Help Your Team Win by Unlocking Hidden Knowledge

It’s a drag on performance and productivity, especially in the era of remote and distributed work: teams often struggle with challenges that someone else on their team already knows how to solve. The difference between high-performing teams and those that can’t get ahead often comes down to how effectively (and quickly) they surface and share existing knowledge.

Whether it’s handling customer objections, working effectively with a cross-functional team, or writing a winning creative brief, team members have knowledge and experience that could elevate each others’ effectiveness — yet this information remains hidden and its value untapped. How much profit and revenue is hiding in what your team already knows?

We've identified four obstacles to better knowledge flow across teams:

1. People don't realize others have figured things out
2. It's unclear who has valuable knowledge worth learning from
3. Those with expertise often struggle to effectively share it
4. Teams don’t take the time to surface their insights

Let's explore each of these obstacles - and more importantly, how to overcome them.

People don't realize others have figured things out

The first obstacle is surprisingly simple: people often don't recognize that their colleagues aren’t struggling with the same things that they are — especially in a remote work environment. When something is difficult for us, we tend to assume it's equally challenging for everyone else. Meanwhile, the person two desks down (or one Zoom window to the right) has developed a system or script to accomplish the same task in half the time.

This assumption creates a knowledge-sharing blind spot that leads to redundant effort and foregone revenue and profit. When someone develops an effective system that increases their productivity, make it visible. These success stories often reveal solutions others didn't know existed, or problems they didn’t even know could be solved.

It's unclear who has valuable knowledge worth learning from

Expertise doesn’t always announce itself — in fact, the announcements and the expertise aren’t necessarily correlated at all. It's rarely clear who's doing something worth learning from, and people don't typically broadcast their special skills or innovative approaches. This can feel awkward or self-aggrandizing, and we’re not exactly taught how to share our successes at work. Without leaders inviting the team to reflect on their wins and intentionally dig deeper, your experts’ knowledge remains hidden.

To overcome this, leaders need to actively surface success stories and skills within their teams. This doesn’t mean assigning a formal presentation on top of everything else your high performers are doing, rather creating lighter-touch opportunities for team members to showcase their unique approaches and systems that you’ve seen driving key results.

Those with expertise often struggle to effectively share it

Even when people know their knowledge is valuable and want to share it, that’s not trivially easy to do. Natural talent can be a barrier to teaching. When something comes easily to someone, they might find it difficult to break down their approach into learnable steps. They don’t know what it is about their approach that others aren’t keying into.

To get past this, focus on sharing stories rather than abstract explanations or codified frameworks with baked-in assumptions. When someone has mastered a skill and executes well, help them articulate their journey. How do they identify an opportunity? What specific steps do they take? How can they tell it’s on track? Making expertise relatable and giving people specific, legible cues to follow is crucial so that they can apply the knowledge themselves.

Teams don’t take the time to surface their insights

In part because of these other obstacles, leaders don’t make time to study success, fearing that it wouldn’t ROI. But in the rush of daily operations, we forget that the time spent struggling with previously solved challenges far exceeds the time it would take to share solutions effectively. We barely have time to confront a problem before we’re onto the next, let alone learn how our teams avoided problems… but that’s the key to getting ahead.

Try integrating knowledge sharing into existing workflows. Use the first few minutes of team meetings for quick win-sharing. Create channels where people can document and share their approaches asynchronously. Create a culture where people will elevate each other’s successes naturally so they can be examined. Make knowledge sharing a natural part of how work gets done, and recognize the contributors who are helping expand the shared wisdom of the group.

Unlock Your Team’s Genius

As a leader helping your team succeed, your team’s experiences can be a resource in ways that you almost assuredly haven’t fully tapped into. Looking inward for insights can be the difference between a team that builds confidence and cohesion versus one that wastes energy constantly wrestling with the same challenges.

Start small: in your next team meeting, ask who has found an effective way to handle a common challenge. You might be surprised to discover that the solutions you've been seeking have been there all along, waiting to be shared — and that your team’s collective knowledge is a more powerful and valuable resource than you thought.