Knowledge Capture and Transfer

This section of our website includes a variety of articles and resources for capturing and transferring critical knowledge. For more current resources, check out Pam's wiki at http://knowledgetransferalliance.pbworks.com

For more specific information on Pam Holloway's knowledge transfer services, contact Pam directly at pam@aboutpeople.com

  

How to Use Mentoring for Knowledge Transfer

STEP 1 – Define Purpose and Focus

The first step in a mentoring initiative is to define the purpose or focus of the initiative. These questions will help you do that.

1. Why do you want to do a mentoring program? 
2. What are you looking to achieve?
3. If transfer of knowledge, what knowledge?  Be specific.
4. How much of the knowledge to be transferred is predictable and task oriented – doing x, y or z, versus higher level knowledge and ability to respond to new and unique situations?
5. Have you looked at other alternatives for transferring this knowledge?
6. Why do you think mentoring is the best way to go?
7. How will you measure results?
8. How will you know when you’ve achieved your objective?

Mentoring versus other knowledge transfer alternatives

Organizations sometimes choose mentoring for situations where it is not the best choice.  There are several alternatives for knowledge transfer and different situations tend to lend themselves to different solutions.  The optimal solution for an organization is to know how to use all the different approaches and be able to apply whichever one makes sense for a particular situation.  Our focus here is mentoring, so let’s look at where the mentoring approach makes sense.

Situations Where a Mentoring Approach Makes Sense

1. The experts have mentoring or teaching DNA – they are “natural” mentors or teachers and are motivated to achieve excellent results.
2. Time – the mentor is not leaving the organization immediately – there is time for them to be a mentor.
3. There are good candidate(s) for the mentoree role – i.e. people who have the skills and motivation to learn.
4.  The knowledge area lends itself to mentoring.  Work is more hands-on and knowledge to be transferred is definable, straightforward and more “doing” focused rather than “thinking” focused.  
5. The organization has been successful at mentoring in the past (it is part of the culture).
6. There is consensus and buy-in among all stakeholders, including supervisors, teammates, upper management, and HR.

Mentoring Versus Apprenticeship – Doing Versus Being

The terms mentoring and apprenticeship are often used interchangeably, but they are a bit different. The distinction is important only to the extent that it helps us crystallize our focus.  Apprenticeship typically involves an apprentice learning a particular skill or trade. It is more task-focused.  An apprentice will learn how to do x, y or z.  Mentoring, on the other hand, is broader, more about becoming an x, rather than doing y.  Knowledge transfer will likely be both deeper and broader and require that the mentor take a greater responsibility for not only offering up knowledge but also for guiding and shaping the learner. 

One way to think about it is, apprenticeship is more about doing, while mentoring is more about being.  It is a subtle distinction, but important, because it helps us better define the goals of our program, and provides insight we can use in choosing the best people for the roles of teacher and learner. 

Predictable Versus Unique

If the knowledge to be transferred involves regular and predictable work, then the program is much easier to script.  If, on the other hand, you are looking to transfer high level knowledge (critical thinking, resolution of problems that are unpredictable or complex), then it may take more work to outline the “what” and “how” of knowledge transfer. 

STEP 2 – Identify Best Candidate(s)

Mentoring is sometimes implemented on a large scale throughout an organization, and other times used in specific situations to achieve specific objectives. In the case of the later, the organization will typically have a mentor and mentoree in mind.  We also find that often there are not a lot of candidate choices beyond those already suggested.  That said, the analysis of candidates is important regardless. You want to know whether the mentor has the DNA and motivation for teaching.  You also want to know if the mentoree has the DNA and motivation for learning.

If you have a choice between candidates, obviously you want to pick the ones who have the best skills base and psychological profile (good teacher, good learner).  If you don’t have a choice, you still want to know, so that you can make the appropriate accommodations.

What if the mentor is not a good teacher?

What do you do if the person with the knowledge doesn’t have the mentoring or teaching DNA?  In other words, they are not naturally inclined to teach and motivated to transfer knowledge.  Or what if they have the motivation, but lack the skill?  This is where the Mentoring Facilitator role becomes critically important.

A Mentoring Facilitator is typically responsible for:

1. Helping to determine the focus of the project – i.e. the specific knowledge to be transferred
2. Administering surveys to help identify the best candidates or understand the mental makeup of existing candidates
3. Helping to determine project plan and time and activities commitment
4. Working cultural issues: Ensuring manager(s) and team members are all on board with the initiative
5. Measuring results
6. Communicating status

 
If the mentor is not a good teacher, the Facilitator will work with the duo and use questions to enable information flow.  This process is very similar to Knowledge Harvesting Eliciting, and often performed by someone in the organization who has been trained in Knowledge Harvesting. The Mentoring Facilitator will also work with the mentoree one-on-one to help them develop good questioning skills and strategies.  

 

The Facilitator will also help the mentoree collect and organize learnings through use of various tools and templates, such as the What-When-Where-How-With Whom-With What template.  These tools provide a structure to help mentorees ensure they’ve covered all aspects of a task. Some of the tools used in Knowledge Harvesting can also be used in mentoring.

What if the mentoree is not a good learner?

 

In a perfect world, you select apprentices or mentors that have the skills and the motivation to be effective.  In the event that this is not the case, you may want to consider:

1. Skills training to bring them up to a level where they are better able to receive and integrate the knowledge transferred
2. Motivational (i.e. performance) incentives tied directly to mentoring results
3. One-to-one coaching to help the mentoree learn how to ask good questions, apply knowledge, practice skills

STEP 3: Map Out Activities and Time Commitment (Project Plan)

In order for mentoring initiatives to produce optimal results, you need to treat these initiatives with the same importance and rigor you do other business objectives.  That means developing a plan for how time will be spent, the specific knowledge areas that will be covered and the specific activities that will be engaged to enable knowledge transfer.

