Paradoxically, the pace of business is accelerating simultaneous to the winding down of a large proportion of senior businesspeople in the Baby Boomer and early-Generation X groups who are preparing to leave the workforce and hand over the reins to a younger cohort.
Among them are the leaders, mentors and experts who have contributed to the company’s successes over many years. Some may even have been there from the very early stages, laying down the foundations of the organisation.
Relevant and important questions arise. When they leave, could your company’s competitors have a free shot at your important clients? Would the business’s standing be dented in the eyes of partners such as auditors, merchant banks and major suppliers? How would other employees feel about being able to cope relatively seamlessly after their departure? If the company is listed, how would the market react?
In the minds of clients, shareholders, the board, fellow employees and business associates, these questions are expressions of doubt regarding the transfer of knowledge.
Mitigating risk
The concept of knowledge transfer starts with the realisation that long-tenure figures in the business inevitably fulfil multiple, important roles.
Their departure ushers in risks. If they have consistently been the spark of ingenuity for innovations, their leaving is a risk of an intellectual property (IP) hole. If, for decades, they’ve held the master key to unlock the annual renewal of contracts worth millions, and their departure jeopardises how important clients see their dealings with the company, it is a relationship risk. Further, there is a business continuity risk if these deals represent a major proportion of overall revenues. Feasibly, at risk of being lost is institutional knowledge – the tacit understanding of what course of action is true to the company’s ethos; dextrous, muscle-memory application of expertise in a crisis situation; transmitting the required gravitas in meetings and presentations.
Transferral, to learn from the best
Knowledge transfer is far more than a basic handover which prepares a successor to take over a role or relationship.
When someone leaves an organisation after 20, 30 or more years of service, a complex psychology is inevitably at play. Sensitivity is required to unlock, in a process of discovery, the spectrum of insights they have.
This means that deep-dive, in-person interviews are required. Our experience with a large finance sector corporate is that people are more participative when the process is tailored both for the company and for them as individuals.
Further, they share more readily when the process is conducted by an independent knowledge transfer professional who brings appropriate sensitivity to the task. After all, would you be fully engaged in a process that feels transactional, led by someone whose primary focus is logistical efficiency rather than uncovering the deeper insights behind high performance? Or what if it was overseen by someone with whom you’ve had professional disagreements or long-standing competition for promotions?
From risk to opportunity
Frankly, any knowledge transfer process will uncover a few surprising KPIs, the touchpoints that smooth external liaison with key clients, and tips and tricks for extra-mile client delivery. But a better, more refined exercise probes deeper. It reveals, too, aspects of the employee’s character and the habits they’ve adopted that have contributed to their high performance. It points to internal constraints that hold back the performance of the team, a full function, or perhaps the entire organisation. Observations are brought to light involving loopholes, people and processes, strategies and systems.
Knowledge transfer, as such, often ties into many, if not all, of the challenges a business may have, including strategically important issues which may be embedded in the collective consciousness of longstanding employees but which are not evident to leadership. So, knowledge transfer is not only a “hold what we have” exercise to protect the core; carefully executed, its ambit widens from knowledge retention, to leveraging operational improvement, to a blueprint for strategic insights.
Weaving within and catalysing culture
Knowledge transfer initiatives have another valuable spinoff: they refine or rejuvenate culture. Employees who benefit from the knowledge they gain inevitably feel that a valuable interaction has been done for them. Assuming they are motivated and engaged in the workplace, the performance baseline rises a notch, as does their willingness to extend the sharing ethos to others. The more consistently these knowledge transfer cycles occur, the more the process itself is a positive input into an improved culture.
Substance and scale
When done consistently, and over an expanding sample of experienced, high-performing employees, a collage of quantitative and qualitative information emerges. De facto, this is a learning curriculum around important skillsets, issues, and the practicalities of navigating nuances both internal and external to the company.
Here, technology slots powerfully into the knowledge transfer process. Large-language, AI-driven models can create bespoke, company-specific transfer modules based on a cumulative dataset of knowledge. These can be skills-, task-, or event-specific. Consider the scenario: an inexperienced employee needs to prepare for a meeting with a major client. To rely on Google or ChatGPT would be risky, even foolhardy. (How could it know the intricacies of the deal, the idiosyncrasies of the client, the history of pitfalls and milestones?) But what if she could access the company’s conversation transcripts from the 25-year experience of her predecessor, adapted into a short-form Q&A-style PDF, or animated mobile or laptop learning modules integrated into the company’s LMS or LXP, or a virtual reality (VR) tool giving her just-in-time, immersive learning? That would be gold!
Knowledge transfer is indeed partly about harvesting what senior employees know and using it to accelerate newer talent’s time to full capability. But it is also a pursuit of something more fundamental to the company’s success: embedding the individual legacy of high-performing people within the company’s DNA, so that it can be fortified for the challenges ahead.
For more information, reach out to John Karageorgiou , LRMG’s Senior Sales Architect, Facilitator and Coach, at JohnK@lrmg.co.za or Stuart Symington at StuartS@lrmg.co.za
