Nigel Bristow - Targeted Learning: Managing knowledge workers

Steve

Hi, this is Steve Hunt with People Performance Radio. This week we spoke with Nigel Bristow, who’s the president and founder of Targeted Learning, and who has over 20 years of experience working with knowledge workers and knowledge management, and how to really maximize the productivity of knowledge workers, and Nigel shares with us a really interesting model, a very powerful model, for thinking about knowledge work, in terms of the differences between acquiring knowledge, applying knowledge, creating knowledge, sharing knowledge, and leveraging knowledge. It’s fascinating, if you consider yourself a knowledge worker, or you manage knowledge workers, there is definitely something in this podcast interview that will help you in terms of making your own performance more productive, which is what it’s all about here at People Performance Radio. So let’s listen to Nigel Bristow.

Hi, this is Steve Hunt with People Performance Radio. Today we’re talking with Nigel Bristow, who’s the president and founder of Targeted Learning, and Nigel has been working in the area of maximizing the productivity of knowledge workers for more than 20 years, he’s worked with major companies like 3M, Boeing, Exxon Mobil, Fidelity, and a long long list of different companies that really have succeeded through being more innovative than their competitors, out-thinking other people in the market in moving forward, so Nigel, thank you very much for appearing on People Performance Radio.

Nigel

It’s my pleasure, Steve.

Steve

So Nigel, when you talk about knowledge workers, can you talk a little bit about, what do you mean by “knowledge worker”, and what makes them different from other employees?

Nigel

Knowledge workers are essentially people who have to exercise discretion in carrying out their responsibilities, so it's easy to see the difference between a manual worker who is purely following procedures, doesn’t have to exercise any discretion, versus those who do have discretion, and that would include supervisors, it would include engineers, it would include graphic designers. It doesn’t necessarily mean the person has to have a professional education, it simply means they have to exercise discretion in their work, which could include janitors as much as engineers.

Steve

So it sounds like the key thing is, these are people who part of their job is to tell the company what the company should be doing, rather than having the company tell them what they should be doing?

Nigel

That would definitely define a significant part of their role.

Steve

So what is it when you look at working with knowledge workers, how is talent management for knowledge workers different from talent management for, I don’t know what we’d call the other kind of worker, I don’t know if you have a term for non-knowledge workers – what would they be called?

Nigel

Well, the truth is, the complexity of the workplace has increased so much over the last few decades, that it’s really hard to find anyone who doesn’t have the potential to be a knowledge worker. Now, you certainly do have people who don’t perform as knowledge workers, either through their own choice, limitations they place upon themselves, or because of the limitations that over-controlling managers perhaps place on them, or a corporate culture that doesn’t value input from others, so the reality is most people today, if not all people in corporations, should at least be treated as knowledge workers.

In the information economy, knowledge has been described as the only source of sustainable competitive advantage, and knowledge workers are really the primary source of knowledge in organizations.

Steve

So one of the things when you talk about knowledge workers, which we often talk, and we’re talking maybe the most extreme version, where people have a very strong identity to their profession, so for example, I am an industrial organizational psychologist and an employee of SuccessFactors, but my professional identity is very much around being an industrial organizational psychologist, and I invest a lot to maintain my knowledge, stay abreast of innovations in this field, and so forth, and I think that’s true for engineers, the really good engineers, research scientists, I think what people traditionally think of knowledge workers.

When you look at that group of people, what is it, if you’re a company that employs all these people that are heavily invested in staying really on the cutting edge of their area of expertise, what is it that’s key to managing those people, keeping them engaged and productive?

Nigel

Well, if I could take a step back, and talk a little about what makes those kinds of knowledge workers unique, and then we’ll talk about how to manage them. As we’ve researched what knowledge workers actually do, we’ve identified that there are five different roles that knowledge workers perform in organizations, or at least potentially five different roles.

The first two of the roles are not very good at differentiating the top performers, and most people at some time learn to perform in those first two roles, so the first two roles are acquiring knowledge, and applying knowledge, so people in that first role of acquiring knowledge are focused on accessing and using the existing knowledge of the organization to complete their assigned work. They acquire this knowledge in order to make effective decisions and take appropriate action within their roles, but they remain primarily dependent on others and have to defer their decisions about their work to others.

