Sharing knowledge in a wrong way

There is nothing wrong in sharing knowledge as such, however there are differences in the way of sharing itself, that I would recommend considering prior to doing it. When you are working with a group of people, sharing knowledge with each other is especially crucial, and we can do it in several ways:

presentations (static or interactive)
live demo
verbal (briefly mentioning about the stuff) – face to face communication
passive – sending email/message with article

and they are all ok, we can adjust each of those, depending on the situation, listener, and size of the group. However, never mind the way of communication, mind the way we are assuming people will read your message – kind of complicated, let me explain.

If you are the type of person that is reading all the messages, checking out all the articles – that’s cool, any way of knowledge sharing would be appropriate for you, as you will always take something for yourself out of it.

Unfortunately/fortunately, most people, have a slightly different approach especially when knowledge is shared passively – as a plain message with limited description. In 80% of the message of the case will be ignored, maybe in 20% it will be saved for later (someday maybe list) and no action will be taken.

This would lead to two things:

as a sender you may feel as your time and effort was wasted – “c’mon I’ve shared this cool article, nobody cared – will not send it in the future”
receivers will feel bored and kind of forced to listen/read what was shared with them – “Oh he/she has shared something again I will check it out, most likely it will be reproached someday”. That’s not the way.

I’m personally learning that the hard way, learner and input are my key strengths¹, thus the need of learning more and sharing it is all the time with me, and I was doing that.

To share the knowledge, I’ve been using a passive way of communication – share the link, brief description, that’s its job done – expecting that people have the same character/approach as I have. Guess what maybe 20% of what I’ve shared had a positive outcome, meaning people have actually checked it and used that knowledge, and I had a feeling of wasted time and effort due to that, blaming not myself – of course. Fortunately, I’ve good friends that give honest feedback, plus a bit of self-retrospective that has changed my point of view.

I’ve started analyzing how much different would it be if instead of passively sending messages I would show knowing that I wanted to share based on real-life examples, maybe sharing 50% of content but in a proper way would be 100% more beneficial than sharing all of it in this weak` way that I was doing.

I’m right now on the path of changing my approach, will share with you my findings and outcomes in the near future. But I don’t expect that all the people will read everything that was sent to them.

Reference:

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Based on Gallup® Strengthsfinder® ↩