Friday, August 06, 2010

We know everything, but we don’t do anything!

You go anywhere, in any company, in any meeting, people talk about everything. They talk and show the expertise they have. They talk about strategy, they talk about tactical planning, they talk about business plans and they talk about everything except execution. The person who talks more in the meeting is assumed the expert in his profession. Off course they are professional having knowledge in their respective domain. They know “what”, they know “how”, but still they don’t do.

The person who talks less is considered dumb. If somebody talks with big presentations, in excellent language skills and with lot of technical jargons gets more attention. However the problem is with “execution, doing”. There is a big gap in “knowing and doing.” They know, they plan, they talk and sometimes they colloquy, but they do not do and act. I have seen so many examples. They had lot of business plans and expansions. They hired renowned consultants, but all the projects miserably failed. The reason was “knowing doing gap”.

Organizations should form the opinion about employees based on their performance and their contributions is the organization and not what they talk. The reality is they form the impressions based on how smart they seem. Being critical to the ideas of others is another way to project oneself as a smart. The reason why such smart talk is appreciated because the quantity and quality of talk is assessed immediately but quality of leadership and managerial capabilities can be assessed with a large time lag. One manager to whom I know was promoted on senior level position only because he appeared to be the smart to the managing director while co-coordinating one business summit. Being critical is not always good but being critical for everything and exhibiting the knowledge on every subject is the problem.

When there is an expansion plan, every manager tries to get enough workforce. Putting people first is easy job, buy delegating and empowering them is very difficult to implement. Knowledge transfer is also the issue. Certain things are just assumed.

Success of the organization depends upon the executing what is already known. I always ask the question, if you know so many things, then why you don’t implement it.

As rightly said by Stanford professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton, it is important to convert the knowledge into actions than only knowing and exhibiting your wisdom.

“Why knowledge of what needs to be done frequently fails to result in action or behavior consistent with that knowledge…we came to call this the knowing-doing problem—the challenge of turning knowledge about how to enhance organizational performance into actions consistent with that knowledge.” Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton

3 comments:

Pankaj Devgan said...

Yes Mr. Vinod I truly appreciate that you bring in Notice about the fact of Company operation. I think this may known to every single employee of every company but you took the initiative. Also i Pray and hope that this style of company's working might be changed in near future so that Progress chart will move more fast than, also it will improve employees retention.
Best Regards
Pankaj Devgan

Kavi Vidyanuj said...

When persons are not sure about their knowledge and it seems that others absolutely have no idea(because of being silent or not thinking/studying )about situation/subject,they keep speaking.They should met persons crossing their opinions many times.This can change such person or that person can't change without big failure.

Kavi Vidyanuj said...

When persons are not sure about their knowledge and it seems that others absolutely have no idea(because of being silent or not thinking/studying )about situation/subject,they keep speaking.They should met persons crossing their opinions many times.This can change such person or that person can't change without big failure.

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