The document outlines seven competencies and provides examples of how to build expertise in knowledge management. It discusses seven types of competencies including experience, skills, attributes, behaviors, tasks, specialties, and components. It then provides seven lists of competencies from different knowledge management experts. The lists include competencies like sharing knowledge, driving for the most valued information, and improving knowledge and skills with tools. It also provides ways to build expertise such as assessing strengths, reading, participating in communities, attending conferences, and finding a mentor.

1. The Seven Competencies of
Highly Effective Knowledge
Managers
Stan Garfield, stangarfield@gmail.com
Knowledge Management Author & Speaker
Founder, SIKM Leaders Community
SLA Webinar, October 9, 2018

2. Topics
2
1. Competencies: 7x7
2. Seven types of competencies
1. Experience
2. Skills
3. Attributes
4. Behaviors
5. Tasks
6. Specialties
7. Components
3. Building expertise in knowledge management

3. 7 Competencies List 1: SAFARIS
3
1. Share tips, tricks, and insights
2. Ask questions and collaborate with others
3. Find resources, people, and content
4. Answer questions
5. Recognize colleagues’ contributions and
achievements
6. Inform about activities and plans
7. Suggest ideas and solicit input

4. List 2: Dave Simmons
4
1. Drive for most valued information in an
organization
2. Write once and use many ways
3. Spot information pain as a KM opportunity
4. Link all KM content to business metrics
5. Start small and build both supporters and
content
6. Be prepared to speak IT, business, budget,
content, process, and HR when addressing
KM
7. Know your constituents' metrics for success

5. List 3: Patti Anklam
5
1. Share Relentlessly what you have created and what you are learning. Be
a role model for those around you.
2. Search First looking to find, reuse, and refine what others have done
before creating something from scratch. Listen to what others are
saying.
3. Communicate, Ask and Answer in the Open using email only when
absolutely necessary. Make your work and your talents discoverable by
working out loud. TAG, TAG, TAG what you create so others can find it.
4. Seek Active Collaboration for tasks both small and large. The sum is
always greater than the parts.
5. Build Social Capital as if it matters as much as financial. Build your
personal network and connect people so they can enhance theirs.
6. Act on Your Ideas for creating and sharing knowledge. Leverage
company KM resources.
7. Improve your Knowledge and Skills with KM Tools and Practices by
learning one new thing every day (and then go to #1 and share).

6. List 4: 1-3, Jean-Claude Monney
6
1. Be a Knowledge Citizen: Display accountability for sharing, reusing,
and improving collective knowledge to create greater value
2. Be Social with a purpose: Be an active participant in your
organization’s Communities of Practice
3. Be Digital: Studies show that 50% of your productivity comes from
individual task performance and 50% from collaboration
4. Articulate the end-state vision: Passionately explain what KM looks
like when it is working
5. Implement, Improve, and iterate: Continuously act to achieve the
vision, with measurable progress
6. Define compelling use cases: Convincingly communicate the
advantages of using KM processes and tools over existing
alternatives
7. Lead by example: Regularly model the desired behaviors

7. List 5: 1-3, Malcolm Gladwell
7
1. Connector: a hub in social networks
2. Maven: a guru on important topics
3. Salesperson: persuasive, passionate, and
persistent
4. Communicator: good at writing, speaking,
and presenting
5. Expert in the people, processes, and
technology of KM
6. Effective in getting people to ask for help,
provide help, and answer questions
7. Helpful to those who seek information and
resources

8. List 6
8
1. Raise awareness
2. Align knowledge actions with business
priorities
3. Promote a knowledge sharing culture
4. Engage senior leadership
5. Manage the infrastructure
6. Manage the KM program and projects
7. Support all knowledge workers

9. List 7
9
1. Monitor important information sources
2. Participate in relevant communities
3. Read key publications
4. Listen to podcasts
5. Search effectively
6. Know who would benefit from a piece of
information or from being connected to
someone else
7. Inform colleagues about content, people,
and resources relevant to their interests and
areas of responsibility

10. 1. Experience
10
1. Management: supervised people, led work teams, managed a
business or functional unit
2. Project management: successfully managed projects to meet
deadlines, provide deliverables, and adhere to budgets
3. Communications: published documents, gave presentations,
and managed communications programs
4. 50 Knowledge Management Components: for many of these,
performed evaluations, led implementation projects, and
used them regularly
5. Reputation: has earned the respect of people both inside and
outside of the organization based on accomplishments,
networking, and communications

