culture knowledge-sharing engineering leadership

Knowledge Driven Culture

Knowledge Driven Culture

In my earlier post about building an engineering culture, I briefly touched on the pillar “Knowledge Driven.” This pillar is different from the others — it is really about culture, behaviour and mindset. You can only have a knowledge-driven culture if people are willing to share knowledge, and if people are open to receive it.

In many companies there are a handful of people who are very knowledgeable. They answer questions when asked, and are willing to share — but somehow knowledge is never truly transferred. The expert remains indispensable. The knowledge stays locked.

Show, Together, Alone

At Xpirit, we like the mantra “Show, Together, Alone” — in Dutch: voordoen, samen doen, zelf doen. We show you, we do it together, you do it yourself. That way, we are not only there to answer questions. We make sure people are able to do it themselves in the future.

Of course this takes more time than just answering a question. But on the longer term it is far more fruitful. As the quote goes: give a man a fish and you feed him for a day — teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

Sharing Knowledge

There are many ways to share knowledge, and basically everything is fine. Sharing some knowledge is better than sharing none.

What we often see happening is that people do not know what to talk about. They think what they know is not interesting enough, or not useful. Many companies also try to focus knowledge sharing into boxes, areas, topics, or focus groups — and I have learned that those limitations and borders actually paralyse the people who want to share. Just let people share what they want to share.

By removing boundaries, people feel much more at ease. And once the pressure is off, you can start asking them to share on specific topics you care about. But do not start with that.

Also important: sharing knowledge looks very different for different people. Some like to present on a stage, some for large groups, some for smaller ones. Others prefer workshops or brainstorm sessions. Some write blog posts, some record a podcast, some put code in a GitHub repo, and some just prefer a 1:1 conversation.

The same principle applies: do not limit your people, enable them. Make sure they know about conferences where they can speak. Let them organise a meetup. Help them develop writing skills. Provide the equipment to record something. Do a conference session together. Once you remove all the boundaries and concerns, people start to thrive.

Receiving Knowledge

This is a short paragraph, but an important one. Receiving knowledge seems simple, but it is not. It is a mindset — being open to other opinions, being open to learn, being genuinely connected to others.

It already starts in the hiring process. You can hire the most knowledgeable person available. But if they already know everything, why would they be open to learning from others? More important than what someone knows is what they do not yet know — and how they deal with that.

Mindset is everything. Sometimes you need to take away fears to help people be open: the fear of being embarrassed, or the fear of feeling inferior. A good conversation often helps. Sometimes issues are deeper. Help people with coaching. Help them grow personally. The business benefits are rarely measurable — but people will flourish, and everyone benefits in the long run.

Do not hire brilliant jerks. Hire people who can grow.

In Practice

At Xpirit, we run two flagship knowledge-sharing platforms:

  • XKE (Xebia Knowledge Exchange) — a weekly session every Tuesday where the team comes together to share. Around 4–5 parallel sessions on a normal week, 15–20 when combined with Xebia colleagues. Brainstorms, presentations, demos, code shows, rehearsals. Anything goes, as long as knowledge is moving.

  • Innovation Day — four times a year, the whole team comes together to do something innovative. What it is is up to you — you can do anything, as long as it is innovative for you. Small groups work together. Usually people simply learn something new. Occasionally, something beautiful comes out that finds its way into the community or a customer engagement.

The summary is simple: enable knowledge sharing, remove fear from knowledge receiving, and hire for growth mindset. That is how a knowledge-driven culture is built — not by mandating it, but by creating the conditions where it becomes the natural thing to do.