Does Tenure & Loyalty Matter Anymore?

Deep knowledge cannot be trained or transferred because deep knowledge is the result of being a part of previous company involvement that brings about complete and often complicated understanding of situations.

You lose deep knowledge when your senior staff retires. You also lose it when you transfer, promote, or replace your stars without figuring out how to transfer their critical knowledge. You can’t simply rely on a data dump to teach the novice everything the deeply experienced worker knows. Deep knowledge comes from what you’ve experienced; it’s not something you can read or learn from a class. It’s why so many corporate initiatives feel like recycled ideas—they generally are.

Every new leader wants to prove that the company hired the smartest person in the room. They want to make their mark on the company, to get a big win, fast. The problem with fast is that it takes time to understand the current situation and how it got that way.

It takes time to figure out the root cause of what seems like a flawed process. When you pull the string, you’ll often find a messy pile of workarounds and temporary fixes for other big new initiatives that went wrong. But instead of turning to the people with deep knowledge who may be able to provide an explanation to why things are the way they are, they dive immediately into coming up with the “fix,” believing their own smarts are better than those around them or those who came before them. They look for their way to shine when there may be light in the room that would help illuminate the reasons why the problem exists and what has been done before that worked or did not.

Every three years or so, a company I worked for would come up with a “new” initiative. New name, new corporate champion, but the same core goals. Nothing had really changed, but new management meant you had to come up with a new initiative. We spent thousands of hours and millions of dollars in consulting fees and technology, and generally wound up right on the same loop, which typically meant a repeat of the same failed attempt to fix the problem.

For this particular situation, we had experienced a great deal of turnover, and I was one of only three members in our global HR team with more than three years of experience with the company. That meant three members with more than three years of tenure for a company that would repeat the same initiative every three years. Do you see the problem? No one but the three of us dinosaurs (we each had more than twenty years of tenure) had even been there the last time the initiative had been attempted. That meant that there were about twenty infants and three dinosaurs trying to fix a long-standing, reoccurring, complicated problem—and the infants were running the show.

Our brand-new leader (the fourth in seven years) of this HR team had spent a few months travelling around, assembling a new team, and formulating a strategy (that was surely going to change the trajectory of the company). During that entire time, she had not once asked the dinosaurs any questions about why things were the way they were. As she unveiled the new priorities, the dinosaurs in the room gazed on a list of almost identical priorities of the former leader(s).

The infants were excited about the new initiative, throwing out ideas and discussing how transformative their contributions would be, celebrating their ingenuity and brilliance. The dinosaurs sat looking at each other, feeling like we had all been punked. It was Groundhog Day. The same thing all over again.

As I looked over the presentation and the slide that listed the new priorities that would be initiated, I recognized eighty percent of them as priorities from each of the previous leaders. All of these priorities had failed, and for very specific, deep-rooted, and challenging reasons.

An exorbitant amount of time and money had been spent to fix these priorities in previous attempts. Consultants. Meetings. Travel. Rebranding. Communication, both internal and external. Process changes. Systems upgrades. Millions of dollars had been spent on the same problems over and over again to experience the same failures over and over again.

It’s not hard to find the problems. It’s the fixing that is the difficult part. As the dinosaurs in the room, we had stories about why fixing these problems were a challenge. It involved dealing with different cultures, complicated reporting lines, and a host of other issues that were costly and caused barriers to success. We were open to a brilliant new idea, but it meant understanding the situation and the failures of the past. It meant relying on the deep knowledge that some of us offered, but which new leaders seemed to disregard because “surely the new leaders knew better.”

New leaders must take the time to listen to the people who have been in the company for a while. Find out what’s working—and why—and what’s not working—and why. How did we get here? What would you do if you were me? Listen to the people who will be directly affected by the changes.

I think people want to contribute right away when they take on a new role, especially with a new company. And I admire new blood and fresh thinking as much as the next person, but I also know that you have to give credit to those who came before you and the good work that may have been done before assuming the role. I know, as a manager, to look for and talk to the people with deep knowledge and ask questions first. If the new lead had simply asked if these things had ever been done, she would have recognized what had already been accomplished while still looking like a leader who wanted to support improvement within the organization.?

About the Author:

Rich Thompson, author of the book; RELENTLESS: Leading Through Performance, Relationships, and the Lessons of Sports, is an expert on staffing, human resources, training, and leadership development.?He is also a former All-Big Ten football player for the University of Wisconsin.?XPG Recruit provides recruiting for staffing companies.?The?XPG Recruit Athlete?division places former athletes into business careers and works closely with universities through its sister company,?PodiumX.