An important trend facing organizations across all industries is bridging the knowledge gap between outgoing employees and those who remain or are hired to fulfill their work. Despite a stubbornly persistent unemployment rate in the U.S., attracting and retaining people who can positively impact your company remains a considerable challenge to building and maintaining a premier organization. Triggered by Baby Boomer retirements, companies must develop systematic ways to attract the best, retain the best, and hold on to the knowledge that the best contribute to their organizations.

1. How to Build and Maintain a Premier
Organization
by
Mike Kahn
Executive Senior Partner – Human Resources
Introduction
An important trend facing organizations across all industries is bridging the knowledge gap between
outgoing employees and those who remain or are hired to fulfill their work. Despite a stubbornly
persistent unemployment rate in the U.S., attracting and retaining people who can positively impact your
company remains a considerable challenge to building and maintaining a premier organization.
Triggered by Baby Boomer retirements, companies must develop systematic ways to attract the best,
retain the best, and hold on to the knowledge that the best contribute to their organizations.
This paper is based upon my extensive experience in executive recruiting and 22 years as a Human
Resources practitioner and offers ways to ensure that when key people leave, the intellectual investment
made by your organization remains for the next generation of employees.
Knowledge Transfer
How do we take the knowledge accrued by experienced employees and transfer it to those succeeding
them? How do you bridge the knowledge gap that exists between those with extensive experience and
those with clear potential but less tenure? How do you retain the knowledge that younger talent invests
into an organization when they decide to take the next step in their careers?
For organizations across all industries, retaining the knowledge that you’ve invested in creating is
important. When people leave, it’s too late to retain what they take with them. To counterbalance that,
it’s important to have processes in place to harness and retain that knowledge before they depart.
Knowledge transfer is not easy. It requires discipline, a plan, and a process. But there are important
steps companies can take to enhance and retain crucial, experiential information.
 Inventory your talent. Identify which positions are most crucial—executives, business development,
sales, product development, risk management, team leaders in project management, etc., and initiate
knowledge transfer accordingly.
 Plan ahead. Retirement, maternity leave, and employees deciding to return to school full time usually
provide you with months or weeks of advanced knowledge. Hire replacements for these departures
as soon as possible and allow the new hires to job shadow before they take over.
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2.  Know where your talent lies. Create an experts’ list or a skills database for who in your organization
manages risks and opportunities. They may not always be at the top of the org. chart but they are
important sources of institutional knowledge.
 Conduct exit interviews before an employee leaves. Candid and credible exit interviews are
beneficial. But don’t wait until the exit interview to glean important information. Regularly ask
employees the types of questions you would in an exit interview. It may help you retain great talent
and will minimize the impact of their departure if they choose to leave.
 Keep in touch. Consider creating ways for retired employees to stay involved by inviting them to
breakfast briefings, engaging them in market research, asking them to share business intelligence,
and encouraging them to send you emails or reports on trends or nuances in your industry. You will
garner goodwill and good knowledge.
 Establish and track your metrics. These must be tied into your organization’s goals and objectives
and should track how HR is contributing to meeting them. For instance, one metric that makes sense
to track is the cost of employee turnover.
 There are multiple ways to track turnover costs including this method explained in a
Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) webcast. SHRM predicts that it costs
six to nine months salary to replace a salaried employee. If you lose a petroleum engineer
making $85,000, it will cost you $42,500–$56,100 to replace her. Regardless of the
methodology, understanding and tracking these types of metrics will help you directly link
the HR function to your organization’s strategic and financial objectives.
How do you fill this knowledge hole? There are a number of successful strategies that I’ve seen
companies employ.
 Mentoring and reverse mentoring
The CEO of SAP, Bill McDermott, announced to a group of executives in Northern Virginia that he
advocates promoting Millennials as innovation leaders. While a bit controversial, he appreciates that
older employees can learn from these digital pioneers and that experienced professionals have a great
deal to offer their younger counterparts. With our workforce soon to consist of five generations,
mentorships and reverse mentorships are a smart strategy.