 

This plan is typically developed by a team consisting of mentor, mentoree, supervisor and facilitator. The team sits down together to map out the activities that will ensure knowledge is successfully transferred.

 

One way to go about this process is to think in terms of Actions and Results.  What are the results that the Mentor produces and what Actions produce those results?  This is similar to what is typically done during the Work Profiling portion of a Knowledge Harvesting project.

 

Mind Maps are useful in this respect because they help break apart and visually organize all the different things a mentor may want to teach the mentoree.

 

 

Once you complete the map, then you can begin to think about situations and activities that will enable the mentoree to learn these things. 

STEP 4 – Ensure Consensus and Commitment

It is essential that you ensure everyone involved is aware of the initiative, understands the importance and is committed to a positive outcome.

This is an area where the Mentoring Facilitator is important.  They take responsibility for speaking to all stakeholders and ensuring everyone is on the same page.

STEP 5 – Facilitate, Monitor, Measure and Report

It is essential to have ongoing observation and oversight even if you are blessed with an optimal situation where both mentor and mentoree are skilled, motivated and self-directed.   

 

You’ll want to tract and report progress and use this information to make course corrections as needed.  Make a point to establish checkpoints along the way and have the team regroup and do a “how are we doing?” level check. Depending on the nature of knowledge transfer, you may also choose to do testing of the mentoree to monitor and measure skills learned.

 

Measurement and feedback are important to keeping the mentor and mentoree motivated and feeling like they are accomplishing their objectives.  It is also important for the organization to ensure they are achieving their objectives and realizing the return on investment.

 

How to Clone Your Best People

Moderately successful business owners and managers know who their top performers are.  Highly successful owners and managers have learned how to clone those top performers.  Which one are you?

Whether it’s sales people, office staff, or service technicians, did you ever say, “If only I had more people like Bob, the entire department would operate in the black.”  And, chances are that’s correct.  The question is, exactly how can you clone your best people?  How can you add more black ink to your bottom line by hiring better?

  

You have two basic choices:  1) high-tech and expensive, or 2) low-tech and affordable.  Which one do you like better?  Just a wild guess, but let’s say you want low-tech and affordable.  This means you’ll take more of a hands-on approach. 

First, identify your top performers (in a specific job).  Let’s take sales as an example. 

Second, recognize how your top sales performers do what they do.  In particular, you look for the common qualities and competencies among your star salespeople. 

Third, build a profile of those qualities and competencies.  You can use a few conversational questions to get key information from top performers.  Let’s say you discover that your top sales people possess five common qualities and competencies:

• Proactive – tends toward direct action rather than thinking about things
• Persuasive – good at building rapport, leading, influencing
• Competitive – invigorated by competition, likes to win
• Positive – always on the lookout for the positive in any situation
• Social – invigorated by social interaction

Now that you have this information, you have a head-start on what to look for when you begin to interview new sales people.  You simply look for people with those specific qualities.

The Tricky Part

How do you identify the common traits?  That’s the tricky part, and it requires a tool.  Again, the choice is yours.  You can spend literally millions and get a highly effective, high-tech tool.  Or, you can spend mere thousands and get a highly effective, low-tech tool.  What makes this so tricky is that there are lots of choices.  You probably already know about the many variations of personality tests and behavioral assessments.  Chances are, you’ve also discovered lots of variation in the quality and validity of those personality tools. 

  

To make matters worse, most assessment processes tend to employ tunnel-vision - they focus on assessing the applicant within a vacuum.  They don’t take time to understand the job and the success criteria.  It seems like common sense, doesn’t it – to know what you’re looking for BEFORE you start looking!  Unless your tool can help you address the job and success within your culture, you could easily end up with an excellent performer who hates showing up for work. 

  

In addition, if you’re not careful, you could easily end up assessing all the wrong things, and not even know it.  You could chew up a lot of time and expense and get very little return on your investment.  All this is to say, be cautious when selecting the tool.  Unless you employ 30,000 people, keep it simple and low-tech. 

A perfectly logical solution

During ten years of research, we’ve discovered only one tool that contains everything you probably want:  low-tech, affordable, highly effective and used by some very high-profile corporations, such as Southwest Airlines and IBM.  Its called the Language and Behavior (LAB) Profile. 

  

LAB Profiling is based on the scientifically valid concept that people’s language gives you a direct link to their behavior.  In other words, if you listen carefully to the words someone uses, you can understand how his or her mind works.  Here’s how it would work for you.  If you teach your sales people to follow a specific sales process, you absolutely need to hire people who naturally and automatically embrace procedures.  You need to hire people who will not vary from that procedure.  What are the chances of finding those people in a random sample?  About 1 in 2.  But, if you know what to listen for, you’ll recognize it in the language when your applicant talks.

Here’s how we use the LAB profile to create a profile.  We interview the top performers in a specific job, asking 8 – 10 conversational questions that enable us to determine their values and how their minds work.  What we actually identify is called a “mental filter configuration.”  That configuration becomes a template or map to identify your next superstars.  We, then, simply use those same 8 – 10 questions to interview job candidates.  The result is, we can immediately see how closely a candidate’s mental filter configuration matches those of your top performers.  The closer they are to the template, the better they will perform.  The farther they are from the template, the more money they will cost you.

It’s a low-tech, practical, and amazingly effective approach.  The important thing is not so much what tool you use, just that you look at the characteristics of star performers and use those as your guide for hiring.