11. 2. Skills
11
1. Leadership: able to influence others, lead work
teams, and manage projects
2. Communications: excellent at writing, speaking,
presenting, and using a variety of
communications vehicles
3. Process and Technology: able to quickly learn and
master a wide variety of tools and processes
4. 50 Knowledge Management Components: expert
at using many of these
5. Analysis: able to seek input, analyze information,
consider alternatives, and make good decisions

12. 3. Attributes
12
1. Adaptable: flexible, resilient, open-minded
2. Assertive: shows initiative, meets commitments, decisive
3. Calm: handles pressure, even-tempered, balanced
4. Client-focused: understanding, responsive, helpful
5. Creative: innovative, inventive, bold
6. Collaborative: acknowledges, shares, networks
7. Curious: keeps current, open to new ideas, asks others to
share
8. Dynamic: gets results, analysis and action, sets high standards
9. Influential: gets commitment, resolves differences, spans
boundaries
10.Personable: gets along, builds relationships, well-liked

13. 4. Behaviors
13
1. Lead by example
1. Practice what is preached
2. Become an expert in the tools that you want others to use
3. Get respected leaders to model desired behaviors
2. Set three goals for everyone
1. Simple, fundamental, measurable
2. Consistently communicate and leverage
3. Widely communicate and inspect
3. Recognize those who demonstrate the desired
behaviors
1. Praise
2. Reward
3. Promote

14. 5. Tasks
14
1. Improve business results through a knowledge-
sharing culture
2. Define, maintain, and execute the KM
implementation plan
3. Implement people, process, and technology
components
4. Define KM goals, measurements, and rewards
5. Report regularly on KM metrics
6. Implement action plans for KM projects
7. Lead the organization's KM teams
8. Manage the organization's KM communications
9. Actively participate in communities
10.Network with other KM Leaders

15. 6. 100 KM Specialties
1. Sharing, culture, organizational design, and change
management
2. Innovation, invention, creativity, and idea generation
3. Reuse, proven practices, lessons learned, and knowledge
retention
4. Collaboration and communities
5. Learning, competency development, and training
6. Goals, measurements, incentives, gamification, recognition,
and rewards
7. Social networks, organizational networks, value networks,
and network analysis
8. Expertise location and personal profiles
9. Communications
10. Facilitation and knowledge transfer
11. User support and Knowledge-Centered Support
12. Content management, document management, and records
management
13. Analytics, text analytics, visualization, metrics, and
reporting
14. Project management, process management, Agile development,
workflow, planning, decision making, and checklist
15. Knowledge audit, knowledge mapping, knowledge modeling, peer
assist/retrospect, After Action Review, sensemaking, and ritual dissent
16. Appreciative inquiry, positive deviance, and Most Significant Change
17. Storytelling, narrative, anecdote circles, BarCamp/unconference, and
World Café
18. Information architecture, usability, user interface, and user experience
19. Search, findability, taxonomy, ontology, metadata, tagging, and
semantic web
20. Portals, intranets, and websites
21. Big data, databases, repositories, business intelligence, data
warehouses, and data lakes
22. Competitive intelligence, customer intelligence, market intelligence,
and research
23. Digital workplace, social business, and social media tools
24. Cognitive computing, artificial intelligence, natural language
processing, machine learning, and neural networks
25. Wisdom of crowds, crowdsourcing, collective intelligence, and
prediction markets
15

16. People
culture & values
knowledge
managers
user surveys
social networks
communities
training
documentation
communications
Technology
Process
methodologies
creation
capture
reuse
lessons learned
proven practices
collaboration
content management
classification
metrics & reporting
management of change
workflow
valuation
social network analysis
appreciative inquiry &
positive deviance
storytelling, narrative, &
anecdotes
blogs
wikis
podcasts & videos
syndication & subscription
social software & media
external access/extranet
workflow applications
process automation
gamification and badges
e-learning
analytics & BI
cognitive computing
& AI
user assistance &
knowledge
help desk
goals &
measurements
incentives & rewards
user interface, UX, & usability
intranet
team spaces
virtual meeting rooms, web/video/
audio conferencing, &
teleprescence
portals & digital workplace
repositories & knowledge bases
threaded discussions & ESNs
expertise locators/ask the expert
metadata & tags
search engines/enterprise search
archiving/document management
& records management
7. 50 KM Components
16

17. 10 Ways to Build Expertise
1. Assess yourself
2. Read books, periodicals, blogs, and sites
3. Join, participate in, and help lead communities
4. Attend conferences
5. Tweet, retweet, and follow tweets
6. Present, speak, lead discussions, and deliver training
7. Post, write, and publish
8. Attend training
9. Learn by doing
10.Find a mentor
17

