Capturing Institutional Knowledge
Nearly all organizations suffer from poor transference of institutional knowledge across generations of employees, citizens, congressmen, etc. This problem has a tendency to get uniquely bad because the most competent members of an organization or society are typically those with the least time to teach. Trying to get your best salesperson to teach others how to sell is a nightmare. Getting a country’s best entrepreneurs to teach kindergarten is completely unrealistic.
We call this the ability paradox: Those with the most knowledge and skill have the most demands on them and thus are least equipped to pass on that knowledge.
We utilize simple institutional rewards to track individual performance and create bonuses for our best employees when they invest time in transferring their skill sets to other team members (and giving additional rewards if the numbers indicate that skill transference turned out to be successful).
It also helps to frame successful leadership as inherently entailing skillful delegation and knowledge transference. Our investors and board members consistently showcase sterling examples of leaders who succeed by hiring excellent people and equipping them to do an even better job in certain domains than the leader themselves. Framing success as delegation and knowledge transfer—and in contrast, failure as micromanagement—distributes key man risk in leadership structures (the concentration of too much knowledge or ability in one person).