How Organizational Knowledge Can Help You Reach Your Goals

Organizational knowledge is a powerful tool that can be used to reach professional goals without having to rely on formal power. It is the collective wisdom and understanding of the organization, including its people, processes, and procedures. By understanding organizational knowledge, individuals can identify areas for improvement, find solutions to challenges, and facilitate successful change initiatives that can help teams reach their goals. In addition, organizational knowledge can help develop relationships and networks, understand how to navigate the organization, and gain insights into how the organization works.

With organizational knowledge, you can identify the existing issues within the organization. When working on identifying areas for improvement, you can ask questions such as: "What can we do to make our organization better? What can help us solve our challenges? Who can help us reach our goals? What can help us implement change smoothly?"

Many organizations, however, leave decision making and process improvement to those who have formal leadership or formal power. Although formal leaders are necessary in certain aspects of operations, these types of leaders can sometimes lack the technical knowledge of the operation itself. This is often a missed opportunity to bring in technically and organizationally knowledgeable individuals who can share their expertise. Team members with operational knowledge have the potential to not only share the specifics of why certain processes were designed or implemented, design rationale or functionality, as well as the alternative options that were considered. These colleagues have the benefit of hindsight but also prospective forecasting within the business, as they've seen what can go wrong and how.

I often hear the concern that individuals who have vast organizational expertise may be unwilling to consider new options or may be resistant to change. News flash: Nearly everyone I know resists change on some level. Employees who have organizational expertise may also have informal leadership and influence within the organization. Their concerns, issues, and objections are all items you'd need to address in a project plan anyway. They've only made it convenient for you to hear what the concerns are and the questions you'd need to answer along the way. Instead of running from and hiding plans from individual objectors (especially those with deep organizational knowledge), include and engage them in the process. They could turn out to be your greatest asset towards achieving your goal.