Time to Share

Last night at dinner I heard a story about knowledge and time. One of the topics that comes up very often when talking about knowledge sharing is about „preserving knowledge when a person leaves“. That is a big concern because people are more flexible, move around more, and managers are more aware that "knowledge can take a walk".

When thinking about this based on last nights story, three angles came to my mind:

- Preserve the knowledge early and ongoing - i.e. embed it through having experts share it within communities (not necessarily via documents), by mentor-ship and through networking.

- Try to capture knowledge when they leave - but not via „why don‘t you write down everything you know before you go“, but rather in some smarter ways like the knowledge transfers sessions I described in my book, or overlaps between leaver and replacement (where possible).

- Another way: Don‘t let them go unnecessarily

The story was about a woman that not only had longer years of expertise, but also several years of experience within that specific environment. She was a manager, she knew a lot of people in the organization as the type of her job was giving her the possibility to meet many of those in other departments as well. Being social she used that to her advantage over the years and at the same time turned into an important node within that organization (I am sure you met people like that).

Best of all it wasn‘t just that she knew those she needed to pull triggers, but they knew her and made best use of her department as well. As an important node in the organization, she enabled important knowledge flow.

Then she had a baby. Before she went, she asked whether it would be possible to come back 60% after a short time. There was an easy solution to cover the additional 40%. Still management did not let her do it. They came with a number of arguments, which were fairly easy to argue against, until the killer argument was brought out. A position like this has to be filled with somebody working minimum 80%.
In the end a less experienced, less social person got the job and the connectivity between departments deteriorated.

To me the management decision was very shortsighted. There were no financial implications, it was fear of leaving the old model. Some people still seem to be stuck in the factory model, where their employees work 8-6, use a time-tracking device every time they leave the room for a bio-break.

We live in the age of knowledge workers and many of us are in that category and the group is growing. It is much less about time as it is about what we do with it. With the complexity of jobs it is about experience, information and creativity to act in the right way. Work results can be astonishingly independent of the actual time spent. Especially when what we need to achieve is highly dependent on information, prior experience, and conclusions that we need to draw, time might be not as important as having a well established network for example.

You probably also know people that can achieve things in 2-3 hours, that others less-experienced in a similar role might need a full day for. And an experienced 60% person can definitely be more effective and valuable than a non-experienced 100% person.

A lot of innovative companies have understood this. But it is time, that all organizations that employ knowledge workers get it. The ones that do not might produce well filled-in time sheets, while their competition is getting ahead by keeping the smarter people with more flexibility.