2016-01-19 04:56:55
Rebecca Knight
January 15, 2016
When a valuable employee tells you she s leaving, worrying about losing her
institutional knowledge and experience is understandable. How can you oversee
the transition in a way that helps you retain that expertise? Who should be
involved? How far in advance of the employee s end date do you need to start?
And how do you motivate the departing colleague to cooperate?
What the Experts Say
In many organizations, the typical off-boarding process is a whirlwind of
project wrap-ups, paperwork, and exit interviews. The manager might ask the
person who s leaving to write a [report] to share his knowledge, but often
there s just not enough time for that, says John Sullivan, professor of
management at San Francisco State University, HR expert, and author of 1000
Ways to Recruit Top Talent. But failing to capture the departing employee s
organizational-specific knowhow is shortsighted especially if the person
leaving has deep smarts meaning business critical, experienced-based
knowledge, says Dorothy Leonard, professor emerita at Harvard Business School
and chief adviser of the consulting firm Leonard-Barton Group. These are the
people who have so much tribal knowledge and are so valuable that they become
almost irreplaceable, she says. Fortunately, a lot of this know-how can be
passed along if you make it a priority. You re not going to be able to clone
the employee, but you can identify her behaviors, thought patterns, and
processes that have made her such a valuable decision-maker. Here s how:
Make a plan
Your first step is to lay out how you will transfer the knowledge, who you will
transfer the knowledge to, and along what timeline. If you have a say in the
matter, ask the departing employee to give you a couple of months notice.
Doing so gives you time to identify and hire a qualified replacement whether
that person is an internal candidate or an external one. That may not be
possible, but buy as much time as you can. Then you and the employee must work
together to figure out the scope of information that needs to be transferred.
Ask, How much of this [expert s] knowledge has never been captured or
documented? suggests Leonard. This information will help you come up with
learning plans for your team and the individual s successor. Bear in mind that
the more unarticulated the knowledge, the more time you ll need to pass it
along.
Motivate the expert
The next step in the process is to encourage the person who s leaving to share
his knowledge. If the employee is really unhappy with the organization, this
could be a challenge, Leonard acknowledges. In fact, it may be well-nigh
impossible to convince him to cooperate. But if he s just somewhat reluctant,
you need to find out why. It could be that he s humble or unaware of his
expertise. He thinks, That s just the way I do things. Or perhaps he doesn
t know how to teach others what he knows. In these cases, it s your job to help
him transfer knowledge in a structured way, she says.
Create apprenticeships
If you have months for a transition, Leonard suggests creating a carefully
constructed action plan of learning, whereby the highly skilled, deep smarts
employee is paired with one or more replacements so they can observe her in
action, learn and practice new skills, and receive feedback on their
performance. Consider it an accelerated apprenticeship. The learner might sit
in on a conference call to hear how the expert pitches clients or attend a
meeting to observe her soliciting input from colleagues in another department.
After a period of shadowing, give successors a series of mini-experiences so
they can try doing the tasks on their own. We don t learn deeply by checklists
or lectures, Leonard says. We learn by doing.
Emphasize team learning
If you re really short on time and you don t have an identified successor,
Leonard recommends holding a meeting in which the departing employee shares
stories with colleagues about how he handled problems and crises that arose
during his tenure. This exploratory question and answer session should be
conducted by a skilled facilitator. The goal, she says, is to reveal insights
into the expert s thought process and help team members absorb information.
Questions such as Who did you consult before you made this decision? And what
alternatives did you consider? should be encouraged. You want to go through
these [scenarios] in a structured way and in enough detail so that a pattern
emerges. The most effective knowledge transfer involves conversation. Sullivan
recommends also asking the expert how he learned what he knows. Ask what he
reads, which websites he visits, and whom he talks to, he says. The goal is to
speed up the learning of the remaining team members. The world changes so
quickly, what matters is how you learn new stuff.
Document selectively
Sullivan is skeptical of off-boarding processes that require the departing
employee to compose a hefty here s-how-to-do-my-job manual. Too often, he
says, the person doesn t bother to write it up, and even when he does, no one
ever reads it. Selective recordkeeping can be helpful, however. Leonard
recommends that apprentices and team members trying to capture the expert s
knowledge keep learning logs of information that, in some cases, can later be
entered into a database.
Focus on the relationship
The best way to retain the expertise of a departing star employee is to
maintain a relationship with her. You might go to her with the occasional
question, engage her as a consultant or hire her back someday. So set the right
tone during the off-boarding process, says Sullivan. Even if you don t work
together again, she still serves as a brand ambassador who could refer business
or job candidates, he says. Don t accuse people of disloyalty for leaving, he
says. Let them know you love them and that you want to keep in touch. It s not
an exit, it s the beginning of the next phase, he says. Leonard concurs:
People who are leaving a company want to feel good about [the place they re
leaving].