When knowledge workers get to stage two, or the second role that we refer to as "applying knowledge", they have learned to use the knowledge of the firm independently, to independently plan and complete their work, they don’t have to defer decisions about their work to others, but in those first two stages, people are largely dependent on knowledge from others, knowledge from others in the organization, knowledge from others outside of the organization, and the vast majority of knowledge workers and the job descriptions of knowledge workers tend to peg them in those two roles.

The three roles that we found that really differentiate the top performers are creating knowledge, sharing knowledge and leveraging knowledge, so let me talk about each of these in turn. When it comes to creating knowledge, anyone in this particular role is identifying gaps in the organization’s current knowledge base and practices. They go out and they look for new ways to address old challenges, or they create new knowledge to address new challenges. They find alternative ways to solve previously unsolved problems, or alternative ways to complete their work more effectively. They invent new, or potential new, products, work processes, tools, technology and so forth, but the focus of those knowledge workers who are creating knowledge is more around their own domain and their own work, and making themselves more effective.

The fourth role, sharing knowledge, has the knowledge worker sharing their expertise and experience with others. They no longer are trying to differentiate themselves by producing more at their workbench or at their terminal than anyone else with a similar job description, they start to step back and ask themselves, "How do I enhance the productive capacity of my team?", and so they help others acquire and apply knowledge, they share information, they ensure that the work of the group is integrated so that the value of the whole exceeds the sum of its parts. The first three stages, people are focused on themselves, or in the first three roles, people are focused on themselves and their own productivity; in the fourth role, sharing knowledge, they focus on the productivity of their team or the wider work group.

Then the fifth role, leverage knowledge, has people focusing on the productive capacity of the larger organization. They now have an impact by crossing organizational boundaries to influence the practices of the organization, so they may influence decisions that define what the organization does, or how the organization does its work, or how it competes in the marketplace, so people in this role try to make knowledge more widely accessible to others in the organization by transforming the knowledge in their heads, or the knowledge in other people’s heads, into expert systems, structures, processes, policies, and so on.

So those are the five stages, or rather, those are the five roles that knowledge workers can perform, and the most successful ones are those that learn how to go beyond the first of those two roles.

Steve

I think that's key to the first two, because I look at this, and I was jotting this down as you’re talking, it's almost like you go from learning to doing, and then there's innovating, teaching and influencing, is the way that I was thinking about it when you were talking about it, but I think when you get to those top three roles, it's not like somebody who is at that role, the fifth role, influencing, is necessarily more effective for an organization that somebody who's good at innovating, there's certainly a lot of companies that have highly effective knowledge workers who really would be, they're very independent, they really would be terrible managers.

Nigel

Yes, that’s definitely one of the implications of the research we’ve done, and the model. A lot of managers or organizations make the mistake of looking at their technical population, identifying those who have been most effective in acquiring, applying or creating knowledge, and then promoting them into supervision as a result of that judgment that they’ve shown in the past, and the talents that it takes to share knowledge and leverage knowledge, and the skills that it requires, are very different from the skills required in those other stages, and so the saying goes, “We promoted a great engineer and got a lousy manager in that person’s place”, and so promotion should not be given as rewards to people who have performed the first three roles exceptionally well. Rather, promotion should be reserved for those technical professionals who have already shown, through their own initiative and so on, that they have both an interest and a capacity to do the sharing and leveraging work of the organization. If those are the technical professionals we promote, we really set them up for success, and so it’s not the best technical professional who should get promoted, but the one who, in completing their professional work well, has demonstrated the potential to teach and lead others.

Steve

So you’re really talking about, when you say promotion or promotion of management roles, I’m assuming that there would be certain value in some companies of maybe promoting somebody at the, creating knowledge, they may be promoted to, like I think IBM has, engineering fellows, or something like, they’re very senior individual contributor positions, but they’re intentionally a track that doesn’t necessarily involve managing other people. Do you think there should be those two tracks?

Nigel

That’s correct, absolutely, there should be those two tracks, and I think organizations today are doing a little better at finding a way to reward their technical professionals who don’t have the desire or the talent to be successful on the management track, and so creating a technical fellowship is a very effective way to do that, and one of the things that I’ve noticed as I’ve studied organizations that have this technical track is, almost always, even though they may not have worked with us and so don’t have the language of these five different roles, when you really look at what it takes to get into the technical fellowship and then become, say, a senior technical fellow at Boeing, that sharing and leveraging knowledge is a pre-requisite to getting into those top technical roles.

