Lead by Example: How Insights Managers Can Improve Knowledge Engagement

Knowledge engagement is mission-critical for insights teams both internally and when collaborating with stakeholders across the organization. And thanks to cloud-based technology and the digitization of data, it’s easier than ever to share and collaborate around knowledge and insights, no matter where everyone is working.

Realizing the full potential of knowledge engagement, however, involves more than tools and processes. Just as important as any technology is the culture around how it’s used.

One of the biggest challenges for insights teams is building a culture of curiosity and research engagement. It’s not enough to present insights once and move on: You have to get your stakeholders invested in your findings and arm them with the knowledge and tools to apply insights to their decision-making process. You need to give your stakeholders on-demand access to insights – and encourage them to comment and ask questions – so that research engagement becomes embedded in their work habits and behaviors.

A culture of research engagement and knowledge sharing will benefit both your insights team and your stakeholders. An insights team grounded in a culture of knowledge engagement will collaborate more effectively, generating smarter insights and more compelling deliverables. And stakeholders who feel empowered to access and engage with insights will make more data-driven, customer-centric decisions.

That culture is driven from the top–by leaders creating conditions and modeling behaviors that reinforce knowledge engagement as the overarching principle of everything you do.

Here we share some best practices for strengthening the culture of knowledge engagement on your insights team – and spreading that culture and its value across your organization.

Remove friction from knowledge engagement

Encourage knowledge engagement to become the default behavior by shaping new habits and routines. Meetings are a traditional venue for information exchange and real-time collaboration, and you want to be sure your meeting protocols are consistent with a knowledge engagement culture. Ask meeting attendees questions to encourage them to share their ideas and perspectives, and give them the opportunity to contribute without the fear of negative repercussions.

Meetings aren’t the only venue for sharing and engaging with knowledge, and as hybrid work becomes increasingly common, it’s more important than ever that you’re also giving team members opportunities to share knowledge asynchronously. Team members can use chat platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams to communicate about what they’re doing on their own and with others, share progress, and bounce around ideas. They can also use an insights management platform to publish and preserve finalized documentation, such as research reports, and ask questions of subject matter experts across the organization.

Even highly adaptive people can be resistant to new practices when they feel their current way of doing things is working well. As you set expectations around adopting new tools and protocols, make it clear the floor is open to ideas and suggestions about how to use them to best serve the team and its mission. Make developing team best practices everyone’s business.

Make knowledge sharing feel safe

Knowledge silos can develop for various reasons, including simple risk aversion. Teams and individuals sometimes opt to keep a low profile about what they’re doing, thinking there’s no upside to sharing too many details with too many people in case their work is found lacking in some way. A culture of knowledge engagement creates a professional safe space and is an excellent antidote to the tendency toward silos.

A safe environment for knowledge engagement and sharing is one in which people feel comfortable letting their guard down and taking risks. Leaders need to signal clearly and consistently that innovation is prized and that it thrives when everyone feels free to experiment and make mistakes while trying new ideas. Borrow a key principle of agile methodology, test and learn, to reinforce the message that fear of failure is off the table. What matters is forward progress and innovation, and nobody knows which tangent or rabbit hole will lead to the next useful thing. Obviously, running completely amok is never productive, but when everyone feels safe sharing their ideas, the team becomes more cohesive and able to self-regulate without quashing creativity.

When everyone on the team is fully invested in knowledge engagement, mutual trust and respect naturally follow – two conditions that support everyone doing their best work.

Practice what you preach

Setting clear expectations around knowledge engagement as a foundation of genuine collaboration is only part of the equation for leadership. It’s equally important that you demonstrate best practices yourself and consistently beat the drum of a culture of knowledge engagement. Recognize individual contributions and don’t reserve callouts for obvious successes. Salute risk-taking even when – especially when – it doesn’t pan out.

It’s also important for you, as a manager, to share what you can. Transparency builds trust. Give your team visibility into how you “walk the walk” of your knowledge engagement values as you perform your own responsibilities and collaborate with your peers and bosses.

Bring your stakeholders along for the ride

Happily, the guiding principles for building and sustaining a strong culture of knowledge engagement align closely with many best practices for insights teams. As you address challenges around building sustained engagement and making sure stakeholders get the most out of insights, you will discover plenty of opportunities for your team’s activities and deliverables to set a tone that helps promote knowledge sharing throughout your organization.

As curators of centralized, self-service research libraries, today’s insights teams are designing deliverables to retain value on an ongoing basis and to be used repeatedly by various people – not necessarily just the original or core audience. That means organizing data and insights for optimal useability and incorporating the full value of the team’s consultative input.

The most powerful way to give legs to a set of insights is through storytelling. Stories are no longer just hooks to make data dumps more interesting – more and more, the story is at the heart of your insights sharing. And it doesn’t always live on a slide, as insights teams embrace a variety of media to grab and hold stakeholders’ attention – animations, infographics, videos, and more.

Stakeholders need and expect access to insights on demand, but they still need guidance around best practices in research and analytics, and they bring a range of background knowledge about it. The self-serve model is ideal for providing Research 101 resources: content and access to additional coaching that users can find and tap into as needed.

A fundamental strategy for engaging stakeholders with insights in a sustained way is to pull them in upfront, at the project design stage, and keep the interactions going throughout the research process – field, analysis, reporting. This builds a model of engagement as a two-way street, affirming that the insights team understands the business and the implications of the learnings.

Use every opportunity to display strong data literacy and storytelling skills. This not only helps build sustained engagement with insights but also reinforces the principle that knowledge is a key organizational asset, one to which everyone has access, and everyone contributes.