My Job is to Make Myself Obsolete
Just recently, BusinessWeek reported about the skirmish for human resources between Lenovo and Dell in Asia where top executives from Dell are transferring to Lenovo. To date, 6 key figures have moved out of Dell (ranks 3rd place in Asia according to International Data) towards industry-leader Lenovo.
While such brain drain would have caused big problems to most companies, not under Steve Felice’s watch.
It’s obviously something that we didn’t expect…we are dealing with it. None of these people is irreplaceable.
Brain drain can be fixed with a properly implemented Knowledge Management Program. At the heart of such undertaking, is the objective to retain intangible assets like knowledge and wisdowm within the organization. This usually involves:
Documentation
Procedures and best practices in a company should always be documented. In this way, the basic responsibilities and know-how required in a position can easily be retrieved by the replacements. Documentation can take in lots of forms: manuals, blogs, webcasts, podcasts, audio, video, etc. Day by day, more and more companies are seeing the possible business applications of today’s technologies.
Super-Vision
Rookies can jumpstart their knowledge through a mentoring program. Paired with a senior, rookies can get a taste of visionary guidance from someone who’s been there and done that - Super-Vision. While there might be an abundance of books detailing the concepts and theories of the practice, the shortcuts and lessons from supervisors that don’t make it to the books are priceless.
Grooming
There is a lot of truth in the saying, “Nothing beats experience.” For organizations who want to develop the depth and breadth of their bench, nothing beats being thrown into the actual job. With regards to information-heavy jobs, this is where the thought process gets developed and used well. This goes to show how memorizing stuff in college isn’t really that useful. Or maybe that’s just me talking… Moving on…
Intangible assets like worker experience and know how should be given as much thought as tangible assets like land and property. With a properly trained replacement, filling up a emptied spots in a company can be less expensive (immediate trainings, out-of-budget briefings, etc.) and a lot easier (less disruption of work for people dependent on the vacant job).
Personally, I believe that my job is to make myself obsolete. Whenever I work on systems, I try to make it a point to provide the proper system documentation and training for the users. I want the system to be easy to use and automated as much as possible so that they won’t need me to do their stuff for them. For instance, if they want to update the news section of their site, they don’t have to go to me to upload the document. They can do it themselves by using the form and manual I provide. I want to make it very easy for them to replace me. In that way, clients keep coming back for more.
How about you? Are you obsolete?