 Team projects to train and advise
Diverse project teams are smart operationally and provide a valuable method of knowledge transfer.
They offer a broader perspective than solo assignments. They change office culture with communal
workspaces, video conferencing, and the flexibility to work from home. And they provide a forum for
capturing knowledge by documenting achievements, errors, and omissions for post-project review. This
rich institutional knowledge can guide future projects and future employees with meaningful content.
 Job Rotations
Best practices show that companies who regularly provide new opportunities to employees not only
increase retention but build institutional value. Taking an Operations Specialist and putting him into HR,
or moving an Engineer into a Sales role takes effort and planning. The moves must meet needs of the
employer, however, and must build upon the interests and competencies of the employee.
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3. Succession Planning
Succession planning helps your organization effectively plan for your future human resource needs. It
allows you to build strategically important competencies and helps your organization grow an internal
talent base necessary to replace those who are promoted, leave, or retire.
Today’s highest-performing companies are succession planning well beyond the C-Suite. Regardless of
whether people stay 5 or 35 years, the knowledge that they gain during their tenure is valuable and it’s
important that you take the necessary steps to retain it.
Once your succession plan is in place, you have to create a succession process. Your company’s
priorities should be embodied in your succession process. Want to become more nimble in social
media? Take direct steps to achieve it now. Want to outpace your competition in Big Data? You’ll need
to recruit, hire, and retain data scientists. Considering merging marketing and IT into an integrated unit?
Plan for how such a move will impact future hires.
As you go through this important process, always remember that who you hire today may become your
CEO in eight years.
Building your own talent
When talent walks out the door, do you have the bench strength and knowledge base you need to
supplant it? Despite a dizzying array of technological advancements, business remains profoundly
personal in many ways. The final way to offset talent loss is through internal talent growth. Combined
with knowledge transfer and succession planning, talent growth is the third leg of the premier
organization stool.
One of the best ways to build internal talent is to provide cross-functional growth opportunities for those
with promise. Sales and finance have historically been the most fertile grounds for nurturing future
CEOs. But that dynamic is changing. CMOs and CTOs are beginning to move into the coveted corner
office. Whether you’re grooming CEO successors or mid-level managers, opportunities to broaden
experience and exposure are golden.
Creating professional challenges, mentoring with talent, and delivering systematic training opportunities
can help your organization build a strong internal talent base. A surfeit of talent is one of the most
important challenges facing the business world. Internal talent development is vitally important for
organizations of all sizes.
External recruiters can help organizations address these needs. Every day, our goal is to match the right
people with the right opportunities and we keep abreast of what’s happening in the industry, best
practices, and important trends. That is valuable external perspective. By employing knowledge
transfer, succession planning, and talent building into your business strategy, you can take important
steps to building a competitive, premier organization.
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4. Are you building a premier organization? Do you employ an integrated approach as described above or
have your found other methods to achieve your objectives? I will be blogging more about these issues at
Your Career Intel in the near future and I’m very interested in hearing how you are building a premier
organization. Please email me your thoughts at MKahn@LucasGroup.com.
About Mike Kahn
Mike’s parents owned a retail store while he was growing up. After graduating from Tulane University, he
began working for Foley’s Department Store in Houston, Texas. There, one of his mentors stressed the
importance of knowledge transfer between Salespeople and Store Buyers in order to better understand
the consumer. It was a lesson he never forgot. Mike has worked in Human Resources for more than 20
years and joined Lucas Group’s HR Practice Group in 2007. He is Director-elect for Texas SHRM,
representing some 18,000 HR professionals, and will become its Director in 2015.
About Lucas Group
Lucas Group is North America's premier executive search firm. Since 1970, our culture and
methodologies have driven superior results. We assist mid-tier to Fortune 500 Clients find transcendent,
executive talent; Candidates fully realize their career ambitions; and Associates find professional
success. To learn more, please visit Lucas Group at www.lucasgroup.com and connect with us on
LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
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