Know-Who Mattered More than Know-How

Here’s a success story but not in the way you would expect. My boss realized that a retired employee had really critical knowledge of how to set up call centres, so he asked me to go visit her and “do” some knowledge transfer. I said we needed to do something more structured in a team context but he didn’t want to be bothered with the details, he said “just go and do it”. So we invited her to come into the office for a day, and I got the other members of the team in. She said she’d be very happy to tell us all about it, but that she wasn’t the only person who knew this. She was able to identify several people who also had this knowledge, and the parts of the business they had moved to. So my boss was very happy, and he pulled those people back to help him. In the end it wasn’t her knowledge of the call centres that was helpful, it was her knowledge of other people who also knew.

People Matter

When I first started my job I had a manager who would go into his office and close the door and discuss and decide things privately. Then he would come and tell me “you can take on this area of work because of your expertise” but I never knew his rationale or his expectations. Then I got a new manager. She was very open, she is always having conversations, with all her staff. She is very embedded in the organisation, she seems to know everything and everyone. I assumed she had been there for years. I found out she had only been there for 18 months. It turned out she had been very ill at 22, and survived. She decided then that the most important thing was people, so deliberately spends time to get to know people and build relationships with them.

Sociable

I have a colleague who knows the organisation really well. Anyone can go and ask her about anything. Whenever she’s around, everyone around her works better, because she sets the atmosphere.

Who knows?

It’s not so much about knowledge sharing but access. If info resides in humans, I wouldn’t know who to look for. For example, Task A and B. Who do I ask? I can’t email the whole department to ask. It would be weird. So knowing who has the info, that intimidates me. I sent emails to different individuals but I still haven’t got the info.