"Avoid a Brain Drain Disaster"
By Ira Wolfe, Vistage Speaker and Founder of Success Performance Solutions
On March 2, 2006 in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska 260,000 gallons of oil leaked from a damaged British Petroleum pipeline. One month earlier, a different pipeline had sprung a smaller leak. The March leak was the worst spill in the region's history, and six months later it led to a temporary shutdown of the largest oil field in the U.S., cutting eight percent domestic oil production.
A subsequent Congressional investigation uncovered one source of the leaks--BP's senior corrosion engineer retired a few years earlier and the job had been left unfilled, creating a huge knowledge gap. This vacancy and others hindered BP's ability to manage its corrosion prevention activities.
BP failed to retain or document the knowledge of its senior corrosion engineer. Poor knowledge management and lack of talent planning plague many organizations. Ask yourself: who is holding the knowledge in my organization? Whose knowledge could prevent a catastrophic loss of money, trust, customers and employees?
Capture and transfer knowledge
Here are six steps to capture and transfer knowledge in your organization:
- Identify your subject matter experts and super-experts. If they were to leave your organization tomorrow and on the way out the door offered to "dump their brains" on your desk, what knowledge would you want them to leave behind? What questions must you ask if you have any chance of capturing what you need to know?
- Make a plan for retaining the pile of knowledge left behind. You'll likely find that super-experts are mental "packrats." They keep everything because you just never know when you might need that information. Before they are long gone, someone should decide what to keep, what to archive, and what to trash.
- Identify the right recipients. Transferred knowledge can only continue to "live" if the successor integrates the information into his or her own knowledge base. Not everyone has the cognitive capacity, interest, or motivation to do this. And simply filing the information is not enough.
- Assess the talent pool. After you identify the employees whom you believe are capable of capturing knowledge, it's essential to assess them for cognitive capacity and potential. It's not enough to identify just the smart and ambitious employees. A successful transfer of knowledge requires that the receiving employee(s) have the ability to deal with added levels of complexity, ambiguity and responsibility.
- Mentor your knowledge successors. Once you've identified your experts and successors, it's time to pair them up. Some relationships will develop naturally, others will struggle. It takes time to build trust. Many experts have a difficult time communicating at a level that the rest of the world understands. Some will be reluctant to share their knowledge sensing their value in the organization will diminish once they reveal what they know. The mentor may need to be coached on how to mentor and the mentee on how to learn. Potential personality rifts must be recognized up-front or the talk of knowledge transfer will remain just that - talk. The same employee assessments used to identify the right talent can be used to pair the right mentor with the right protégé.
- Start today. You can plan for retirements but you can't plan for illness, disability, or the death of key employees or those who leave for greener pastures. Knowledge transfer at the implicit level takes years, not months or weeks.
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