Meet Jean-Philippe

Completely fictitious case study: You are the founder and director of BrouetteCorp, the Limousin-based market leader in connected three-wheel wheelbarrows.

Jean-Philippe, aged 54, has been the in-house expert for twenty years on one of your key processes: wheel rounding. He set it up, and he alone knows all the details. He's very efficient and rather helpful, though not with everyone. During meetings, he brings up problems with rubber vulcanization that nobody understands, only to explain after half an hour of collective panic how he's already solved them, for which he is congratulated.

Jean-Philippe is not yet a problem for your organization: he's meeting his targets, production has never been so fast, and the wheels are so round.

But what happens if he falls ill? If he leaves the company? Or simply if his commitment wanes?

Your attempts to formalize your expertise

You have already tried to convince him to formalize his know-how in one (or several) Word documents, in Notion, in Excel, in Powerpoint... Without success: "no time with the production to ensure", "too complicated to synthesize"...

You gave him an intern, then a deputy, with the secret mission of doing this formalization work. They left, disgusted, because he didn't delegate much to them and didn't explain anything. "Oh, by the way, it's not up to date, we've customized the product a lot".

You began to suspect that Jean-Philippe was a little reluctant... unless it was a fear of losing his central position in the company if he shared his knowledge?

But what to do?

Some possible solutions

• Value transmission, not expertise.
  ‍Eitherthrough individual objectives, which will incorporate training or knowledge transmission time, a quantified objective of processes covered or people trained.
  Or, more innovatively, by abandoning individual objectives for support functions, which all too often lead to this type of information-holding strategy, in favor of collective objectives.

• Think about its possible evolution.
  Jean-Philippes often find themselves in pyramid structures that offer the top jobs to managers and leave the experts under a glass ceiling. So what choice do Jean-Philippes have but to hang on to their expertise? What would their next position be? There are solutions to enable these experts to evolve: create transversal squads of experts for the biggest structures, create an internal academy and offer them a position as a trainer, integrate them into a mentoring program, freeing them from part of their time.‍

• Think about your company's culture.
  ‍Iscollaboration at the heart of your company's values? Is the high demand for results (we don't know of any company that claims to be undemanding when it comes to results) accompanied by a strong individualization of objectives and directive management? It must be clear to Jean-Philippe that they will lose nothing by sharing, and that on the contrary, you value the time spent making such precious knowledge available to others.‍

• And of course, offer him a quick and easy way to pass on his knowledge ( Komin.io, for example).
  Jean-Philippe will no longer be able to hide behind the arguments of time, repetition, difficulty in synthesizing or unsuitable format. He may even get a taste for it (in fact, we're sure he will, but let's be modest).

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