A little while later, she im'd me again to let me know that the problem had been fixed and that everything should be working. Again, I thanked her and updated my staff.
A year or two ago, she wouldn't have thought to reach out to me to highlight a problem in her system - I think because she didn't know what I'd do with that information, and she didn't realize I'd work to protect her while she's working on the problem. We have a trusting relationship and I really value that.
The Communities of Practice article talks about how knowledge sharing won't happen without trust. I couldn't agree more. I've carefully cultivated my relationship with her, and many other programmers and administrators in our department, so that they feel like they can trust me to tell me the truth about what's going on in their systems.
I was so effective in building a relationship with one of my coworkers that he was really offended when he heard from a third party that I was pregnant - he expected to have heard it directly from me:
Coworker: I hear you have news
Me: Well, what have you
heard?
Coworker: That you're spawning!
Me: That is
true. You saw my announcement on Facebook right?
Coworker:
Facebook? Bob told me at lunch.
Coworker: I'm hurt. I thought we
were tight!
Me: We are!
I'm not sure our relationship is going to be the same going forward. He's been distant and slow to respond to me lately. I hope we don't return to our previous state of "fragmented knowledge networks" as we had been previously.
Speaking of trust, I'm not thrilled to read the Hansell article about Google turning my inbox into a social network. I disagree that the people I email most frequently are the people who are most important and close to me. Classmates are a great example - we are constantly emailing back and forth, but I honestly (sorry guys!) don't want their messages to be placed more prominently than the rare but cherished email from my sister or grandmother. They're not big writers and I always open messages from them first when they appear. If they do implement something like this, I hope it will be something I can turn off. Since the article is from 2007, perhaps it ended up in the bitbucket of interesting ideas.
The article does raise the interesting question of how we trust our web mail provider to be a bit more tight lipped about our personal data than a social networking site. A friend of mine told me recently that her Hotmail account has been "enhanced" with some sort of personal profile web page - I think it must be the Windows Live Profile - and without realizing it, she had uploaded photos to this profile page. Her husband alerted her to what had happened. They weren't problematic photos to be sharing, but she didn't realize she was doing it - and I think she now trusts her Hotmail account and Windows software a little less for sharing information she definitely wasn't expecting to be shared.
How has trust or lack thereof affected your ability to share information at work?
Carolyn,
ReplyDeleteI totally agree that you have to trust someone before you can actually share information. It happened to us almost a year ago when we lost a big government contract and all the team working there had to go back to the main office and be a part of our team. The 12 members had to go back to the main office for some time until they find another billable positions, at least for some of them.
Well we had never worked with that team before, and the headquartered engineers were so possesive of the systems, if I can say. We did not grant them domain admins rights for the longest period. It created a hurdle for us because we had a ton load of work, and they were physcially there, but with no rights to do anything. We then got to work together and built a trust relationship. 5 of them ended up staying for full time basis and they now know everything on the network. We even share some passwords, which was very restrictive before.