Hoarding knowledge can often feel like the best way of keeping your organisation or business on track to reach its goal. Keeping the knowledge you’ve worked hard to acquire close to your chest can feel like a protective measure that can prevent others from outperforming your business.

Oftentimes, the opposite is true. Knowledge sharing is an act of understanding the bigger picture and engaging with an abundance mindset which often only benefits both your personal development and the development of your business and yourself and an entrepreneur.

Why is knowledge sharing important?

Being a founder is often lonely. After all, there is no manager above you to provide feedback, ideas, and guidance.

Communities for founders enable knowledge sharing about topics which sometimes are not suitable to discuss with your immediate team. Learning from others is a crucial way to ensure your business consistently grows and doesn’t become stagnant.

What’s the latest app? How are people pivoting their working location policies? Where do you find talent? Which processes do you implement to measure profit?

All these fundamental questions – and many more – can be answered if a culture of sharing knowledge is embedded within your operations. Knowledge sharing doesn’t mean you’re forced to discuss all aspects of your work with no stop point, it’s about empowering yourself to understand your limitations.

Once you know what struggles you are facing and the questions around these struggles, having a community that offers you the platform to communicate openly with like minded individuals is extremely useful.

How can networking help with knowledge sharing?

My experience with networking as the foundation for knowledge sharing has only been positive. I had a negative preconception that other founders and entrepreneurs would want to “hide their secrets” but I found the opposite to be true - people are often super happy to discuss how they do things and are keen to hear your perspective on it.

Thinking about the bigger picture of how you can always refine and improve ensures that you are not scared to share knowledge. Instead, sharing more openly therefore opens opportunities for someone to share their feedback and great ideas with you!

Knowledge sharing not only helps to foster new and important relationships built on honesty and openness from the offset, but it allows the space and potential for collaboration – building a shared knowledge base that isn’t exclusive or “hidden”.

This can then even shape how you perceive and engage with networking itself. You can be prompted to want to expose your ideas to more feedback because you’ll have a more astute experience of how sharing knowledge can be beneficial.  

How do you share knowledge and get feedback from peers?

Creating and joining a mix of groups is important. Surrounding yourself with similar-level founders means you are facing similar problems and can easily support each other. It’s also much easier to build relationships as there are so many common traits and ideas between group members.

Sharing knowledge prompts you to step outside of a lack mindset, where you can feel pressured to struggle through problems alone and grow your own ability to source solutions from shared knowledge as well as grow in appreciation and gratitude for the networks you form.

I always try to be a part of aspirational groups, where leaders are running bigger operations, facing even larger challenges, achieving even higher numbers. These are the moments where you can be inspired and think bigger. Surround yourself with more people like this and you will find you naturally start growing towards their level.

It also gives you a space where you know the struggles you face will be understood and where the struggles faced by others are understood by yourself. This grows your capacity to want to engage with and help others which are long-term traits that will help you guide your business to further success.

This doesn’t have to just be on a professional level, think personal level too. Who do you surround yourself with? Do they inspire you? Do they motivate, congratulate, and amplify you?

Knowledge sharing speaks to a bigger idea – that we collectively benefit from supporting and engaging with one another. Closed off practices that are surrounded by secrecy miss the beneficial opportunities for growth and development that comes with peer reviewing. 

Setting a culture of open and curious communication at all levels of a business only ushers in more honesty and more engagement with seeking knowledge that could bolster your business to new heights.