Fork 4 | Knowledge Work - What everybody is missing and how it sabotages progress in Organizations

Today and the next few forks, I will talk about

• why your and others skill level in knowledge work matters in big organizations
• how to frame knowledge work levels generically on a pyramid based on an emergent pattern and
• finally, deconstructing the most important layers in detail so you can benefit from my experience

TL;DR for Managers

In the first part, I am summarizing why it is important to understand that knowledge work - defined as functions who perform their work based on the accumulated knowledge and experience - needs to be dissected into more sophisticated levels of skills. The two examples I give, in order to frame the problems faced by ignoring this requirement, are

1. Big company-wide programs like "Digital Transformations"
2. Idols in Consulting or Managers who are not living what they preach

As a lot of people nowadays have never mastered the basic skills (or Essentials as I call them), they face big frictions when getting involved with a new tool/methodology. The knowledge worker's idols, on the other hand, are a reason why people don't think it is necessary to evolve past a certain point. This is a false interpretation as they might not see the ones who did evolve and are now more advanced than their idols.

After drawing the baseline of the problem, I move on to explain that a generic framework to "measure" knowledge skill level does not seem available at the moment. Therefore, I tried to draw a basic framework myself which I will reveal in the next episode.

The final part is about why you should engage with this content, no matter if you are a Young Professional, a team lead or a Manager. It gives you the benefits if you adopt some of the skills/habits I am presenting but also the benefits of being able to evaluate others and which skill level they are on.

Why is this topic important for leading functions?

It is a matter of work hygiene. Imagine people don't respond to meeting invitations so you don't know if somebody will join or not. Imagine somebody not responding to very urgent emails (like escalations) because they don't have their inbox in check. Or imagine not being able to open a crucial document because your colleague has saved it on his private drive without sharing it but left for vacation. It is frustrating, decreases productivity and in the worst cases it can even block progress. If you are involved in a client-based business like consulting, it might lead to complaints or even requests to replace somebody.

Why do people have different entitlements regarding these things? Well, companies and their Managers lost a lot of people long ago on their way through the digitization. It was considered normal that people would adapt to the new tools, communication channels and everything else that has changed within the last 20-30 years without regularly going back to the basics. Nevertheless, I am not here to detail the problem in its entirety. Fact is: These experiences are a reality in every knowledge worker's life. Of course, capturing the problem is not sufficient. Hence, one possible solution for it is the goal of this mini-series thinking bottom-up instead of top-down.

To emphasize the realization of the lack of skills of many people in knowledge working functions, I would like to give two examples of missing "the point" when tackling the progress of an organization towards "new ways of working" or I like to call them: Better ways of working (very creative, I know^^).

Problem Area 1: Big Programs like Digital Transformations - Ignoring the fundamentals

I have big issues with talks about trending major programs like digital transformations, as it implies that an organization and therefore the people involved in it need some kind of external pressure to change according to the "rules of the newly defined way of working". In my experience, these programs include a reorganization, usually with new tools combined with new (but old) methodologies (e.g. agile) as well as a brief training related to those novelties. The management expects to encounter resistance from employees and therefore engages a high-level change management to take their teams along. Completely thought top-down.

Then, these so-called "experts" (change managers) make a "Change Plan", add fancy events like "roadshows", share marketing materials - which nobody cares about - and other stuff to frame the to-be as more exciting than the as-is, wasting a lot of money. But in the end, you have somebody to blame if it does not work out as planned, right?

In my opinion, the thing that mostly gets forgotten is the first rule of sales: If you want to sell somebody something, show them how they profit or benefit from the new product/service. Also, the second rule of selling - if you want to sell again - "Only sell things which make sense to the buyer." gets ignored. And don't fool yourself: You are selling something.

By the way, the first rule of sales ought to be the first principle in mind when you write an email, create a presentation, build a reporting, negotiate an employee's (or your own) compensation: Put yourself in the other person's shoes, communicate with their language, have a logical structure they can follow and sell the point that

• you want to make or
• as an intermediary function, your client wants to make.

It may sound obvious but it is a very hard exercise because it requires the consumable manifestation of your thoughts.

But I digress. The point I am making is that if you want to bring your teams to new (or higher) levels of productivity, you first need to define the fundamentals they need to know in order to build on them. As a matter of fact, contrary to the popular belief that skills are independent from each other, especially ways of working in collaboration are following an emergent pattern which means: If you've never been proficient in the basics, it becomes very hard to adapt to the next level. Each level emerges from the one below it, either extending or abstracting the same core principles. Each level also makes use of the time and attention freed up by the level below.

