Author: Robert Crouch

Companies want employees to share what they know. Research has found that this leads to greater creativity, more innovation, and better performance, for individuals, teams, and organizations. Yet despite companies’ attempts to encourage knowledge sharing (think of those open office spaces), many employees withhold what they know. They may play dumb, pretend not to know something, promise to share something but never do it, or tell people they can’t share when in fact they could. New research finds that the way jobs are designed can affect whether employees share or hide knowledge from their colleagues. More cognitively complex jobs — in which people need to process large amounts of information and solve complex problems — tend to promote more knowledge sharing, as do jobs offering more autonomy. By focusing on these aspects of work, managers can encourage employees to share more and hide less.

Virtually every organization has a few superstars. They’re the employees who’ve fast-tracked their way to the C-suite or maybe they don’t sit at the top of the hierarchy, but they are definitely part of the tacit power structure within the organization. Generally, they’re well regarded, highly respected and seem to have an X factor that propels them to succeed….But how do they achieve such success? What is it that they do differently? Is there a specific set of skills they possess that others don’t?

When firms do a good job, it’s often with senior hires. This makes sense to a point, given the potential impact of higher-level executives, including the costs of underperformance. However, as roles across organizations become more complex, the competition for talent more intense, and the consequences of poor onboarding better understood, more firms are taking comprehensive looks at their policies and practices in this area.

To build something distinctive in the marketplace, you first have to build something distinctive in the workplace. The author argues that “shocking rules” are a building block of a powerful culture. In other words, if you’re doing things at your company that outsiders can’t quite understand, you may just be doing it right. The article includes a few company examples, including one from Amazon. Jeff Bezos insisted for years, even as Amazon was growing by leaps and bounds, that desks at the company “were built by buying cheap doors from Home Depot and nailing legs to them.” Of course, a company with tens of thousands of employees and billions of dollars in revenue could pay for elegant desks for its programmers and executives. But this shocking rule reminded everyone that “We look for every opportunity to save money so we can deliver the best products for the lowest cost.”