Knowledge, Empowerment, and Growth
There is an invisible chain of knowledge that propels your team forward. It’s made up of 3 interconnected links:
- Knowledge
- Empowerment
- Growth
Great leaders understand how these elements are connected. And they know how to strengthen the chain. Let’s break it down:
Knowledge > Empowerment
Knowledgeable people feel empowered and get empowered.
Well-informed, well-trained people do their jobs well and with autonomy. And because they’re doing higher quality work in which they take greater ownership, they also become more invested in the company and its outcomes.
Furthermore, educated people also get empowered by others. Why? Team leaders that have a knowledgeable, capable team will confidently delegate tasks to their team members. They will trust their team to get things right.
Final result: a well-oiled machine that not only functions smoothly but produces great outcomes.
Empowerment > Growth
You can’t do it all.
And as your business grows, your team leaders won’t be able to do it all either. Great leaders know that in order to go up, you must give up—tasks.
For a business to elevate, leaders must delegate. So in order to grow, you must have empowered people, worthy of accepting responsibility. As we’ve just learned, empowered people are knowledgeable people.
So knowledge is the foundation, and the result is growth—which means the sky’s the limit. Knowing this, it’s worth digging deeper into the true meaning and importance of knowledge.
The Need-to-Know on Knowledge
In order to gain better clarity on what knowledge is all about, we need to examine what it isn’t:
Namely, knowledge is not information.
Information can create awareness, but it can’t always be regarded as true beyond doubt. And—more importantly for our purposes—information conveys data, but it does not give people experience or skill.
To be of use, information requires an act of memory. You must be able to retrieve it from the part of your brain where you stored it. If you’ve gathered information on the best quarterback’s completion percentages, then you have a certain body of information on this topic. But that doesn’t mean you can complete a pass yourself.
For that, you need to get on the field and get into action. Enter knowledge:
- When you apply information and use it practically, you convert it into practical knowledge
- From here, you move from being aware of the information to knowing it
Simply put, we acquire knowledge through practical experience.
The Leader’s Role in the Knowledge Chain
As leaders, we shouldn’t just be passing out information. Instead, we should put our teams into a position to convert this information into knowledge—which will in turn build their confidence and launch the growth described at the outset of this post.
To understand the how-to of this better, let’s look at some examples:
NASCAR Knowledge
NASCAR: You might watch it, read about it, go see live races, and listen to informed commentators while cheering on your favorite racers. So you have collected a lot of information about racing. But do you have practical experience on the track, behind a NASCAR wheel?
If not, it would be foolish to get into a car and think you could race because of everything you have seen and heard from the experts. Without experience, you’d probably run into issues right away. And you certainly wouldn’t have the inherent intuition for what is the right or wrong way to drive.
Simply put, there is no substitute for experience. Experience is essential, because it is the means by which information is converted into knowledge.
A Real-World Example
As many of you know, I am the founder of a hardscaping company called Decra-Scape. Years ago, we witnessed a great example of the difference between information and knowledge when a sales person came out to our offices to demonstrate a mechanical paver layer.
The sales person was an ICPI Certified Concrete Paver Installer. He knew about the machine he was demonstrating and had successfully completed an exam about concrete paver installation, but he did not have any practical experience operating this piece of equipment. So when asked to demonstrate how it worked, he fell flat on his face—and I mean that almost literally.
The machine was not calibrated properly, so when he clamped a layer of brick, lifted it from the pallet, and commenced to move it to position, the machine nose dived to the ground. The counter weights were not positioned properly, and he had no clue. Thankfully, the machine’s cab enclosure kept the salesman safely inside; otherwise, we may have been calling a doctor.
Would you want this guy installing a critical application for your company?
Without practical knowledge, he lacked what he needed to truly be empowered to do his job well—and he lacked the skills that his leaders should have required before empowering him to have this level of autonomy.
The Leader’s Role in the Knowledge Chain
A leader’s role is to get your team members the knowledge they need by
- Providing access to information
- Providing access to the practical experience they need in order to convert the information into knowledge
Information PLUS hands-on practice leads to knowledge.
There are 3 keys to pulling this off:
1: Remove Fear of Mistakes
Practice makes perfect, but we make mistakes on the way to perfect. It’s up to the leader to create an environment free of the fear of making mistakes.
Have you failed? Yes. Will you fail at times in the future? Absolutely! So will your people. They can’t learn how to do it right without space to fail.
Last I checked, failure is success if you learn from it!
2: Get out of the Way
Had the owner of the paver layer company properly educated the salesman and provided him with the proper experience before our demonstration, he might have sold a machine.
Isn’t it time you got out of the way and started letting others within your organization start making mistakes—and learning from them?
3: Learn from Mistakes
I can only hope that the paver-machine salesman learned from his mistake and became better for it. (If he did, he got a bonus: a great story to incorporate into his sales pitch moving forward.)
Learn from your mistakes and become better through them. You’ll grow—and you’ll model the importance of learning from mistakes to your team, so they, in turn, can become more skilled and knowledgeable.
Fearful Leaders + Education
There’s one other place where fear comes into this:
I have heard leaders flat-out say they will not send their team members to educational venues in fear that the team members will take that knowledge and leave them.
These aren’t good leaders. Sorry, not sorry.
I think of it this way: I would much rather educate you and have you leave my organization than not educate you and have you stay.
P.S. Everything you want in life is on the other side of fear.
The Power of Experience-Based Knowledge
There’s no such thing as a sure thing, but uncertainty is highly problematic for businesses. So as leaders, we need to avoid it as much as possible. This knowledge chain is one way to do it.
While the unknown breeds fear and undermines confidence, experience-based knowledge breeds certainty throughout your business, because it helps to eliminate guesswork and speculation.
Information informs. Knowledge empowers. And empowerment leads to growth.
Pitter patter, let’s get at ‘er.
