The recent TIME featured ‘10 Ideas that are changing the world’, where Jeffrey writes about Great Social Transformation. The end of slavery, civil rights movements,end of colonial rule- all began with public awareness and engagement. The political leaders followed rathen than led. It was scientistics, engineers, religious groups and young people who truly led the way. According to him, if the public leads, politicians will surely follow.
It has been said that top management commitment is crucial for successful implementation of KM. Leadership as well as a good team can only drive KM in an organization. People only follow what the top leaders say. Yes, I agree with this. But can we ensure proper commitment and guidance from the top management all the time? Do the top management really value and understand the benefits and concepts of KM? Do they have enough time to spend in participating KM related activities? – The answers of these questions might be No. So, with a big ‘No’ from the top management ( say the politicans/decision makers), how do we implement KM?
Here is my thought-
Let’s get a group of young, enthusiatic staff in the organization. Talk to them. Tell them how KM can help their daily work. Give them some simple KM related task to do. Treat them as the KM Change Agents. Inspire them to use Blogs, wikis (provided the organization’s policy supports blogging) and achieve some quick wins. Youngs can be easily enthusisatic about any new initiatives. Use that spirit and bring some changes (even if it is little) into the day-to-day work practices. Top management will definitely stop by and give a look of what these young people are doing. And who knows, they might start following some of great initiatives taken by the young staffs.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Hulwana // Mar 21, 2008 at 12:23 am
Commitment and influence might not necessarily comes from the top management. I believed there are people who can influent but without having necessary prescribed power (as in their title) in any organization. Like for example experts power, people who can and had actually transformed and influenced certain top management to arrive at certain decisions based solely on their expertise and knowledge on certain subjects.
Somehow, I still believe that at this juncture, looking at the current cultural scenario in Asian countries, I think we still need both-management power and drive from the employees to make a project succeed.
There are certain trainings which we failed to get enough participants to join. We planned to approach people we know and coax them to join. Somehow, at the other end, a manager from a department requested that we conduct a training for her staff for a project that they are undertaking.
A mixture of both ways are worth to try.
2 Naguib // Mar 21, 2008 at 12:31 am
The point I wanted to make is- let us empower and rely on the youth. Let them drive the changes. I am not saying, ignore the top management. If you can get proper commitment from the top- its great! otherwise?- have an alternative plan. Work as an activist…excite people with your thoughts. You may have to work some extra hour for that, not a 8-5 daily schedule.
3 Chung // Mar 21, 2008 at 3:48 am
We cannot always put the blame on the culture we inherit and having right now. Things got to change. To be better, the only way is to change the mindset and the attitude towards learning. And, it is now.
In fact, young people that I have met, they are ready to challenge their skill to prove that they are the better change agent. They are more energetic and vibrant. Importantly, they are more flexible and easily adapt to new ideas. Old management style got to go, too. What managers need to do is to learn how to handle individual management and take care of their employees’ goals. And, {try to} invest in young’s ideas.
To assemble teams of young people to join us, we need to make them like a VIP. And yes, I agree with you, we will need to spend more time to educate our potential group members and making {many} contacts. Importantly, we need to make them to see our objective why we are doing it and to show them it’s a ROI for their own career development. Always, put themselves before us. We fail to attract people to join us, in workshop, etc, the problem lies in failing to show them the value of the activity. Eg. the workshop objectives are not aligned with what they want to know. If the strategy still not yielding any results, then we are not doing enough of our homework.
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