As we build our intranet more and more of those documents that are tucked away on internal filesystems are surfacing for all to be viewed. The way that I keep abreast of this is by adding an alert to the SharePoint Site Directory.
One little gem that bubbled up was a document that lists out the roles and responsibilities of various types of people within Readify. Here is a little snippet that I thought was interesting:
“Be a leader. Simply possessing deep technical knowledge does not qualify you as a Senior Consultant. Proactively sharing knowledge, communicating effectively, assisting others, and achieving high work ethics are all leadership qualities required of a Senior Consultant.”
There are a couple of important things there I think. Technical folks have a tendency to go dark, so one of our roles as a Senior Consultant is to fight that urge to share knowledge and communicate. That can be hard but its kind of like a muscle – if you exercise it enough it becomes easy and even pleasurable, but like exercise willpower is required to keep it up.
If you are in the situation where you need to communicate a portal can help you – but that form of communication is multi-cast and doesn’t have reliable delivery so you need to hook others into the system and get them to be responsive – so effectively – my (and your) job as a senior consultant is to engage other people and get them communicating too!