One of the many forces driving the need for knowledge retention practices

Posted by  Shawn Callahan —June 24, 2007
Filed in Collaboration

The ‘up or out’ policy is well known in consulting firms like McKinsey & Company. If you are not promoted in 5 years to partner then you’re out. It has been estimated that up to 5/6ths of people who leave McKinsey leave as a result of this policy. What might be surprising to some is that a similar (mostly tacit) policy exists in Australia’s public sector; it’s up or assumed you have given up on your career. This mindset of having to keep moving up the hierarchy is not isolated to the public service, the Australia Army has a similar and more overt example with what is informally called POMs—Passed Over Majors. These majors are readily recognisable because they wear a medal representing 10 years of service. Ten years as a major typically means you’ve been passed over.

To be a career bureaucrat requires a broad experience of policy and programme delivery. It’s not unusual for someone to spend as little as 6 months in a job before moving to their next position. If you spend more than 3 years in one position then, according to senior management, you have given up, you’ve become stale. This expectation creates havoc resulting in what seems to me like excessive churn. One section I’m aware of has had 9 managers in 12 months. Remarkably the team held together and managed themselves, which was a testament to their resilience.

High churn will remain because the senior leaders who’ve benefited from hopping from one position to the next are now the power group whose every move and utterance is scrutinised by the aspiring leaders of the future. The power group will tell the stories of how they got ahead and expect the aspiring ones to do the same. The culture has been set and reinforced.

The result for knowledge (and in turn, productivity) is both good and bad. Frequent movement creates cross-pollination fostering opportunities for innovation. That’s a good thing. People leaving after 2-3 years, however, creates knowledge gaps, especially if the group operates like a group of individuals, which happens a lot. Head down, bum up, getting your particular output out the door.

Knowledge retention has the wrong sound to it. It makes you think about holding on to what you’ve got. You immediately think of knowledge capture, which is an unhelpful mindset. Knowledge circulation might be a better phrase because the aim, I believe, is to share knowledge among people in the group so that it is resilient to someone leaving.

To become resilient to knowledge lost requires the adoption of a set of knowledge sharing practices that operate all the time, not just when you learn someone is leaving. They might include the following:

  • participating in communities of practice
  • after action reviews
  • lessons learning sessions
  • working together (radical concept) rather than as individuals
  • pairing expert with novice
  • fostering knowledge sharing behaviours
  • story listening and telling

About  Shawn Callahan

Shawn, author of Putting Stories to Work, is one of the world's leading business storytelling consultants. He helps executive teams find and tell the story of their strategy. When he is not working on strategy communication, Shawn is helping leaders find and tell business stories to engage, to influence and to inspire. Shawn works with Global 1000 companies including Shell, IBM, SAP, Bayer, Microsoft & Danone. Connect with Shawn on:

Comments

  1. Mark Schenk says:

    I also like the concept of ‘knowledge diffusion’, whereby knowledge is ‘permitted or caused to spread freely’ [see Merriam-Webster online dictionary]. The downside of the term diffusion is another definition from Merriam-Webster online which describes diffusion as ‘spreading out thinly or wastefully’.

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