Knowledge management involves all the processes of an organization since it enables different initiatives across the entire value chain. Adequate knowledge management can result in new products, services, savings, achievements, alliances, and countless possibilities that enable the achievement of the business project.

However, if we ask ourselves, who enables it? And where is knowledge located? The answer is “in people,” people who are immersed in an organizational culture and whose work is being guided by leaders who must be convinced of the importance of identifying the key process knowledge and connecting it with the organization’s strategy.

Leaders who, with conviction and appropriate tools, mobilize their team towards the appropriation of practices for preservation, creation, transfer, and socialization.

In this sense, it is important that all knowledge management initiatives be deeply addressed from a human perspective, generating actions in conjunction with human talent processes and organizational culture, aimed at developing behaviors in leaders to favor this practice, since they are the ones who have first-hand knowledge of their people, potential, trajectory, and projects.

Next, we want to present six actions that become best practices for both leaders and human talent areas to accompany people, work teams, and the organization in aligning purposes for knowledge management.

  • Recognize the importance of knowledge management as a mobilizer of the organization’s strategy:

Knowledge is the asset that will convert everything people know from their experiences, training, experiences, relationships, among others, into products, services, process improvements, to generate competitive advantage, thus activating strategic initiatives, counting on its best talent to materialize it.

  • Identify the critical knowledge of the organization and promote actions to preserve it:

The leader must be able to read his environment based mainly on strategy, organizational capabilities, and critical knowledge for the organization. He must be able to identify that knowledge that is difficult to find in the market, which is key to the development of his mission and materialization of his purpose, identify tacit knowledge: that which is difficult to codify in documents.

Questions such as: Where is it? Which process has it? Who has it? What is the impact of its loss? How much does it cost to get it back? Is it critical to business continuity? How much dependence is there on this knowledge for process development?

  • Understand each person’s interests: What motivates them? How do they project themselves? How do they want to be recognized?

Each person on a work team is different. The leader must be able to identify those things that motivate them, that they like, what connects them with the purpose beyond the job profile or role they are performing. Identify what they want to learn and what they are willing to teach the organization and their colleagues and thus “personalize their experience” to capitalize on knowledge for mutual benefit.

Personalize challenges, design succession and career plans that allow that person to project themselves and assume new positions, enable their participation in innovation and development teams, encourage their continuous learning so that that knowledge is scalable and possibly applicable in other processes, organizations, and/or sectors.

  • Mobilize your team’s development based on learning for productivity and results achievement:

The power of singularity generates great benefits when working in a team. When the leader knows the particularity of his people, he has the possibility of relying on the strengths of each one to carry out his process’s projects and initiatives, creating and transferring knowledge from different experiences, enabling collaborative work, and reaching the final result with more certainty.

Facilitate an environment that enables co-creation:

Knowledge management and innovation by conviction, coherence, and not by fashion.

If the organization has decided to capitalize on its knowledge and start managing it to generate competitive advantage and assume new positions in the market, it is necessary to create spaces that allow for it: adopting new ways of working, methodologies, tools… And showing genuine interest in what is being developed there.

These spaces must be given importance and seriousness, and we must bet that the future of the organization can be brewing there.

Ensuring the transfer of knowledge and lessons learned:

The leader must ensure practices that do not concentrate knowledge in one person, especially if it is critical knowledge. Knowledge must be made accessible to everyone, or at least to those who can use it, since organizations are dynamic and must use it at some point to launch other initiatives, identify risks, mitigate impacts, generate market strategies, make temporary or permanent replacements, grow, expand, and continue creating milestones in their history.

The 21st century is synonymous with knowledge, and the challenge is to permeate it throughout the organization from leadership, including motivating, believing in people, planning actions for knowledge management articulated with the organizational culture, and having a shared vision of the strategy, generating value from what its members know, and thus ensuring a leading position in the market and fulfilling the corporate purpose.