This Knowledge Is Meant to Be Shared

Knowledge is one of the few resources that grows when it is given away.

Money decreases when it is spent.

Time disappears once it is used.

Knowledge is different.

When you share it, you still possess it. The only difference is that someone else now possesses it as well.

That is how individuals become teams.

That is how teams become organizations.

That is how organizations endure beyond the people who built them.

Unfortunately, many people misunderstand the relationship between knowledge and job security.

They believe the more knowledge they keep to themselves, the more valuable they become.

At first, that belief appears to be true.

Every difficult question comes to them.

Every complex issue requires their involvement.

Every critical system depends upon their expertise.

They become indispensable.

Or so they believe.

In reality, they have quietly assigned themselves ownership of every recurring problem associated with that knowledge.

Every outage interrupts their day.

Every vacation includes a phone call.

Every emergency waits for them to become available.

Every new employee eventually finds their desk because no one else knows the answer.

What began as expertise has become dependency.

The irony is that this dependency often prevents the very career growth they hoped to achieve.

Eventually, the organization launches something new.

A major migration.

A cloud transformation.

An acquisition.

A modernization effort.

A leadership initiative.

These are the projects that expand careers.

These are the assignments that expose engineers to new technologies, new responsibilities, and new opportunities.

Leadership begins looking for people who have the capacity to take on the challenge.

But you are unavailable.

You are too busy answering the same questions you answered yesterday.

Too busy fixing the same recurring problems.

Too busy maintaining the dependency that only you created.

Meanwhile, the engineers you refused to teach have something you no longer possess.

Bandwidth.

They are assigned the new initiative.

They gain the experience.

They build relationships.

They become visible to leadership.

You remain exactly where you are—protecting knowledge that has quietly protected you from your own advancement.

Knowledge hoarding may ensure you have a paycheck next week.

It may also ensure you have the same paycheck three years from now.

That is not career security.

It is career stagnation.

The purpose of expertise is not to become permanently attached to yesterday's problems.

It is to prepare someone else to solve them so that you are free to solve tomorrow's.

That is how careers grow.

That is how organizations grow.

That is how people grow.

Knowledge was never meant to be stored.

It was meant to move.

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