Be prepared for the next time
The off-boarding process goes much more smoothly if you already have tools and
systems in place to ensure that knowledge is constantly being transferred from
experts to successors. That way, if the proverbial bus were to run over the
employee, you re not left in the lurch, says Leonard. For example, says
Sullivan, the kind of concentrated job shadowing discussed above doesn t need
to be reserved for off-boarding purposes. As the manager, you should always
create opportunities for less-seasoned colleagues to work side-by-side with
your resident experts, he says. The objective for the less-experienced staff
member is to learn how his senior colleague gets things done; the goal for the
expert is to mentor, which is part of leadership development, he says. Of
course, some experts are disinclined to teach others how to do their jobs
because they want to be seen as irreplaceable. But you can t afford to have an
employee with a monopoly on company-specific knowledge. To prevent this,
training and coaching should be part of the promotion process or an incentive
for phased retirement. They should need to prove that they ve trained their
backfill, he says.
Principles to Remember
Do:
Create opportunities for less-experienced colleagues to observe the expert in
action
Encourage team members to keep a log of what they ve learned from the expert
and, more importantly, to practice new skills and behaviors
Make training and coaching part of the promotion process in order to motivate
experts to mentor possible successors before they leave
Don t:
Panic determine the timeframe and the scope of the knowledge that needs
transferring to figure out which strategies will work best for your team
Bother asking the departing expert to write a lengthy how-to manual instead,
ask him to share stories of how he handled problems in the past
Treat the person like a traitor for leaving the organization use the
off-boarding process to demonstrate your respect
Case Study #1: Determine a workable timeframe and be flexible
Julie Lavender, director of personnel relations and employee policies at Ford,
admits that she was rattled when Maria, one of her high performers who had
worked at the automaker for close to 30 years, announced her plans to retire.
There was a moment of panic, says Julie. Maria had a complicated job. She
worked on government contracts and compliance issues, and she was very good at
digging into details. She also had relationships with a lot of key
stakeholders. Losing that could be very difficult.
With Julie s approval, Maria applied for Ford s phased retirement program,
which allows prospective retirees to work part-time for six months at full-time
pay. Her application was granted. Whew. That took pressure off me because
Maria s primary responsibility during that time would be to onboard her
replacement in a high-quality way, says Julie.
Julie quickly identified Kelly as Maria s successor. Maria opted to work three
months full-time and then have three months off at full-time pay. But timing
was a challenge. Kelly was being promoted and her negotiations with the union
took longer than we expected, says Julie.
In light of the scheduling issues, Maria offered to take some of her time off
earlier, so there would be more overlap with Kelly. Maria was really flexible,
and that helped make it a positive experience for everyone.
Under Julie s supervision, Kelly and Maria soon began working closely on a
transition plan. Using Ford s internal knowledge transfer tool, Maria created a
reference for Kelly that detailed the access codes she would need, information
on how to write reports, and the names and contact information of relevant
internal and external colleagues.
Maria also facilitated meetings with Kelly and each of the key stakeholders;
this was a way to introduce her to the people and the issues, says Julie.
Because of timing, Kelly never got to take the lead in the meetings with Maria
in attendance, but that would ve been ideal.
Julie says that during the off-boarding process, her goal was to demonstrate
respect for Maria and all that she did for the organization, and also support
Kelly. I wanted to show her that I had confidence in her.
Maria s paid leave was up in December, and she recently delivered her laptop
and company key cards at a department potluck. She told us we could call
anytime with questions.
Case Study #2: Lead storytelling sessions for colleagues and replacements
Tamar Elkeles, chief people officer of Quixey, a technology company that helps
users find information inside mobile apps, says she hates the term
off-boarding because it feels inadequate. People are your number one asset,
and the term off-boarding sounds almost derogatory, she says. It should be
more about helping people transition to their next stage whether it s a new
career, retirement, or something else altogether.
At her former job, she led the transition process for Bob (not his real
name), who was leaving the company to start his own venture. Bob not only
headed the company s marketing department, he was also the person who started
the department from scratch, so everyone was worried about losing his
expertise.
To help the marketing team get up to speed, Tamar held a series of focused
storytelling sessions where she would interview Bob about a specific ad
campaign or initiative that he had run in the past. We had a tremendous amount
of respect for Bob s work and wanted to celebrate him as well as capture his
knowledge, she explains. The sessions lasted 30 or 40 minutes each, and she
held about a dozen per week over a two-month period, acting as the primary
facilitator but also encouraging other employees to chime in with questions.
I would ask questions like, Tell us about the messaging of this campaign. Why
did you choose this collateral? How did you pick the colors of the logo? Why
did you decide to use this agency? she says. I wanted people to understand
the thinking behind the decisions.
After each session, one employee was tasked with summing up the essence of the
story in several paragraphs and sending it to the rest of the team in an
email. These stories are also now shared with new hires during the onboarding
process so that all employees benefit from Bob s experience and expertise, even
though he s no longer with the company.
Rebecca Knight is a freelance journalist in Boston and a lecturer at Wesleyan
University. Her work has been published in The New York Times, USA Today, and
The Financial Times.