Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Kent Jonasen
Read between
February 28 - March 17, 2023
That a knowledge leader cannot create success on their own, but must succeed in getting others on board, must be a motivating factor in itself.
if you have a need to promote yourself and personally claim successes, then you will struggle in mobilizing people around you.
Naturally, knowledge leaders do not have to incite complexity and ambiguity themselves, but we need knowledge leaders not to be frustrated by the uncertainty that exists and to recognize it as a condition.
A knowledge leader thrives in and with ambiguity and enjoys making decisions under uncertainty.
Knowledge leaders depend on relationships. They need other people to buy in to their agendas and dedicate time to their priorities.
There is no one to address something two to three years into the future if you, as an expert, do not do it yourself.
Knowledge experts are characterized by the fact that contact with their closest colleagues is far greater than with the rest of the organization. Their primary communication is with those who are organizationally close. The consequence is that knowledge leaders spend a lot of time communicating with people from completely different functions within the company and often communicate directly at the vice president level.
As soon as you start developing something new, you need to take change management into consideration.
As a knowledge leader, you can’t just develop a tool or a process and then hand it over. You have to follow through and ensure implementation.
Knowledge leaders have to do the end-to-end tasks themselves.
As a knowledge leader, you often have to work on changing people’s mindsets. You may need them to better promote your solutions in the organization. But you rarely get far by just throwing yourself into a long explanation of why they should do it. You need to learn what stands in the way of them not already doing it, through basic coaching techniques, and then you need to figure out what it will take for them to start doing it. Coaching is an exceptional skill in such situations.
In the role of knowledge leader, it is vital that with your unique knowledge, you can see the connection between your domain of expertise and how to create a good customer experience.
The knowledge leader must work on three scenarios: What is the best solution? What is a very good solution? And what is the solution in which we are probably scraping bottom in terms of utilizing the technology we have?
You own your domain of expertise and must have the end user in mind.
Part of making something happen in an organization is not setting a claim on success.
At the expert level, you are the one who must take these things into account and have the necessary insight into the future.
knowledge principal roles are not just defined by having uniquely deep knowledge. They are roles that are defined as critical for the company to maintain or build new competitive edges.
The knowledge principal role is also characterized by having very high-level organizational targets with little guidance on how to achieve these results.
As a knowledge principal, you are held responsible for some organizational results, but you will find that you are far from in control of your results.
a broad organizational understanding is crucial to your success.
the marked depth of knowledge is critical to being classified as a knowledge principal. But it cannot stand alone.
As a knowledge principal, you are held accountable at the organizational level, even if significant parts of the process are beyond your direct influence. For some, this is a big motivating factor; for others, it is a major factor of frustration, but it is a condition of being a knowledge principal.
Succeeding in the role of knowledge principal is difficult if you are unable to operate independently across different functions within the organization.
Every day, leaders in their field must ask themselves this question: How do I contribute to creating a competitive edge for the company?
An essential work value of a knowledge principal is to create results through the organization. You should thrive on not being in direct control of your results and creating them through the organization.
Even though you have agreed on goals and timelines with top management, you will experience that people keep asking for visible progress—and top management can be very impatient. As a knowledge principal, you are caught in this cross fire. Some will thrive in this conflict. Others will perish. It comes down to what your work values are.
Specialists who crave daily, weekly, or at least monthly visible results of their efforts will normally suffer in the knowledge principal role.
The key point here is that in the creation of groundbreaking innovation, we often see two or more disciplines intersecting. But just putting different people together doesn’t do the trick. The people whom you put together must possess a genuine interest in understanding the others’ fields of expertise.
as a knowledge principal, you need to spend a lot of time seeking out external inspiration—it’s a significant factor for contributing to long-term expertise development.
The knowledge principal must operate strategically and systematically on building external networks.
The ability to set strategic goals and be able to negotiate them in place with the management team and colleagues across the organization are critical skills for leaders in their fields.
As a knowledge principal, you need to be able to drive change processes across the organization without having formal authority.
As a knowledge principal, you must contribute to the strategic agenda and constantly explore how you can contribute with your area of expertise to bring about competitive advantages.
The steps to defining your Specialist Pipeline are as follows: 1. Defining the business purpose for designing and implementing a Specialist Pipeline framework 2. High-level mapping of specialist roles within your organization 3. Validating the initial mapping via data collection from the organization 4. Defining the core specialist levels 5. Defining the core dimensions 6. Defining the performance expectations for each specialist level 7. Defining the required work values, time application, and skills for each specialist level
You need to ask yourself: • What problem are we solving by implementing the Specialist Pipeline? or • What business strategies are we creating for the business by implementing the Specialist Pipeline?
What you need to focus on is this: What role is a certain specialist in question mostly required to fill? The crucial observations to make during the workshops are as follows: • Do we have specialists at all levels? • What percentage of our specialists fall in between levels or go above the knowledge principal role or below the knowledge expert role? • Are we good with the four dimensions, or is there a dimension missing to allow us to better categorize the specialist population? • Are the performance expectations easy to understand for the participants? Is the “language” a good fit for the
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be aware that you are not mapping the specialists. You are mapping the specialist roles, meaning that, when mapping the roles, there can be a tendency to classify the role based on how the specialist in the role fills that role.
Begin by illustrating your own Specialist Pipeline so that you get a rough idea of how many different specialist levels you have in your organization. Then describe the specialist levels you have identified in your own language so that they are understandable to the leaders within your organization.
The two levels can still consist of the four dimensions and a transition concept with work values, time application, and skills, but now the dimensions and performance expectations of the knowledge expert are combined with something from the knowledge leader.
No matter how small an organization is, the Specialist Pipeline mindset can be applied.
Another variation is organizations that want to differentiate more fundamentally between people manager career paths and non-people-manager career paths. They may have a desire that everyone who is not a people manager be called a professional and that the professional role be defined as a specialist level. It is not our immediate recommendation to work that way, but some organizations have a legacy in relation to specialist titles, which makes it difficult not to consider the professional role a specialist role.
Organizations rarely need more than three or four levels, as the differentiation between the individual levels would end up being qualitatively too small.
