It’s Not WHO You Know, It's WHAT You Know! (yes – you read this correctly!)
How many times have you heard the phrase “It’s Not WHAT You Know, It's WHO You Know”? It must be up there as one of the most overly repeated cliches of the business world.
I don’t know about you, but it’s one of those phrases where every time I hear it, I respond with a mental ‘eye-roll’. If we're not careful, it can shape our thinking and may become something we aspire to.
Let me explain why.
It is a deeply fascinating statement and even more so when you consider the impact of it, particularly when applied to the business world and especially in regulated industries such as financial services.
I don’t doubt that “It’s Not WHAT You Know, It's WHO You Know” can be reflective of some things we see day to day, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t challenge ourselves as to whether that’s what we want to see and whether that's the kind of behaviour we want to endorse. The financial services sector has long since suffered from various high profile scandals and whilst there are many reasons as to why that is, perhaps, a culture of not valuing the importance of attaining knowledge is, at the very heart of it.
“IT’S NOT WHAT YOU KNOW…..”
Let’s dig into the first part of the phrase and just so I’ve understood this correctly? “It’s not important what you know?!”. Wow. Really?
Let’s have a think about what that really means and the seismic impact of that statement. It effectively means that knowledge is not important when compared to your network connections. How comfortable should we feel about that?
How many times have we heard the stock phrase “Oh, don’t ask me, I’m not technical!”. Let’s be honest, if we’re not careful, that approach is used as a reoccurring excuse to prevent us from having to invest the time to learn, to understand and appreciate the foundational principles of the industry we work within. And let’s be honest, who wants to listen to someone who is openly acknowledging, “I can’t be bothered to learn”.....
It wouldn’t be an article without an Albert Einstein quote, so here’s a deeply applicable one:
“Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.”
If we don’t enter the field of battle to acquire knowledge, what does that transmit to our colleagues and our clients? For example, any business who decides to launch sales staff into meetings who are unable (and perhaps unwilling) to converse intelligently with clients and openly rely on the ‘SME’ (who has most likely been wheeled out for the meeting to perform on behalf of the sales team before being locked back under the stairs)….
In this capacity, do you really need expensive sales staff, who have diminished their role to such an extent that they book meetings, introduce who is round the table and pour cups of tea? What is it in the business DNA that has prevented them from acquiring knowledge for themselves? Is that a company you would prioritise doing business with?
It could be argued that it is an extremely disingenuous way to interact with clients and displays a total disregard for those who have invested significant time to improve their knowledge through sheer hard work, discipline, dedication and diligence.
Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park (stay with me on this...) quite brilliantly sums up the flaws in this approach “I'll tell you the problem with the power that you're using here: it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!”
In the world that is financial services consultancy, this analogy is often met with a knowing smile.
Clearly, we all understand and accept that some people are more technically minded than others, but it’s fundamentally important not to create an industry of allowing perfectly intelligent and capable people the excuse to absolve oneself from all responsibility to learn and attain knowledge. Valuing knowledge and respecting the process to attain it must be promoted.
We need to increase the focus; we must value ‘WHAT you know’.
“IT IS WHO YOU KNOW……..”
Don’t get me wrong, networking and building meaningful relationships are clearly essential in any business and immensely enjoyable. You could be a genius in a specific field or sector, but if you are living under a rock, then what value are you providing? Your platform is important and learning to build trusted relationships is vital.
However, the problem lies within the context of the phrase.
It is positioned to devalue knowledge and cast aside the importance (and hardship) of learning the detail to promote networking without responsibility. How well aligned is that ideology to your business strategy?
If we were to express this saying in % terms, it would equate to:
Importance of knowledge = 0%
Importance of contacts = 100%
Herein creates a major problem, as success can often be solely derived from being in the right place at the right time and saying the right things to the right people. Corporate psychology surmises this approach 'as the principle of people failing their way up the corporate ladder'.
Perhaps a more sinister manifestation of this problem is the concept of networking with the ambition of replacing the need to learn entirely by allocating that responsibility to someone else. We must all guard ourselves against this one as it demonstrates the very worst in corporate DNA. It effectively amounts to harvesting people for knowledge, and purposefully creating relationships without equality or transparency.
How often have we heard the phrase “oh, they’re just an SME.....”?
Unfortunately, this is a tactic often used to prevent highly skilled resource from obtaining a deserved platform by positioning them as somehow deficient in some capacity when in fact, the very opposite is true. The perpetrator in this example is often unknowingly engaging in ‘projection’ (a defense mechanism people subconsciously employ in order to cope with insecurities. Psychological projection involves projecting an insecurity onto someone else, rather than admitting to or dealing with the unwanted insecurity)....
In conclusion, this leads me to ask the following three questions:
Should we really be empowering a business practice where we diminish the pursuit of knowledge in favour of influence?
Would we prefer colleagues with relevant knowledge to have more or less influence?
Should we reward networking only and/or the blood, sweat and tears in the pursuit of attaining knowledge?
Who you know undoubtedly has value, but we must not forget how futile that is in isolation, if, what you know is not a lot.
www.sygnia-group.com
Real world articles based on experience (no reposting or copy and paste)