The Working Week 67: Transferring Critical Knowledge
This week, Wayne is joined once again by Management-Issues’ longest-standing columnist, Dan Bobinski, to discuss why it is that so many organisations are
ignoring the transfer of critical knowledge.
Because as the Baby Boom generation of senior management heads off into retirement, the curious lack of urgency about retaining the knowledge that underpins organisations means that many are likely to suffer an unprecedented loss of skills and experience unless they get better at managing the transfer of knowledge from one generation to another.
From Dan’s perspective this is an ever-increasing problem. Worse, the higher up one goes in an organisation, the less people are prepared to share what they know – or admit what they don’t know. And if the people at the top don’t have any great sense of urgency about the problem, what hope is there further down the food chain?
To make matters worse, Dan says, individuals are moving from company to company far more frequently than used to be the case. This mobility, and the fact that in many workplaces, as many as four generations work side-by-side means knowledge is just not getting filtered throughout the organisation.
So how do organisations capture knowledge? First, its vital to persuade older, often very senior, staff that knowledge transfer matters.
Then you need to get HR folks more involved round the top table. And they need to ask themselves some important questions before they set out their case. Things like:
what results do we want? What behaviours will get those results and what knowledge, skills and attitudes will give us those behaviours?
Tags: knowledge transfer