A Hoarding Culture vs. A Sharing Culture

Have you ever considered if your school and district has a hoarding culture or a sharing culture?

In a hoarding culture, teachers and schools keep their expertise, their knowledge, their ideas, and their innovations to themselves. These teachers and these schools get a sense of reward and gratification by being seen as experts, as more creative, more knowledgeable, and more effective. They crave the recognition that comes from getting results that others are not able to achieve and the influence and recognition that comes with it.

We have all seen it, those teachers who have great ideas but don’t want to share with others. Teachers with special training that keep all the knowledge to themselves to be seen as the “expert.” Teachers who are good with technology but seem to keep the “secrets” all to themselves. Principals who keep information to themselves so as to ensure staff must go to him or her for the information. Even entire schools keep their best practices and knowledge to themselves. This is what hoarders do. They set up silos and keep their knowledge inside.

Sharers know that their fellow teachers, their fellow principals, and their fellow schools can benefit and should benefit from their knowledge, ideas, creativity, and information. Sharers get a “reward” out of helping others benefit from what they know. Sharers attempt to overcome silos by sharing with others so that the entire school or school district can benefit.

Toyota has an approach to knowledge management called “Yokoten.” The Japanese word means “taking from one place to another.” Toyota’s culture is a sharing culture. They correctly understand that knowledge, ideas, and data are organizational resources. A good idea should not be wasted but should be implemented. In addition, and this is key, a good idea should not just be used in a single location, but should be exported to all parts of the organization. Their sharing culture obligates that an individual share with their peers and leaders are expected to circulate good ideas throughout the organization.

In other words, if Toyota ran your school or your district, teachers would be expected to implement good ideas and share with others. Principals would be expected to implement good ideas at their site and share with the rest of the district. Silos would not be allowed to prevent good ideas from being implemented and shared. If the idea is a resource, it is not wasted, it is used and it is shared.

Does your school and district have a hoarding culture? Or does your school and district have a sharing culture? A culture of “yokoten?”

Catalytic Questions:

1. Imagine the benefit to student learning and achievement if every great idea in your district was implemented and shared across the district. Every one. How might you encourage this level of collaboration and sharing?

2. In what ways could you begin to model a sharing culture? How might you use the principle of “yokoten?”

3. What things should you stop doing? What things are getting in the way of collaboration and should be eliminated?

4. How might your approach to collaboration change if you viewed ideas as a necessary commodity or resource for your school and district?

5. In what ways have you encouraged, rewarded, acknowledged, or expected sharing of ideas, knowledge, information, or data?

Comments

[Steve Kinney]

I agree whole-heartedly with the sharing vs. hoarding dichotomy, but my questions is this—would a hoarding culture shift towards becoming a sharing culture if they were presented with an easy and effective avenue to share information.

I've seen a number of cases where teachers who normally keep to themselves all of a sudden open up during a staff development day and are flush with ideas—only to return to the solitude of their classroom the very next day.

[Rob Jacobs]

Steve, interesting point. Teacher are not rewarded for sharing and are not rated poorly for failure to share.

The PNLC model, which leverages technology, should provide an easy and effective avenue for sharing information, the question is does the culture encourage and does leadership expect it.

Leaders should think about way to measure the sharing of and implementation of ideas. With a little thought a principal should be able to measure if ideas are being shared among teachers and if, after ideas are shared, they are being implemented in the classroom.

Many districts include collaboration as part of teacher's review process.

[Gabriela Fitz]

I think you are hitting on a really important point here Steve. In my experience in the nonprofit sector, knowledge sharing represents a delicate balance between culture and technology. Neither really works without the other.

At IssueLab we have learned that it's simply not enough to just provide the platform for knowledge sharing. Nonprofits who don't have a lot of practice sharing knowledge outside their immediate networks also don't seek out something like IssueLab and arent always sure whether it's all "worth the effort". So a lot of what we do is to educate nonprofits about the importance of sharing their work before we even introduce them to the tools that make it easy for them to do so.

So yeh, I think it is a combination of the right tools that make it easy to share, the resources and time that are needed to make sharing part of folks' everyday work, and a culture that values knowledge sharing as described above.

(P.S. If you have time, check out our recent collection of 60+ case studies in arts ed - a great example of how people valued knowledge sharing enough to document the impact of their work but still needed a whole other entity and effort to get that work out to a bigger audience. http://artsed.issuelab.org)

[NZN]

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