Tribal knowledge is generally passed down from generation to generation and is a critical part of oral tradition in some societies. As with those societies, many businesses also have tribal knowledge that gets passed down from manager to worker and worker to worker. You know you are dealing with tribal knowledge when the training timeline for a straight-forward role, such as a client services rep, seems to take an inordinate amount of time. In businesses like that tribal knowledge is most often referred to as “domain expertise”.
Regardless of the makeup of the department or staff it is critically important to quickly identify who the domain experts or subject matter experts (SMEs) are. These SMEs can take any number for forms. Sometimes they are people who have simply been in the job for an extended period of time and therefore have witnessed every type of problem or approach to solve them. The SME can also be an individual who possesses a highly specific or specialized skill that is highly valued, but is less of an expert in the specific business processes within their function.
A good way to think about how to determine whether your SME is a skill-based specialist or someone in possession of deep tribal knowledge that comes from years of direct experience within the firm is to try and classify them as “makers” or “users”. Makers tend to be an SME type who are deep specialists in a specific discipline. They are highly skilled but possess little if any tribal knowledge about the company. In fact, their value is not in any way derived from specific experience within the firm but rather a skillset they bring into the firm. Users tend to be people who know everything about the function due to long tenures at the firm, but generally lack the skill to make effective changes. A maker will understand what it takes to construct a machine while a user will understand whether the machine is fit for purpose. A good team needs both makers and users.
In this way both makers and users as SMEs can be critical components to a departmental structure. Identifying who is who will help you determine the right combination of skillsets to try and build into your organization.
It is important to note that while domain expertise based on the tribal knowledge of a firm is critically important to helping the manager not repeat mistakes and identify risks quickly, too much of that domain expertise can also breed complacency and an inability to evolve in an intentional manner. These type of domain experts can be paralyzed by their knowledge of what was tried and failed before.
Unfortunately, business leaders are oftentimes saddled with short term objectives that make it easier to elevate or emphasize tribal domain expertise because they will need to spend less time bring those individuals up to speed on corporate priorities. These leaders have become addicted to local knowledge and build organizations that are at high risk of experiencing a skill drought.
That is why it is critically important to classify your staff and measure the risks associated with skill and knowledge gaps. You need both types of experts to be successful. The challenge is not only in identifying and classifying the staff but determining how much of which type of employee you will require to move forward. Assessing your team in this manner will help you eliminate redundancies and assemble a team most likely to help achieve the group’s objectives.
Usually, when you enter a new situation by taking over a new department or something similar, you will be able to identify the folks who possess the most domain expertise. They will be the one person that must be referred to before any serious decision is made. Those people can be equally valuable and part of the problem. Their personal value is derived from being allowed to persist in their roles for long periods of time without writing anything down.
Combining these people with team members from outside the firm who bring real execution skill to the party can be the difference between a mediocre team that cannot move things forward rapidly and a highly functioning team. As a leader, it is your job, regardless of your functional area or discipline within he company, to assemble the right mix of staff and not get sucked into that comfortable place where you depend on the knowledge of a small handful of employees. By and large that means that you will need to drive your team to produce “run books”.
A run book is a description of a process or sub-process that includes all its dependencies and decision points written down and updated every time a change of any kind is introduced. If a department has created an effective set of run books then the dependency on the few is eliminated, and you can redirect your most knowledgeable staff to other more valuable activities. These run books allow you to eliminate an unnecessary dependency and more than likely a fair amount of inefficiencies as well.
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