Is it truly the most popular dish?
Or just the one everyone in the kitchen knows the recipe to? Is information truly powerful? Is hoarding it the answer?
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For our readers
Politicians often campaign on issues that a vast majority of people want solved. Yet year after year, nothing gets fixed. Why?
My theory; if the issue is fixed there won’t be anything to campaign on during the next election. It’s kind of like job security.
As an example; let’s look at immigration. For years the polling has shown that over 70% of the public agree on 2-things: Stronger borders, and that the immigrants already living here should have some pathway to citizenship.
Why haven’t the politicians resolved this?
They need votes from both sides of the aisle in order to get a bill passed. Power shifts back and forth from side to side every few years - each time promising a resolution. The ones fighting for passage this term, will be withholding their votes next term. The minority in reality is the one in power, they don’t want to give any credit to the majority. If the credit is given to the side that is in control, who will the people vote for next time?
They hoard the power. Fewer and fewer things get fixed year after year.
I’m not going to dive into the politics here, I like to use politicians as examples of how not to run a company. Hoarding an issue has become an art form in our government.
This issue hoarding is a lot like information hoarding.
Information is power
Whether it is on purpose or subconsciously, many people hold back information. They may feel that once this information is shared, the team may no longer need them. Thus, information is power - they alone are equipped to solve the problem.
This is not job security, it is the slow death of a company. If there is only one-person equipped to solve an issue at your company, the line is going to get long. Will your internal or external customer wait their turn, or will they go elsewhere?
How long will you wait in line?
Although fast food is never the answer to a problem, it is a great illustration. How many times have you pulled into a fast food parking lot only to see 10 or more cars in front of you in the drive thru lane? How many of you then pulled out and went to your 2nd choice? That may be happening when that one key employee is holding all the cards.
A hoarder could be a cost accountant who is tasked to calculate new product manufacturing costs, and he’s the only one with the magic formula. This could be delaying your product entering the market.
Or you may want to get more specialized product out the door and need more production tools. Your hoarder could be the engineer with the secret sauce and the only one in the company that knows how to design and commision that tool.
Are you in a service industry? It could the chef at your restaurant which may slow down your service of his special Gnocchi with Rita Sauce, your most profitable dish, because he doesn’t want to share the recipe. While you server is telling the patron, “it will be 30-minutes for a plate of Gnocchi, or 10-minutes for the Spaghetti.” Why the difference in time? Everyone in the kitchen knows how to make the Spaghetti.
We know how we act as an external customer. Unless choice number one is so superior, we often go to our 2nd choice because it is easier. There is less friction. Internally, when you have these long lines waiting for key information, the rest of your team many find a way around that has less friction. Your company may not be selling the best option for the end customer, just the one that had the shortest line.
Did you know that product still comes out the end of the line even when there is a red light flashing? You know the light that only one person knows how to turn off? Your team may be taking shortcuts and undermining quality.
Take a look at all of your internal and external processes. Where are the long lines? Do you see any log-jams in your organization? Any culprits on information sharing? Things not moving fast enough? What is slowing them down?
How to avoid or work-around the information hoarder
Once you find these culprits, how do you create an information sharing community and culture? Leading by example is a good first step. If you are a leader of a group or an organization, what information do you have that could be shared without security risks? Ask yourself a question, what am I the only person equipped to do? When you find out what it is, train someone else to do it immediately.
I once had a client where I urged the owner to share his financials with the employees. He had implemented a profit sharing plan in the past, but noone trusted it. He didn’t feel it was any incentive at all because people weren’t thrilled about it. Nor were they really improving profits which was his hope.
After the gentle nudging, we developed a monthly statement where he shared the revenue, costs, and extraordinary expenses to the entire team. They could see where they were on the path to profit sharing. Employees started to see how their decisions on shipping products overnight vs. 2nd day were impacting their potential payouts. The owner started receiving ideas on how to save money from the team. His bottom line inevitably improved along with his employees satisfaction and bank accounts.
Sharing information and ideas is not just a transfer of knowledge. It is an incubator for new ideas. Napoleon Hill discussed this phenomena in “Think and Grow Rich” while talking about masterminding, and I’m paraphrasing;
If I have apple, and you have an apple, and we exchange them, we still only have one apple. If we both have ideas and share them, we not only each have both ideas, but often a 3rd one is materialized when we combine them.
It pays to share.
Advertise those successes
As a salesperson over the years, I found one of the easiest ways to gain new business was to copy and paste ideas that were working for other team members. Some teams liked to hold on to this new idea because they didn’t want others to have success with THEIR idea.
Encourage new an innovative uses of your companies products or service and give credit to the originators, not just the ones who had more success with it.
Stand on the shoulders of those before you, right? For example, Team A found a new way to use a widget, their new customer bought 100,000 of them. Team B heard about this, went to a similar client in their region, and sold 1 Million of them … just because the 2nd team was lucky enough to have a bigger customer, it was the information sharing that helped create it in the first place. Team A deserves as much recognition as Team B.
There are many ways to foster this culture. But it starts with you. As a manager or leader, you want to be replaced in the future. How else do you move up?
Having troubles recognizing these choke points? Give us a call at the Kole Performance Group. We will share with you our techniques.