Posted on 8/12/2025, 9:22:14 PM
They say it’s not what you know but who you know that helps you get ahead, but truly, knowing everyone but knowing nothing would leave you fairly ineffective. Sooner or later people will figure out you’re flying by the seat of your pants, and there’s nothing of substance there.
This is certainly true when hoping to stay effective in the market. It’s not just good business sense that helps here, you need to make sure that you’re drawing on expertise, experience, and the innovative thinking that allows. It’s why entrepreneurs are often so interested in the biographies of people who have broken the mold while also showing a corel level of competence, like Steve Jobs and other figures.
That said, knowing something and being able to effectively utilize that knowledge is hardly the same skillset. In this post, we’ll discuss how to sustain a competent knowledge base within your firm, so actionable steps can always be taken, and you always have an expanding understanding to fall back on.
You can't expect people to stay sharp and informed if they're just doing the same tasks day in and day out. That's how teams get stagnant and fall behind what's happening in their industry. This is why formalized learning expectations and avenues implemented from when someone starts at your firm means it becomes part of how your company operates, not some extra thing people do if they have spare time.
Providing your staff an hour each week for people to read industry publications, take online courses, or attend webinars related to their work is always worthwhile. If you make it official, people don't feel guilty about spending time on development when there's always more immediate work to do.
People in different parts of your business often know things that could help other departments, but there's usually no formal way for that information to get shared. That’s a shame, because your sales team might have insights about customer behavior that would be valuable for marketing, or your customer service people might spot product issues that development should know about.
A good compromise is monthly knowledge sharing sessions, where different departments present what they're working on or what they've learned, as that can help to break down these silos. Just allowing for casual discussions about challenges, solutions, and interesting developments in their area of work could be a baseline step.
Sometimes you need knowledge that doesn't exist in your company and would take too long to develop internally. You can’t know everything even if you’re pretty successful otherwise. This can be a great opportunity to outsource on a project-basis and let that insight help to nourish your team about particular issues. So for example, if you’re running a major online campaign (or planning to), bringing in a digital marketer fractional CMO for strategic guidance makes more sense than hoping your current staff can figure out complex marketing challenges through trial and error.
It’s temptined to outsource constantly, but a better idea is to bring such external expertise in to build internal knowledge as opposed to just getting tasks done. So when you work with specialists, make sure your team is involved in the process so they learn from the experience and can handle similar challenges independently next time.
Most companies have some kind of knowledge base or documentation system that nobody looks at because it's either too complicated or completely out of date. That’s a shame, as good documentation captures what people learn so it doesn't walk out the door when someone leaves or get forgotten during busy periods.
The best systems are simple enough that people will use them and update them as time goes on, but you have to give them time to do that. This could imply shared folders with clear naming conventions or internal wikis where teams can post solutions to problems they've solved, even through cloud apps like Notion. The format matters less than making sure it's easy to contribute and easy to find information.
Your industry is probably changing faster than you realize, and what worked two years ago might not be relevant anymore. That’s especially true with new developments like AI. As such, staying informed about trends, new regulations, best practices, and challenges at least gives you an official stance or portal to work through those issues, and helps you make better decisions and gauge opportunities before your competitors do.
That sounds like lip service, but really this should be more than just reading the occasional article or attending an annual conference. You need ongoing connections to what's happening in your field through professional associations, industry publications, networking events, or online communities where people discuss such topics. You have to be a thought leader or contributor even if you had no plans to be. That’s just the market we’re in today..
Employees tend to focus on what gets measured and rewarded in their job evaluations. If you want continuous learning to be a priority, it should be part of how you assess performance and career development more than anything else. Don’t test people on random facts of course, it’s not a spot test, but look at how they apply new knowledge to improve their work.
You might also ask people to point to skills they want to develop, give them resources to learn those skills, and then check in on how they're implementing what they've learned. This should give you accountability for professional development while investing in them too.
We tend to think of the person who humbly learns from others and listens more than they speak to be wise, so why can’t companies learn from that candor? Sometimes the best insights come from completely different fields that face similar challenges.
A manufacturing company might learn process improvements from software development methodologies, or a service business might adapt customer experience strategies from retail companies, for example. Maybe a competitor just complete ruined their service thanks to shoddy AI integration and you want to stay far away from that outcome. It’s as good as anything else.
With this advice, we hope you can keep your firm sustaining a very capable knowledge base going forward.
Get the key insights from top nonfiction books in text, audio, and video format in less than 15 minutes.