18. 1. Assess yourself
• Assess yourself against the list of specialties
• If you were asked to meet with a client as an expert in
the specialty
• would you be comfortable doing so?
• would the client be pleased following the meeting?
• Choose one or more specialties in which
• you are an expert, or
• you would like to become an expert
• Focus your development on those specialties
SELF-ASSESSMENT
Sharing, culture, organizational design, and change management
Collaboration and communities
Goals, measurements, incentives, and rewards
Communications
Portals, intranets, and websites
Web 2.0 and social media tools
18

19. 2. Read
• Read books from the list of recommended books
• Start with the 12 shown below
• Then choose ones that match your chosen specialties
• Subscribe to periodicals
• Read blogs
• Visit sites
19

20. Periodicals
Knowledge-Letter
20

21. Blogs
Nick Milton
Mary Abraham
Dave Snowden
Patrick Lambe
Shawn Callahan
Nancy Dixon
21

22. Sites
22

23. 3. Participate in communities
• Subscribe: Get email or RSS and regularly read the threaded discussion board
• Post: Start a new thread or reply in the threaded discussion board
• Attend: Participate in community events
• Contribute: Submit content to the community newsletter, blog, wiki, or site
• Engage: Ask or answer a question, make a comment, give a presentation, and
help lead
SIKM Leaders
23

24. 4. Attend conferences
24

25. 5. Tweet, retweet, and follow
•Follow thought leaders in Twitter, Yammer, et al.
•Participate in a Twitter Chat, e.g., #ESNchat weekly chat
Thursdays at 2 pm ET
•Search Twitter using hashtags, e.g., #KM
•Ask questions on Twitter, Yammer, et al.
25

26. Twitter Chat
#KMers
#ESNchat
26

27. Twitter list Tweet themes
•#FF @hjarche Harold Jarche helps organizations
reintegrate work & learning, using the connectivity of
the Net/Life in perpetual Beta #KM #SM
•Title Thursday Review: The Intelligent Company: 5 Steps
to Success with Evidence-Based Management by
Bernard Marr #KM http://bit.ly/h5iEQg
•Website Wednesday: Laying Groundwork for a #KM
Professional: Learning, Knowledge & Effective Action;
Alex/David Bennet http://bit.ly/hSlzq4
•Trackback Tuesday: Time for #KM to manage
knowledge about management? @stevedenning
presented this to SIKM CoP http://bit.ly/hFC5Iu #KMers
•Meeting Monday: Mar 22-24 AIIM Conference & Expo
at info360 Washington, DC http://www.aiimexpo.com/
#KM
•Meeting Monday: March 24 Social Business Summit,
London http://www.socialbusinesssummit.com/ #SM
#socialmedia
•Meeting Monday: Mar 22 KMEF Webinar: Laying
Groundwork for a #KM Professional: Learning,
Knowledge & Effective Action http://bit.ly/eFsrVC
27

28. 6. Present, speak, and train
•Present at
• internal meetings
• con calls
• community meetings
• conferences
• client meetings
•Ask an established expert
to allow you to co-present
•Offer to help facilitate a
panel discussion
•Develop and conduct
training
28

29. 7. Post, write, and publish
•Post to a discussion board
•Write a blog post
•Publish a document using
Google Docs
•Upload a presentation to
SlideShare
•Write an article for a
publication
•Use writing to
• test your ideas
• solicit comments
• refine your thinking
about a topic
29

30. 8. Attend training
•Online
•At a university
•Before or after a conference
•From a specialized vendor
30

31. 31
9. Learn by doing
•Try things out
•Use tools
•Interact with others
•Attend different events to see which ones are
the most useful
31

32. 10. Find a mentor
• Post in a community discussion board
• Contact a blogger
• Reply to a tweeter
• Talk to a presenter at a conference
• Visit the site of a thought leader and send an email message
• Ask for a referral
32

33. Managing the
ROI of
Knowledge
Management
(chapter author)
The Case against
ROI
Implementing
a Successful
KM Program
(author)
Successful Knowledge
Leadership:
Principles and
Practice
(chapter author)
The Modern
Knowledge Leader:
A Results-Oriented
Approach
Gaining Buy-in
for KM (chapter
author)
Obtaining
Support for
KM: The Ten
Commitments
Proven Practices
for Promoting a
Knowledge
Management
Program (author)
• Join the SIKM Leaders CoP https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/sikmleaders
• Twitter @stangarfield
• Site http://sites.google.com/site/stangarfield/
• LinkedIn Articles https://www.linkedin.com/in/stangarfield/detail/recent-
activity/posts/
For additional information
Knowledge
Management
Matters
(chapter author)
Communities
Manifesto