The #1 Workplace Strategy Mistake that Leaders Make (And How to Fix It)

Background

It feels like every day we hear from business leaders who are struggling to connect the dots between what their business needs and what their technology can help them with. Honestly, there's a lot of frustrations. Tools are supposed to be helpful. They're supposed to lighten the load.

But most of the time they find themselves twisting the tool into working for them, or just feeling completely lost not knowing where to start.

What we've learned over time is that while most of these folks look to us for "how do I use these tools", what they really need help with is understanding "how to think about them". They need a shift in perspective to see success.

And the number one shift we promote is how they think about their organizational knowledge, and how that translates into how they approach their tech tool box.

The Mistake

It's a business leader's job to further the success and mission the organization. So much of that comes from having a particular way of working that sets them apart from the competition.

But that reality is always changing. It needs to. New "knowledge" is created every day, and I'm going to bet you aren't capturing it.

You might not realize the extent to which your workplace culture allows that critical knowledge to be tied to an individual rather than the organization. Let me explain.

Whether it's conversations, decisions, documents, or processes, every one of your team members needs to create a habit to ask themselves:

• How does this information exist beyond me?
• Is this accessible to others who need it now or might need it in the future?

This is NOT a common scenario. We often see employees being protective of "their job" or "knowledge" viewing it as their own little treasure trove. But it has a huge impact in the long run and can be a big problem.

The Real Problem

Let's pretend for a second the answers to those questions above are:

• It doesn't exist beyond me.
• No, it's not accessible to others. Maybe? I don't know, I'll let them figure it out...

If you don't build a culture to prevent this and make sure every one of your employees understands the "why", here's what may happen:

• Decisions, insights, and innovations get lost when employees move on or change roles.

• Teams waste time recreating work or solving the same problems because past solutions weren’t captured.

• The organization struggles to operate efficiently because knowledge isn’t integrated into systems or processes.

Since we're often working with customers who use Microsoft 365, one of the biggest offenders we see is the use of OneDrive. You see, OneDrive is a person-based storage tool. It's tied to an individual's M365 account. It gets created when an account gets created, and it gets deleted when an account gets deleted. If you are storing critical business information in OneDrive, you're creating a problem for yourself, and we see it all the time. That information needs to live in organizational-level storage, like SharePoint. That way employees can come and go, all the while that data lives on in SharePoint.

But document storage is just the start. Think about how you're communicating. Creating a historical wealth of knowledge and context about your business, just for it to disappear into your email inbox abyss. Or maybe how you're managing projects. Or processes. Or meetings. I'll save those for another blog. All of these things are crucial situations for knowledge to not be stored in a person-based system, but in an organizational level one.

We call these knowledge black holes. Where information just gets lost. Strewn apart into something that is completely unusable.

Avoid these knowledge black holes.

The Leadership Fix

So how do you actually fix this? As a leader, your role isn’t just to oversee processes but to create an ecosystem where knowledge is naturally preserved and shared. Here’s how:

1. Set the Standard for Knowledge Reflection: Embed a culture where every team member—yourself included—pauses to ask: Am I capturing this in a way that benefits the organization, not just me?
2. Design for Accessibility, Not Convenience: Make sure tools and workflows are designed to make sharing knowledge the path of least resistance. This is a tricky one, and requires a fair amount of work to make it feel natural.
3. Lead by Example: Share your own decisions, processes, and insights in a way that’s transparent and accessible to others.
4. Create Systems, Not Silos: It’s not just about tools like SharePoint or Teams—it’s about embedding knowledge sharing into every facet of your workplace, from meetings to project updates to communication channels.

Now it's up to you. Do you keep letting your domain/business knowledge be stored in a person-based approach? Or an organizational level one?