Steve

So, when you look at these, focusing on these different roles, do you think these are things they’d be trained, do people get stuck at the doing phase and they’re never going to get to the creating phase, or do you have people at the creating phase? Can you teach people how to be more effective, or is it one of these things where it’s like, you were born to be by yourself in a lab? We never want to put you in front of people!

Nigel

Right, that’s a great question, and certainly we’ve come across a lot of people who I refer to as “maze bright”, they simply intuitively understand what makes organizations competitive, and how to grow into these different roles without waiting for someone to give it to them in their job description, or without waiting for a promotion. However, there are a lot of very smart technical people who unfortunately, because of early conditioning in the organization, come to assume that their only role is to acquire and apply knowledge, and then some of them possibly create knowledge, and I’ve seen a lot of evidence sometimes, working with technical professionals, is once you lay out this road map that is independent of their job description, all of a sudden they say, “Oh, I can do that, I just didn’t know it was expected”, and so we take a lid off their development by giving them a full picture of how they can potentially contribute without having to become a manager.

Now, clearly there are some talents that are going to be involved as well as some skills, and so unfortunately there are a lot of people who do tend to plateau at the applying knowledge, and they go no further, and sometimes it’s talent, sometimes it’s just conditioning by the organization, and so if you think about that second role, applying knowledge, basically the way you become successful in that role is you learn how the organization does its work, you learn the rules of the game, and then you learn how to play the game by those rules.

The problem is, once you’re creating knowledge, you’ve got to start questioning the rules that actually made you successful in the first place, and that’s a very difficult thing, some people don’t know how to do it, or some people feel that that’s more risk than they’re willing to take, and so they get stuck, and so it’s not that people couldn’t potentially move into creating knowledge, but given the way a lot of organizations work, they get conditioned in such a way that, without some help, some prodding and encouragement, they might never get there.

Now, there are some people who aren’t good at divergent thinking, and no amount of training is going to get them creating knowledge. For me, the tragedy is that there are tons of people who have that potential, and that potential’s never realized, because they have become boxed in by their job descriptions, which often focus on those earlier stages.

Now, sharing knowledge, I think, and I have evidence, that that’s easier to do than creating knowledge, it requires some skills that I don’t believe are very difficult for people to learn; obviously, some people will become great at it, and some people will be OK, but I believe that almost every technical professional has at least the aptitude to become reasonably proficient at sharing knowledge.

The leveraging knowledge, though, does require some things that are hard to teach, and things like dealing with ambiguity, influence without authority, and certainly there are some things we can teach to help people along, but when it comes to that fifth role of leveraging knowledge, the shift from, this is a skill that can be learned, to this is some innate talent, or something that the person has evolved to over a long period of time, I think the balance shifts to, this is perhaps the most difficult role for people to learn, and hence a role that most technical professionals will never really reach, and it’s OK that they don’t reach that. What our research says, that as long as you move beyond those first two roles and start either creating or sharing or leveraging knowledge, you’re going to be seen as highly employable and highly valued in the organization. It’s only those people who get stuck in the first two stages that start to experience significant career problems after mid-career.

Steve

I see, well I have a question on again these three stages, and I’m sure anybody who’s worked with high-performing knowledge workers has probably experienced it at some point, if he does for a long time, is having that classic, very good person at creating knowledge, who just has no tolerance, patience, personality for the sharing and learning, if you’re too dumb for me to teach and if you’re too stupid to recognize the brilliance of my ideas, I don’t want to play the politics, I always say, “I don’t like politics”, and say these sort of typical things, these people are idiots, and I don’t want to be political. Is there something you can do as a manager to help that poor manager saying, “You’ve got all these brilliant ideas, you could be so much more impactful if you’d learn to “play the game” a little bit better, play nice with others? Have you dealt with that? I have to think to have, and what advice do you give that manager?

