How are information hoarders best dealt with?

Written by James on Thursday, 6 of December , 2007 at 6:11 am

Recently I posted the following question on LinkedIn:

I often come in to businesses or groups that are growing rapidly. In these situations it seems inevitable that there is someone who has been on the team a long time, has a monopoly on technical knowledge, and refuses to share his experience and knowledge with newer team members. Every bit of information sharing must be painfully argued, justified, and politicized; often taking days to get a simple 5 minute answer. Team members eventually begin avoiding this person whenever possible, spending hours tracking down simple answers, because the process of getting a simple answer is so difficult.

So how does one deal with this situation?

I received six answers (though no “magic bullet”) for dealing with such a situation. Most answers were combative, though one answer (number 3) was especially empathetic.

Answer 1: Tell the CEO

The first answer, and probably most natural one, suggested that the best way to deal with an Information Hoarder through authority:

Have your CEO or President give the person a good talking to or document how time would have been saved or new sales could have been generated if you had obtained the necessary information from this person on time and present it to the person & CEO/President. By then they should get the message.

Of course, attempting to sway authority can be difficult - even self defeating - when you are an outsider. There’s a good chance that the CEO knows and trusts the Information Hoarder, has successfully trusted him in the past, and has even had barbecues or family outings with him. To position yourself as a wedge between them seems counterproductive.

Answer 2: Force them

Information hoarders usually think it gives them power and if the company lets them get away with it, it does give them power. The best option is to deal with it directly and quickly. Force them to either become a team player or get marginalized as the team moves forward.

One option would be to require that person to document everything. Take him off other projects until the information is fully documented so someone else can pick it up and use it. Have other people review the documentation to make sure it is clear and complete. If information turns up later that was not documented and you need to go through the politics again, document the fact that the previous assignment was not completed satisfactorily in the person’s review. This will take away his power real quickly and put him on the defensive for his behavior.

This answer, like the first, attempts to use authority to get the Information Hoarder to submit. Unfortunately, such a solution does not work well unless you have the authority. Even if you do have the authority, as “the new guy” (or gal) it is generally important to encourage teamwork as opposed to discouraging the behavior of a long-standing team member. You run the risk of alienating a potentially valuable asset as well as setting a bad precedent.

Answer 3: Establish them as a guru

This answer from Philip Stanley is a long one, but is by far the best:

The answers received so far are somewhat combative and position a burden upon the information holder that is likely to be insupportable and at odds with the true extent of their knowledge - particularly around ideas in forcing the documenting of the knowledge they hold.

Their ability to retain information in depth and recall it accurately is the skill your team have already recognised as immensely valuable - the ability to map, organize and arrange the same depth of information in documentation to be useful to a team is not necessarily a skill this personality type would hold.

Whilst I appreciate the frustration, the net result of either course laid out so far is likely to be alienation, massive intellectual resistance and at worse, deliberate, subtle, misinformation.

Go a different way. Establish the person as a guru, an information god, an oracle. Make their ten words as valuable as 20 minutes and a page of notes. Involve them and enrapture them in the data, remove unnecessary complications and their day to day obligations and put them on high availability for the teams. Give them more overview, establish them as the domain owner and expert, and provide them with an assistant to marshal requests. Make sure that brain is invited into meetings and their opinion is sought.

Suggest and then help them prepare a series of ‘10 things you must know’, ‘10 things we _must_ avoid’, ‘10 ways -not- to spoil the project’ etc. bulletins for the team.

Pull them so far into the heart of things that there is simply nowhere else they want to be, make it easier for them to answer the ad hoc questions from a team because it is their recognised skill and function - reward them.

Stepping up a level, invent a new title (better than these TECH (Technical Collaboration Head) GURU (General User Research and Understanding) and understand _their_ appreciation of the difference between giving, sharing, and collaborating.

Often collaborating is a option when the other two are not, because it is information acquisitive at the same time as information sharing; there is balanced input and output. You may need to reframe presentation of information need so it can be seen as being collaborative working.

Why on earth would one go to all this trouble, when a simple blast from the CEO is what everyone thinks they deserve? They’ve been there a long time, the firm is invested and the cost to release is high, perhaps prohibitive.

Better to take that mind and experience and help the owner find a new paradigm for involvement. Work your asset, rather than liquidating at below market value.

This answer reminds me of the old “embrace and extend” motto, but perhaps without the “exterminate” step. What I think perhaps that the first two answers were forgetting is that the Information Hoarder has been around a long time and is therefore likely to be incredibly valuable. Should not this person be rewarded for their value?

Answer 4: Start a Wiki

Answer 4 extends Answer 3 with some technology suggestions:

Take Philip’s excellent suggestion of the series of “10 Things” papers and put them on an internal Wiki. This will allow several positive things. First, it recognizes the person as an expert inside the community. Second, it allows other team members to add snippets of additional information so that you get a company repository rather than an “in the head” repository. Third, as the amount of other information increases, it pressures the information hoarder to share more to keep their position of expertise intact.

I think this is a great idea. Furthermore, creating a Wiki is something that can usually be done without authority. Even if embracing the Information Hoarder’s potential doesn’t work, a Wiki can be used to promote general collaboration and thereby at least mitigate some of the issues created.

Answer 5: Run over them with a bus (actually, just pretend like you did)

Alternatively - act like you would if that person was “run over by a bus”. Nobody is that important that the World would stop turning if they were no longer around. It also forces the rest of the team to think for themselves and not have an excuse for inactivity. Oh, and it takes the power away from the “hoarder”. I have successfully managed staff just like that!

Feel free to comment on this one yourself. I prefer to leave it alone.

Answer 6: Appeal to the ego, apply a process

There are two issues at work here:
1) You have one individual with a lot of “tribal knowledge” that resides nowhere else in the organization
2) The individual often feels that sharing knowledge puts his/her job at risk

You need to deal with both in order to have an effective fix. A senior manager or dept head should meet with the individual first and appeal to the ego - “Mary, you’ve been here a long time and you are such a great resource for us. I really need your help in training some of the less experienced staff members, etc.” Offer an incentive for a successful outcome - the ability to work on a fun new project, attend a seminar at a nice location, etc.

Now address #1 by documenting what this person knows so that knowledge can be easily transferred to others. Using ISO, six sigma, or another type of business process improvement can be a good mechanism for this, i.e., “Mary, we need to document this process for our upcoming ISO audit and I’d like you to take the lead on this.”

Establishing goals with measurable and specific outcomes will go a long way toward making this happen. Good luck!

Interestingly, this is the only answer to suggest that the Information Hoarder may fear for his or her job; a premise I felt was implicit in information hoarding. Easing this person’s fears may be all that’s needed to start the flow of information. And if not? Leave it to a well defined process, not an authority figure, to be the bad guy. Sounds like good advice.

Answer N: What do you have to say?

If you’ve ever dealt with a similar situation, how did you deal with it? Were you successful? Have you ever been an Information Hoarder? If so, what was your motivation and how could the cycle have been broken earlier? Will anyone even admit to it?

Category: Growing Pains

• Add this post to Del.icio.us - Digg - reddit

No comments yet.