| How do I promote information sharing and inclusion within my organization? | Look out for people using knowledge to gain power, and use technology to make sure everyone is included in group discussions. |
For an organization to succeed, the people who work there need to feel good about what they’re doing.
Feeling good about the work you do isn’t a luxury or an indulgence, especially when it comes to social impact efforts. People who don’t understand what they are doing or don’t believe their effort makes a difference eventually tune out. In extreme cases, they may even burnout. They almost always leave.
One of the fastest ways to make people miserable at work is to withhold information they need to do their jobs. On the other hand, one of the most effective ways to build a talented, effective team is to build and share knowledge at every level of the organization.
Healthy organizations pay attention to the way that information and knowledge are being shared. They recognize that information and knowledge are keys to both personal growth and group impact. And their leaders are intentional about keeping lines of communication open.
When you aren’t sure how freely information flows in your organization, look for these three bad habits: excluding, hiding, and isolating. If any of these three habits is common, there’s a good chance you have a culture issue that needs attention.
If you want people to be good at their jobs and stay motivated, ensure that access to information isn’t treated as a reward or used as leverage for power. Focus on inclusion, empowerment, and knowledge sharing instead.
People aren’t necessarily being mean-spirited when they withholding knowledge from co-workers. Have you ever forgotten to include someone on a chat thread? Or left someone off an email update because you didn’t remember their address?
Maybe you’ve heard (or said) something like this:
Maybe you’ve silently felt something like this:
The thing is, missing out makes team members weaker — regardless of how or why it happens.
Imagine that you are dropped from a meeting invitation, email thread, or group chat. Or imagine you can’t access the background files, documentation, and information you need for your project. What happens next? Most likely it’s this: You are out of the loop, so your teammates don’t trust you. They think that you don’t know as much as they do, or that you aren’t able to keep up with them. As a result, they stop including you in important conversations. Then the gap between their knowledge and your knowledge widens. As your performance and your reputation decline, your team shares even less with you. So you perform even worse.
Oops. What started out as an honest oversight made someone’s job a heck of a lot harder.
Withholding information doesn’t just hurt random individuals or make it harder for them to succeed. It reinforces barriers that affect some groups of people more than others — you know, the systemic barriers that many social impact organizations are trying to tear down.
For people who are members of certain groups, information is withheld more often than others. For example, people of colour, women, people with physical disabilities, allophones, newcomers, young people, older people, and neurodiverse people are routinely overlooked, ignored, or excluded in mainstream environments.
If you care about inclusion in your organization, then you have to care about sharing knowledge.
Sharing knowledge makes organizations stronger, but like many management practices, it doesn’t happen by accident.
If you want to build up all members of your team, it may require some new habits. For starters, don’t choose who to include in a conversation or briefing on a case-by-case basis. To foster a culture where information is shared freely and where everyone is given a chance to excel, put some communication systems and intentional practices in place.
Every time someone chooses who to include in a project update, meeting, or chat, they have an opportunity to overlook or exclude someone. Instead of leaving inclusion up to chance, spell out exactly who needs to be in the loop on certain activities and topics. Communicate and enforce your expectations over and over again until that people are included by default.
There are a lot of resources designed to help people facilitate meetings, create inclusive interactions, or be a good ally. They all start when the meeting or conversation begins. But often, the biggest omissions and harms happen before that; they start when meetings are called or when one person receives some new information. To foster a culture of information sharing and knowledge building, pay attention to those early moments.
When you make it easy for people to share information and when you encourage knowledge-sharing, you give everyone a chance to contribute. Often the technology you’re using and the way you use it can be set up to help you communicate better:
Email groups and chat apps are not going to solve all internal communications issues. They definitely won’t erase bias. But your tech tools are a great place to start if you’re trying to understand and strengthen your organization’s culture.
No matter which technology you use, you should be training managers to communicate with teams inclusively. Managers are often the ones deciding who to invite to a conversation, sharing files, managing onboarding, and initiating important conversations. If they change who they engage on an ad hoc basis, everyone else will do the same thing. Managers need to model inclusion first. When in doubt, start with them.
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