There are few corporate rituals less popular and more practiced than performance reviews. If our people are our greatest resource then the corollary is this: we spare no expense to understand and leverage their resourcefulness -- their ability to move beyond the gravitational pull of power structures, the boundaries of siloed systems, and the inertia of entrenched bureaucracies.
- To penetrate new markets!
- To remedy chronic shortcomings!
- To forge game-changing innovations!
- To get the real work done!
Say It Ain’t So, Jim
If James T. Kirk provided the opening narrative for our earth-bound enterprise goals, knowledge management professionals would have landed a supporting role in each of the above boldfaced frontiers. “Responsible for all, Kirk might say: “Authority for none.”
The performance piece must be met by the same steely resolve that achieved these laudable goals and patched together through peer reviews. For the latter our starship-mates may enlist our support for realizing their own aims. But a peripheral assist does not a critical path make. At review time those managers might well be trading up for a promotion by focusing on the contributions of their direct peers, not the collaborations from extended teams. And the indirect nature of knowledge work begs the existential question of knowledge ethics and knowledge careers: mainly how does one gain a merit-worthy knowledge promotion -- particularly on teams that are often scattered and double-staffed to other functions?
That uphill incline tilts even steeper for the folks retained to blast through the calcified process flows between the back and front office. Knowledge managers by definition are expected to break with routines while playing within the rules. They are expected to do this typically by flying solo into the strong headwinds of ingrained habits and longstanding allegiances to policies and protocols that appear just fine from the inside and positively undefendable from a longer-term and customer-facing perspective.
The role of muckraker for knowledge managers assumes not only that we're suited to be mavericks but that our success operates around a business imperative. Without a targeted outcome successes are small and isolated by the vacuum that forms in the absence of tangible benefits to the business. Failing that, the knowledge brain trust reports to no one and answers to all. We tend to float below frontline customer operations and revenue streams. While no less beholden to them, knowledge folks typically report to teams of one with visibility into every which silo we're tasked to smash.
Community Resource
This paradox of being a shared, cross-team resource with no direct management oversight means that many of those attempts to integrate, map, connect, and cross-pollinate are peripheral to most and remotely observed by those most potentially helped or impacted. In addition to these inherent conflicts of interest there's the additional hazards that come with multiple boss pleasing. For instance each additional manager bumps up the number of performance review goals. More than a couple per boss and we're hitched to an unachievable number.
And speaking of numbers, what's the chance that our goals can be measured in lieu of quantifiable benefits to the business? If it's system-based, that rationale soon turns to migrations and upgrades. It also prompts another what-have-you-done-for-us-lately reduction: how does the switchover, implementation, and/or deployment translate into the language of cost recovery and time savings?
What about numbers of followers on an internal social net? How about members of a community practice? Are those demonstrable impact measures? What if your organization considers this the natural outgrowth of having made prior investments in social apps and enterprise collaboration platforms? Is this behavior the add-on of a goal-setting review cycle or an expected behavior -- a fundamental part of the job?
Setting the Expectations You Can Meet
A little bit of comparison-hopping here will bring some discipline and transparency to your goal-setting agenda. So will keeping a vigilant and cautious lid on the time and expense horizons of ongoing and future adoptions of knowledge-based systems and deployments.
That kind of accountability is all the more critical if you want your performance to speak for you prior to any performance review meetings likely to convene on your behalf. But even if you're getting your goals addressed don't keep your head down too low. Even if the numbers are trending in your favor, they may not add up by themselves. Even if you're keeping to a manageable goal number, you may need to move the original yardsticks in observance of those add-on requirements that accumulated after your goals were set.
In sum, knowledge remains more of an aspiration than an accomplishment in most business cycles and certainly in performance reviews.