Problem Area 2: Managers, Consultants or Project Managers - The (false) Idols

The second big problem I have is a mix of choosing an idol for the wrong reasons and people trying to preach things they themselves are not adopting. This is why I get very skeptical if I see a knowledge worker like a consultant or a project manager (at least, that is what they call themselves) checking some of the following boxes:

• The person has more than 100 unread emails in their inbox (except after a vacation obviously)
• the person does not take notes when new to a topic or acting as a task manager (tracking people's actions)
• the person does not write clear meeting headlines incl. a short summary of the planned agenda
• the person does not do introductions at the beginning of a meeting with an explicit goal formulated (except for regular meetings like a jour fixe)
• the person asks very generic questions
• the person is not an Expert and says "This is not my scope" instead of helping you to find the right person to address your point to
• the person mentions buzzwords like "agile" or "Scrum" but does not get the core ideas behind the concept
• the person talks about or even worse pushes responsibilities to unspecific groups instead of concrete people (i. e. business, IT, infrastructure, security)

To be clear: There are people who are so good at their job (like my current Product Manager, several architects or even my best friend I work with ✌🏼), they don't necessarily need all the stuff I am writing about here. But

1. There are so few of them that I would rather consider myself not one of them.
2. Or they are more Experts than Interfaces (what the difference is, comes later)

Yeah yeah, of course I don't judge a book by its cover and immediately think: "This person has unread emails, that person does not take notes. Therefore, they are incompetent." I just gave a few heuristics to look for in others but also yourself to differentiate the right from the wrong idols. In reality, it is more like fifty shades of gray.

Coming back to the first point, seeing somebody as an idol for the wrong reasons, I intend to say that characteristics like knowledge, specificity, results, clarity or orderliness are more important than bravado and extraversion. And to finish this point: As somebody who regularly suffers from Imposter Syndrome, I am letting myself blind very easily by other people's fake bravado. So don't worry if it takes some time for you to discover these fakers 'til they makers.

The Solution - A framework which offers a roadmap to improve your knowledge work skills

Obvious, I know. But as obvious as it may sound, I have not seen a well-developed framework - neither in a company nor from a service provider - that contains the building blocks to give every knowledge worker a simple (not easy) roadmap to master at least the "Essentials" as I like to call them. "Why is that?" you may ask. Well, I believe that it is because of three main reasons:

1. ALL people (incl. myself) have become headline readers instead of engaging with content deeply.
2. This led to knowledge workers (formerly known as white collars) to become arrogant and ignorant, thinking "I don't need to improve. I am already there."
3. Let's talk facts: It is boring to learn the fundamentals which is why both former reasons trump the motivation to engage as well as acting as reasons to say: "I don't have time for this."

So, what would be the benefits if we would engage more with basic strategies on how to organize our work?

Why you should engage with it as a professional (especially with less than 5 years of work experience)

Well, if you would engage with the concepts I will present to you, I promise you that you will run circles around your managers, colleagues, clients, peers, acquaintances, etc.. By that, I mean that you might become better than them at every aspect of your areas of responsibilities. I admit, especially charisma and self-confidence are very hard to learn and might not be specifically targeted by my framework. Nevertheless, those characteristics will improve when you are a beast and everybody knows it.

As a consequence, you will get a lot of attention. They will give you direct or indirect feedback by asking you:

• "Which tools do you use?"
• "What methods do you use?"
• "How do you remember all the stuff?"
• "How do you respond so fast?"
• "On how many topics are you working on?"

Finally, you will be able to achieve that without constantly working more than the others. Instead, you need

• to take 3-5 days in December during your Christmas vacation, set everything up,
• invest another 4-6 weeks starting in January to adapt the habits

and that's it. You will have acquired 80 % of the skills needed to get a competitive advantage.

The last thing I want to argue is more a warning: There is somebody at this moment who adapts these concepts resulting in them outperforming you. Period.

Why you should engage with it as a manager

Although most of the arguments as an individual might not be relevant to you - as you are already more advanced in your career - you will benefit undoubtedly from some of the concepts I am sharing with you:

1. Assess your team according to their skill level and advise them to work on some of their weaknesses
2. Assuming, you use some of it yourself, your stress level will decrease undoubtedly as you will be able to control everything accordingly
3. If you adapt the concepts more and more with all (most) of your team, your team will rule

The first advantage is important because team members, who don't adapt the basic concepts of (digital) knowledge work, are annoying other team members. Especially, if you regularly welcome young professionals to your team, you should make an assessment in the background.

CUT The generic functions you can obtain in modern organizations

In addition, you can think about what kind of career you want to follow through. Mostly, I would say that there are four different kinds of people needed in a modern organization:

• The Operations (producing a product/service which creates value internal or external customers are willing to pay for)
• The (real) Experts within specific fields (first and foremost engineers, technicians, etc.)
• The Managers (strategizing, decision-making & developing their teams)
• The Interfaces (people who act as interfaces between all the above)

That's it.

Be honest: How many times have you encountered people in projects/processes about whom you wondered: "What is actually their scope?" How many times have you met people who are just there because nobody knows what to do with them? To quote Nicholas Murray Butler, former president of Columbia University in New York, delivering a speech on Charter Day at the University of California in 1931:

"There are the few who make things happen, the many more who watch things happen, and the overwhelming majority who have no notion of what happens."

I will explain in another short series, I will break down why I sincerely believe that only these four functions are necessary to run a complex organization.