don’t want to get called, you don’t want to have to take a short vacation. You want to have somebody else trained up or trained up and do your job, you know.
The biggest problem I see is people are worried about people knowing more than they do and losing out. They think somebody’s going to take the job. But what they’re really missing is you’re not able to promote. Because if you promote, that means the job’s vacant and nobody else is going to know.
I knew I worked with. A very, very smart guy and he wanted to move up, but they made him find his own relief. And that’s very hard because you’ve got to do your own job and find something else, find somebody else for that position. You can’t hire them.

Jamie V. Parker: [00:07:24] Yes, I see it in operations all the time where people work through their vacations and they kind of get stuck, kind of get stuck in a role and can’t advance. They’re doing so much and we’re not creating an opportunity and a method and a process for people to develop.

Dr. Cynthia J. Young: [00:07:47] Yes. And if they did train people, that not only makes them more educated about how the company is doing stuff, but it gives them a little more feeling. Hey, you trust me, you like me. I’m going to stay here because I feel good being here.

Jamie V. Parker: [00:08:06] Tell me more about this knowledge management stuff, then I’ll be quiet for a minute. You tell us more about it.

Dr. Cynthia J. Young: [00:08:15] Well you have knowledge sharing which is 2-way conversation. It can happen during mentoring or during classroom training. You have knowledge transfer which is I’m talking to you, I’m putting the word out, and you may or may not have an opportunity to ask questions. So just assume it’s 1-way and that you’ve got to follow up later.
And you have knowledge capture, which you can use in business development for business capture. You know, I wrote an article about it a year and a half ago for IAC magazine about the Six Steps to Knowledge Capture in Business Development. And so there are ways of bringing the knowledge that, you know, just as knowledge and experience as well as explicit knowledge which is a codified knowledge, knowledge is written down. Everybody can reference notes there. And so you take all that and you can get a really good picture of bigger competitors as well as business you want to get.
And then there’s also knowledge storage. When I say knowledge management, a lot of times companies think I’m talking about SharePoint Portal and I’m absolutely not. I mean, if you think of a sharepoint portal like a library, I think librarians are like the best knowledge managers. So you have this portal there that has all the information there, but nobody can find it. It’s not going to be any good or if you have access to it.

Jamie V. Parker: [00:09:37] Yes.

Dr. Cynthia J. Young: [00:09:38] I mean, how many times have you gone to a page on the sharepoint portal and it says that you don’t have access, you got request access? Why is it? Does it even have what I’m looking for?

Jamie V. Parker: [00:09:49] And then you get the access or you can’t find it or it’s outdated. Yes. Oh, yeah. Well, that was four years ago. We don’t do that anymore. We have new systems or whatever.

Dr. Cynthia J. Young: [00:10:00] Right. And people have to keep up to the state of a process. So if you have a flowchart or a process you certified and you have to keep going back. You can’t just sit there forever and say, OK, that’s most of. But, hey, well, we’ve made these changes as well. If you don’t make a change to the actual paperwork, people can’t learn from it either, right?

Jamie V. Parker: [00:10:24] So how would an organization use knowledge management from a strategic perspective to help their organization? How do we really use this? We’ve got these different areas of knowledge sharing, knowledge transfer, knowledge capture, all of these, the storage. What does that mean? How does that translate into a strategic goal?

Dr. Cynthia J. Young: [00:10:52] One goal the most organizations have is they’ll do their annual planning and you have your retention numbers and you want to increase your retention. So one of the things you can do with knowledge management is to have a project or a program where you’re having people teach each other stuff, maybe have lunch and learns. That’s knowledge management, you know, where you’re teaching somebody else what you know. And it doesn’t have to be something at work. It can be something personal about how you take notes or how you file things, just something where you can get that trust and teach somebody. And they’ll stay because they know that you’re buying into their professional development, so your retention numbers should go up another way.

Another way is supply. If you want to cut down on the numbers either and we talk about Lean about just in time and all this other stuff. But if you want to keep your numbers low on your spending because you don’t know what’s in your warehouse, well, then you may want to have somebody work a project where they can where they can have a system in place to manage what they have. So rather than just apply, have it back at the office, because if people that are ordering supplies are saying, OK, I got an order because they’ve told me to, yeah. You’ve got to have something there to lower costs. And that’s a big cause. And you see people ordering paper folders and that is Hayden’s other cabinet has them. And there goes they have the.

And then you can also have things like bonuses you can put in your finances, your bonus bonuses. You know how much you can do if you don’t share knowledge. Are you going to give them an extra pay or is sharing knowledge something people do because they feel like it’ll get them somewhere?

