Go to guys. Those nerdy, knowledge hungry guys in every organisation to whom one turns for help or support. Because they can be relied upon to solve any issue.
What are the incentives of becoming the go-to-guy?
- Colleagues & bosses seek their advice because it gets things done.
- They are indispensable at work because they know what others don’t.
- They are not sought for their wit or charisma but for the good old fashioned virtue of hard work and taking the initiative to know more.
How to become the go-to-guy?
- Volunteer for extra work. Doing a task is the only way to learn all about it.
- Keep good relationships with everyone to get easy access to experiential knowledge.
- Always strive for self-driven learning and going beyond your expected duties
In today’s parlance, go-to-guys are basically knowledge centres that can impact the team’s actionables, solutions and turnaround times. What if you could create a free-for-all and easy-access culture for everyone to become go-to-guys? Knowledge drives every other growth factor in today’s dynamic business environment – Collaboration, communication, project management and all such crucial factors.
Giving a level playing field for everyone to access knowledge and making an impact on the bottom line changes how knowledge is perceived and how it is nurtured. It nullifies the undue advantage that can start stacking up from things like overtime, overenthusiastic participation and goodwill from networking.
What are we saying then?
Knowledge management tools are your ticket to creating a go-to-guy culture in the organisation and a culture of self-driven learning. If intel from issue resolution, conversations, meetings and project experiences could be recalled in the form of knowledge capsules anytime and anywhere, the benefits would be the multi – fold.
- It would help anybody and everybody go-to-guys. A centralised knowledge hub that is searchable using hashtags/keywords would facilitate help and support whenever required.
- Finding a needle within a haystack is commendable. Finding solutions can be worse, especially if you don’t know how to. A knowledge sharing platform will solve this issue by offering the solution or the perspective of looking at the solution.
- Not only does a knowledge hub offer on-demand knowledge capsules, it also captures any brilliant project ideas & solutions through the discussion features. Commenting, liking and sharing will ensure there is engagement happening and the capture mechanism polishes the various ideas into clearly defined actionables.
- With so much happening in a knowledge management tool, it can only lead to collective growth. While some users collaborate actively, others watch the power of collaboration and gradually get attracted into the system.
- A knowledge management tool can be institutionalised but to be truly impactful means total acceptance of the tool in the cultural framework of any organisation. The scope for self-help creates that scope of acceptance and eventually smooth integration of a knowledge hub inside the organisation’s core processes.