Nigel

Absolutely, I have come across that, and I think those people are very difficult to get to change their ways, and I think managers should at least try help people understand the consequences of their choices, if you choose not to exercise some patience, and adapt your message to the needs of this audience or that manager, you’re going to be less effective, and that’s going to get in the way of you achieving some of your career goals, and having the kind of impact that you want. That being said, after a little bit of encouragement, a little bit of perhaps training, if the person still drags their heels, and for whatever reason chooses not to, the manager has a choice to make, and I have a bias about that. I think people who are creating knowledge are so valuable that, if you’re encouraging doesn’t, and some support, doesn’t get them moving beyond that, then it’s in your interest and the organization’s interest to find some other person who can work with that person and become the mouthpiece of that person, always making sure that the credit is shared, etc, that the person creating knowledge doesn’t get cut out of the recognition loop, but the reality is, if you look at some great organizations, Hewlett Packard and Microsoft, you get sometimes the technical genius that tends to be a little more reserved, or take Apple Computer for that matter, and then of course you get the other, who’s the more outgoing, political savvy person, and so I believe we have teams for a reason, and that is because people have different talents, that’s why the Wozniak of the world isn’t as well known as the Steve Jobs, but initially Wozniak was critical to the founding of Apple, Steve Jobs was the outside person, the spokesperson, Wozniak more the technical type, and so I think managers are smart if they recognize sometimes that that one person’s never going to be able to play all of those roles, so let’s try and help them partner with someone who can take that knowledge and share it more broadly in the organization.

Steve

So, just to summarize, because I’m sensitive to the time, but really the key thing I think that’s fascinating is saying, as you’re looking at knowledge workers, one, saying that you’ve got to get past the acquiring and applying stage, or that’s really a plateau stage, and then when you get past that, there’s these three different stages of creating, sharing and leveraging, that you don’t necessarily have to play all three of them, but if you don’t play one of them, recognize the limitations it will have on your career, or if you’re managing people, recognize to be an effective knowledge organization, all of these roles have to be played by someone, but everyone doesn’t have to play all of these roles.

Nigel

That’s a good summary.

Steve

Is that a good summary? Well Nigel, thank you so much for appearing on People Performance Radio. Just before we leave, I’m wondering if you have any last comments you’d like to share with our listening audience, and also I have to ask, because I know you’ve written books before, have you written a book on this topic?

Nigel

I have written a couple of books, one targeted more to the individual and how to manage their career more effectively, and we call the book “Beyond Job Satisfaction”, and then I’ve written a book more for leaders of organizations called “Building Communities of Learning”. Both of these books have the research in them, as well as the models etc, and the stages model, or the contribution continuum model, as I call it, is in both of those, as just one of the tools that we use to manage our employees more effectively and make our organizations more competitive.

Steve

We’ll definitely put links to those books on the podcast website, and any last thoughts for our listening audience before we sign off?

Nigel

Well, I think for managers, what the model provides is a blueprint for how we grow our knowledge workers, and how we can grow them within the same job, rather than having them wait until they get the next promotion as a way to stimulate new growth and new challenges, with the stages model we can keep people growing in the same job, even a janitor can be sharing knowledge with other janitors, or questioning and perhaps influencing some of the common practices across a property management company.

For individual contributors, the power of the five roles is to give them a blueprint for their growth, so that they can manage their growth independent of the hierarchy; you don’t have to wait for someone to move you to a new job, give you a new assignment, or promote you, in order to grow. If you’ve got to the applying knowledge stage and it took you two years to get there and you’re starting to feel a little bit bored, you don’t have to don’t have to say, well, what am I going to do next? – in terms of a new job, you can look at your current job and say, “OK, what are the opportunities for me to create, share knowledge?”, and basically what that does is it empowers you to control your own destiny, rather than waiting for someone else to open the door of a new opportunity which then gives you the growth spurt that you need to add more value. You can do it independent of the hierarchy.

So thanks very much Steve, this has been a great conversation, I appreciate the opportunity.

Steve

Absolutely Nigel, and I like that final end, that we all are knowledge workers in reality, and we all have the potential to be much more effective ones, and the model that you shared really helps people re-think about their job in terms of, am I really taking full utilization of the knowledge that I have to offer, so great ideas, thank you Nigel, and thanks for appearing on People Performance Radio.

Jim

My pleasure, thanks Steve, bye.

Speaker

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