The Three Types of Knowledge You Need for Your Job
I think there are three types of knowledge you need to be successful in a corporate job: technical knowledge, process knowledge, and corporate knowledge. Technical knowledge is the “what”; process knowledge is the “how”; and corporate knowledge is the “why”.
Here is an example to illustrate this: let’s say you are responsible for writing a program that communicates with an external API, and there is a firewall at your company that blocks external connections. Having technical knowledge would mean being able to write the program; having process knowledge would mean realizing that you need to request that the firewall be opened to enable the connection and knowing how to go about getting the request initiated and approved; and having corporate knowledge would mean things like understanding why the firewall was set up to block the connection in the first place, understanding where the approval process came from and the thought process behind it, knowing who to go to to expedite approvals, understanding the bigger picture of how the program you wrote would benefit the business and fit into its overall goals, and so on.
The key with these three types of knowledge is to realize that the type of job you have and your seniority level will influence their relative necessity and importance.
For example, if you are a junior person in a “technical” job, what matters most to you is technical knowledge, and maybe also process knowledge, and in a lot of cases you can get promoted purely on the basis of deepening these two axes. In fact, this is true for a lot of entry level jobs, where your jobs largely revolve around doing specific tasks and not so much around fuzzy nonsense like “influencing” people and trying to convince them to make changes or certain types of decisions.
Some jobs rely a lot more on process knowledge and corporate knowledge; those I can think of off the top of my head would be executive assistant type roles, where your goal is to make things happen for someone else, to know things on their behalf, to advise them when needed, and to know enough about how to navigate the organization to make judgment calls that won’t make your executive look bad. When people say that you should be nice to administrative staff, it isn’t just because they control access to powerful people (though they often do); it is also because they tend to be the keepers of knowledge about how an organization actually works (rather than how it says it does), which is a form of power in and of itself that helps them get things done.
I think as one gets more senior, technical knowledge becomes table stakes, process knowledge becomes more critical, and corporate knowledge becomes the true differentiator of how far one can go in the organization. Of course, there are ways to grow in seniority by maximizing the other two axes; you can full-send the technical IC track by going super deep on technical knowledge, or you can go super deep on process knowledge and become a project manager or something. But there are only so many positions that require that kind of expertise in every organization, and most people simply will never reach the kind of exceptional skill required to be able to avoid needing to increase their level of corporate knowledge.
So what exactly is corporate knowledge? It’s history and context. It’s the backdrop for what people call “politics”. It’s building a mental map of which groups do what with other groups and how it’s changed from what they used to do and why. It’s noticing the gap between what is said in public and what is disclosed behind closed doors. It’s being able to take bits and pieces of what people are telling you and fit them into slots in a much bigger puzzle, in real time. It’s reading between the lines of official communications and keeping up to date with organizational changes. It’s getting familiar with what came before you and what’s going on around you so that you don’t inadvertently anger people or break things. It’s not a “real skill” one can put on a résumé, and yet, it feels like the one that’s the most likely to help people feel like they have some kind of handle on the chaos that is their workplace.
Of course, not having sufficient technical knowledge can cap growth as well, but it doesn’t feel as dangerous to me as not having process knowledge or corporate knowledge. Without process knowledge, you can’t get things done in the organization; you will write a program, but it will never communicate with the API, making its existence moot and useless. Without corporate knowledge, you can’t do things that matter to the organization; you might write the program, and it might communicate externally, but you won’t realize that the business unit that asked for it changed its requirements and doesn’t need it anymore, making it a waste of your time and resources. Without technical knowledge, you won’t be able to write the program. Okay, so what? You can probably convince someone else that it’ll be in their best interests to do it for you and take half (or more) of the credit for it. Isn’t that fun?
It seems to me like the main reason why technical knowledge is valued in senior people is a) so that junior technical people will respect them and b) so that they can coach junior people and also make sure they’re not being ripped off by them. But tell me, when was the last time you were properly coached by a senior person?
Honestly, I think the fact that no one talks about this stuff is an indicator in and of itself of why corporate knowledge matters so much. I think a lot of being “more senior” simply has to do with being compensated more for the privilege (inconvenience?) of spending more time stressing over fuzzy, insane, and nonsensical interactions and demands.