Jamie V. Parker: [00:12:42] So really this kind of covers anything an organization is working on, you have to have this.

Dr. Cynthia J. Young: [00:12:50] Yeah, it’s like communication or change. It’s going to happen. It’s used. And you’ve got to build it in your culture so that it’s acceptable to share and not acceptable to hide or to hoard it.

Jamie V. Parker: [00:13:01] Yeah, I love that idea as I was thinking that too as you were talking, because it’s almost like integrating this really into the everyday. This is just who we are. And so every day we’re sharing knowledge and we’re, you know, in whatever way that looks like. You named a few different examples, but we’re working on how we get things? So it’s not just one person, it’s something that we can share across the organization. We can develop other people’s capabilities. And we need that every day.

Dr. Cynthia J. Young: [00:13:33] Yeah, especially now. I mean, there are so many people that are out of work that, you know, I wrote an article before COVID and I really, really like I wrote it because it’s pretty cool. And it was about, hey, these are skills that you need in knowledge management. If there’s going to be a downsizing of your company. Look at others’ experience with downsizing and what knowledge management may have been able to help these people. To give them better skills or maybe make them, I want to say, more important to somebody else that maybe higher up on the on the the selection.

Jamie V. Parker: [00:14:12] So how do I know where I stand today and what I need to work on? Because I feel like there’s a lot of different components here. And so if I’m listening to this and thinking, all right, in my division, in my organization and my group, whatever it might be, I know there’s a gap. I think that knowledge management can help us close this gap. Where do I start or how do I know what I need to work on?

Dr. Cynthia J. Young: [00:14:37] Well, there’s several things. One thing you can do is look at your business process management system, you know, and just see, is that stuff made open for everybody to be able to look at that.
You also question your business development processes, because I know the government, because that’s what I do full time as I work, I work for a defense contractor. But my previous company, we do business development. And one of the things is that you can get an after action report, find out why you lost a bid or what happened when you won the bid. And so if that knowledge doesn’t get passed down to the next ten people they’re bidding on, it was a recompete or if you’re trying to bid on new work, they’re not gonna learn from it.
You know, if somebody says, well, this is only me because it has money information, it has dollar amounts, then that’s not going to help. That could indicate that there’s people keeping secrets or people keeping it at one level. And people actually have to write the proposal at another level.
Also you can have people come forward, you can have them map out what they know after a month and maybe within six months. You know, I teach people how to map the first day. First day at work, I’ll start mapping out “Who’s Who in the Zoo” and what the strengths are, especially if we get back to work in the office. You sit there and keep going. You wonder what does that person do? And from other takes, you have the nerve to go introduce yourself. Well, somebody does that for you and find out what do they do, what they know. You know that if you can’t make it out, that is the same as it doesn’t exist.

Jamie V. Parker: [00:16:19] Yeah, I love that idea of having people map out what they know after one month and then after six months. That’s fascinating.

Dr. Cynthia J. Young: [00:16:29] Well, it’s not difficult. Doesn’t take special software. You can do the Post-it notes or you can go if you want to get fancy and PowerPoint and do like an alternate in your own team. What does your team do with your strengths?
And there is one other thing that a company can do is capture knowledge, skills and abilities. You know, you can have a database or you can just have people responsible for certain aspects.
OK, say you’re manufacturing your quality, you’re manufacturing, you’re the shop floor. You’re all by the way, this is general staff. You know what all those people know and what do they do and how they interact. If you can map that out, then you you’re pretty good. But if one person doesn’t know what the other person’s doing, they’re not able to do their full job.

Jamie V. Parker: [00:17:18] While there’s a lot of stuff going on and a lot of stuff we need for comprehensive knowledge management, it sounds like it’s not necessarily something that is difficult to get started with or that I’m going to have to go into procurement and figure out a new budget allocation and all of that.

Dr. Cynthia J. Young: [00:17:40] No. Knowledge management does have to cost anything except a little bit of time as people dedicate themselves to wanting to make things better. So you don’t have a person assigned to it, but usually it’s better to have a leader. Yeah, if you have a director of knowledge management, sometimes if it’s a collaborative duty, it doesn’t work out well. Meaning like if you have a VP that are in charge of this, but then they pass it down to somebody else to run and they don’t really know what’s going on. That’s not going to help because you need somebody up near the C-Suite to be able to get back to the C-Suite to let them know how well it’s going and maybe to get the C-Suite to weigh in.
Because it’s not just up. It’s not just the upper team that has to know how to manage knowledge, it’s everybody. And when you go into a hospital, the first thing you do is you talk to reception. They need to know what’s going on. You know, especially when we come in, check, check in. And they need to know, OK, well, I’m going to call this desk and I know what that does because my hand simple stuff. But with covid, I don’t know what’s going to be there.

