Are you afraid of knowledge sharing in Agile ?Customize your goal setting.

Often the team members of an Agile team asks this question when they start to understand or adapt the Agile principles. 

How do I build my individual expertise in a specific module or domain and create my own USP ? Sometimes this may not be an explicit question from the people and it creates some amount of anxiety or insecure feeling with in the team members.

In general you will see the tendency of hiding the knowledge in individuals as they want to build their own USP and sharing knowledge may not make them stand out unique

The reason being is, one of the key element of Agile is knowledge sharing and it happens in various formats in the Agile development model. 

Agile methods which encourages knowledge sharing

• Scrum meetings - where you share what you are doing and how you will be doing. This happens in a matured scrum teams where they go beyond the regular format.
• Sprint planning meeting - where the stories are explained to the team and estimates are based on teams collaborative estimation exercise.  
• XP methods - where the team does pair programming, code refactoring, code review or walk through.
• Information radiators - such as Kanban and scrum boards.

Above all the team is always encouraged to  share knowledge among others as much as possible.

In the traditional model you will see experts in the team and the rewards or recognition highly goes to them as they exhibit their skills when resolving critical problems. In general you will see the tendency of hiding the knowledge in individuals as they want to build their own USP and sharing knowledge may not make them stand out unique. 

How to handle or how this is handled in Agile team

Based on what you read so far, you know the answer now which is very straightforward. The team or organization has to change their rewards and recognition model where it should be based on teams performance rather than individual performance and knowledge sharing should be part of the goal setting when you sit with your manager for the goal setting exercise. This might look more generic answer to you. Depends upon your organization or team you need to prepare your own format for the personal goal setting. This also depends on your organization's culture.

Reference:

• Mike Griffiths, PMI-ACP Exam Prep, Second edition.