Facilitating succession planning and knowledge transfer

- Just like everything else in our digital economy, knowledge transfer and succession planning need to be thought of as always on, 24/7 propositions. Yet, according to the Society for Human Resource Management, 40% of companies fail to engage in any sort of succession planning whatsoever. Traditionally, knowledge transfer and succession planning have focused on older leaders and key managers approaching retirement, but those rules no longer apply. Today, retiring managers aren't the only ones walking out the door with significant knowledge about your business. Turnover is an epidemic in our fast-paced and competitive economy and it's happening up and down the generational spectrum. By the time someone gets to their exit interview, it's too late. Make preserving your intellectual capital part of everyone's day-to-day job description. Gone are the days when someone could turn over the keys to their filing cabinet and leave it to their successor to figure things out. If you're not already doing so, develop ongoing documentation protocols across the organization to preserve best practices, KPIs, and other proprietary intelligence. It's just like in software development. Good programmers make sure to document the code that they write, explaining how and why it was written, so that others can modify or improve it down the road. Translating this into a management context, organizations must dedicate a certain percentage of time, say five to 10%, depending on the business and the IP, to reviewing and compiling critical workflows, knowledge, and business intelligence, including competitor information. Ask yourself this question. In the event of a worst-case disaster, how long would it take to get a given department, or the entire organization, back up and running? If you had to reconstitute a team from scratch, would you know where to turn to pull job descriptions, product or sales playbooks, research data, and other information you would need to rehire and relaunch that team? This means that organizations must adopt a more proactive and pervasive posture to preserve the intellectual capital their teams are generating and make it an all-hands inclusive and recurring process. Don't make the mistake of thinking of this as an exclusively clerical function, interns taking notes in meetings, and the like. It is actually a team-building opportunity. It is a way for team members across all generations to reflect regularly on the value of what they do and to memorialize those insights. It is a collective contribution to the future success of each team and the entire operation. Ask your employees questions like, "What do you consider to be the 10 most important tasks "you do every week?" "Have you or could you teach these tasks to someone else?" "What are the most frequent problems or questions "you have to solve or answer?" "What solutions have you or your team devised "that have improved your work process, "work product, or overall productivity?" Younger generations are rising more quickly into leadership positions and putting effective new management ideas into practice, but organizations risk losing them at a much higher rate than in earlier, more stable times. Smart succession planning can safeguard the promotion and backfilling of leaders as they take on more responsibilities and help mitigate the downside risk in the event that they leave for another opportunity. Recruiting practices must similarly anticipate these risks and work with hiring managers to maintain a highly functional managerial bench from which to train new leaders and to backfill unexpected departures. Do you have any succession or knowledge transfer blind spots in your organization? It's time to address preserving your intellectual capital while also making it part of your multi-generational workforce strategy.