Jamie V. Parker:[00:18:43] Anything you think we talked a little bit about, you know, like kind of what it is and these four components and we talked about how important it is, which I mean, I love that you brought up that it’s not just an organizational thing because I think I’ve considered it more of that at the organization level I hadn’t really thought about. Well, but what does that mean for the operations manager that’s out there within their group? Right. So, yeah, right. So even if it’s like, hey, my organization isn’t doing that, but you can write within your you can do it, it sounds like.

Dr. Cynthia J. Young: [00:19:16] And eventually you’ll be able to, you know, as you look at promotions because people look at everybody how well they get along with their team. They know what they share, what they know and they mentor. You know, mentoring and knowledge management really do go hand in hand. I have had a great mentor at my last company and part of us because we both came from similar backgrounds. It’s a very good thing to have as having a mentor. And you have people that share. And even if they’re not mentors, even if they’re just coworkers, you see five days a week or even nowadays one day a week or two weeks, it just makes life easier. Yeah. You don’t think of me as selfish in that they’re going to not help you right then.

Jamie V. Parker: [00:20:00] Yeah, and I love this idea you talked about, too, of making this part of your culture that we’re a sharing culture we’re a knowledge sharing culture. We don’t hoard it. And when we do that, how much that can help with a strategy where you talked about this is really integrated. Any of your strategic goals are going to require this.

Dr. Cynthia J. Young: [00:20:19] Yeah, yeah. There’s a study there’s actually a couple of studies, but there’s a study a couple of years ago that. I think Gallup did it, and they said that organizations have forty seven million dollars more money than somebody else at the end of the year when their people share. And there’s also the other study says that people spend eight hours looking for information or looking for knowledge that somebody else has. That’s a whole workday.

Jamie V. Parker: [00:20:50] That would be so interesting for you listeners out there. Think about that. If you want your one next step from this episode, that’s it.
Go in and assess: how much time do folks on your team or do you yourself spend looking for information and knowledge that somebody else has somebody else, the organization has it and you’re having to go and look for it. And how much time are we spending doing that?

Dr. Cynthia J. Young: [00:21:16] Yeah, I mean. I mean, yeah, you always have a few times where you’re like, I don’t know who does this, but, you know, it’s a lot less time to look at that person or find out who the person does. That is the kind of go find stuff. And then frustrated when you tell somebody I just spent all day looking for this. Well, I knew where that was. Nothing can irritate you more than finding out somebody could have saved you so much time. You could have gotten so much further down your project.

Jamie V. Parker: [00:21:42] Absolutely awesome. Well, anything as we wrap up anything that you feel like we missed that we need to make sure we pull out for today.

Dr. Cynthia J. Young: [00:21:51] I just want people to realize that knowledge doesn’t have to be hard, that it makes things better, it makes things easier, makes things more pleasant to work. And if you share knowledge, you’re going to be seen more as a team player. And if you don’t, you’re not going to get far by hoarding it.

Jamie V. Parker: [00:22:11] Fantastic, I love it, and so what’s the best way for folks to either learn more and connect with you, Cindy?

Dr. Cynthia J. Young: [00:22:18] Ok, well I have a website https://www.cjyoungconsulting.com/ or they can email me at cjyoung@cjyoungconsulting.com or they can reach me on LinkedIn. I’m Dr. Cindy Young on LinkedIn.

Jamie V. Parker: [00:22:31] All right, fantastic. So remember folks, we’re going to put those in the show notes so you can get those links or head over to those web locations and LinkedIn to connect. Cindy, it was so fantastic having you on today. I loved how you made this really approachable. Sometimes I just feel like some of these times we have these concepts that feel like they’re super formal and this really just brought it home.

Wherever you are an organization, whatever you’re doing, you can make this a reality.
Everybody can do it.
Everybody can show up and say, how can I make sure that information is getting shared and that knowledge is getting transferred.

Dr. Cynthia J. Young: [00:23:16] Well, thank you, Jamie. I appreciate it.

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I told you that you were going to hear about how knowledge management is really directly related for you as an individual and as a manager, as an executive. Doesn’t matter where you are in the organization.

You heard your next step already.
This was really inspired by Cindy’s conversation.

Your one next step is to think about how much time you or the people on your team, how much time do you spend looking for information, knowledge or resources that someone else has or knows where they are.

Reflect on that one, make a note and see if you want to do anything about it.

Don’t forget, you can find links to all of the resources that were discussed today, as well as to connect with Cindy at our show notes. So just go to https://processplusresults.com/podcast/

Until next time.