Knowledge mapping: Surfacing employee strengths

Host: [00:00:00] Welcome to Talent Talks, the L&D podcast about the future of work and the talent driving it forward. The world of work is changing fast, from AI reshaping strategies to new definitions of success, and the push for people-first mindsets. Learning leaders are being asked to do more, do it better, and do it faster than ever before.

Together, let’s learn, relearn, and sometimes even unlearn what L&D can look like in today’s world. I’m your host, Gina Lionatos, and this is Talent Talks.

Talent Talks is brought to you by TalentLMS, the easy-to-use training platform that delivers real business results from day one. Learn more at talentlms.com.[00:01:00] 

On today’s episode…

Julia Phelan: I would caution people to not be too dependent on that – well, how many times have you done this before? What’s your level of experience? And rather think about what are the other skills that you have? 

Host: We’re diving into the world of knowledge mapping – what it is, why it matters, and how it can transform the way teams learn, share, and grow.

Joining me is Julia Phelan, learning scientist and co-founder of To Eleven. She spent years helping organizations capture not just what people know, but how they work. We’ll be discussing how to turn the tacit knowledge of a workforce into a dynamic tool for L&D. And how knowledge sharing can transform everything from onboarding to workplace culture.

Stay with us. [00:02:00] 

Julia, hi, and welcome to Talent Talks. 

Julia Phelan: Thank you so much. My pleasure to be here, Gina.

Host: It’s really great to have you here. I’m excited to jump in, and I think the best place to start is kind of at the top. So for many of our listeners they may already know the answer to this, but in your words, Julia, what exactly is knowledge mapping, and what are its clearest benefits? 

Julia Phelan: Uh, well, I mean there are a lot of benefits, so I’ll get to that perhaps second. But a knowledge map really is a resource that shows where the expertise, experience, skills, talents lie usually, you know, within your organization. And one of its big benefits is it helps to make all of that unseen, hidden, often hidden knowledge that exists within everyone within an organization, that tacit knowledge a little bit more visible. 

And that really matters because, or it’s important, because oftentimes within companies, especially when they get large, [00:03:00] or especially when they are spread all over the country or over the world, that, it’s very difficult for people to necessarily know, okay, if I need a certain type of expertise, that I know that somebody within my organization actually has it.

And if you don’t know that, there’s a lot of reinventing the wheel or a lot of time-wasting, or a lot of people trying to figure out things from step one when somebody else is already figured that out. So, if we can make that invisible expertise a little bit more accessible, it helps to both connect people, speed up learning and help people find the right person with the right expertise to help them solve whatever problem they might have.

Host: Excellent. And from your experience, what different forms can knowledge mapping take and how does it differ from, or perhaps build on traditional knowledge management? 

Julia Phelan: Well, I think that one of the things to think about with knowledge mapping is these types of things can feel somewhat [00:04:00] overwhelming sometimes, and where do we even start? I don’t have time to do that. This seems like a, just an insurmountable task. And I think that having a, maybe a lower tech version to begin with can be really helpful. 

And it could be housed on a technology platform, or it could even be, I’ve seen people take their organizational chart and make essentially a big, you know, wall of of index cards that people are writing things down or writing down their certifications they have, knowledge they have, specific skills, they have the type of experience they’ve gained over the years, if they have certain programs that are really skilled at using, all sorts of things like that. And pictures can be really helpful as well, because again, if you have a larger organization, if I can put a name to a face and uh, this area of expertise, that’s gonna help me just facilitate those relationships a little bit better. But I think ultimately you could start, yeah, spreadsheet, [00:05:00] whiteboard. If you do have some sort of technology based tools, certainly use that and having people or having somebody within the organization who really owns it, you know, who really can be taking charge of the effort is really helpful because these things are living, breathing documents.

You know, people are, are to’ing and fro’ing all the time within organizations and so having somebody who can, uh, take ownership of it is also really important. 

Host: Okay. You’ve given me so many things that I wanna unpack here. So firstly, when we talk about this know-how, what are we usually talking about here?

Is it skills? Is it facts? Is it processes? Maybe it’s all of these, but when you really think about it, where are kind of the areas that are worth focusing on, from your perspective? 

Julia Phelan: Everything you said is exactly right, Gina. I think it can be all of those things. And I like to think about if we take a step back or twist it around a little bit and think about, let’s say a new person who’s coming into an [00:06:00] organization and there’s a whole bunch of stuff that a new, that a new person within an organization needs to know.

And we know that typically onboarding-type processes are not as in-depth or not as lengthy as they could be. And oftentimes there are these quick little orientations and then that’s it. And I think having a knowledge mapping mentality even or even a knowledge sharing mentality is really valuable in that particular instance.

And just as an example, you know, if you imagine somebody coming into a company who they’re going to need to know how to use, let’s say, a certain software tool, software program, and there’s probably all kinds of nuances around that, but there are certainly within any area of knowledge, there are certain things that, okay, this is the baseline, the basic knowledge that you need to know in order to get started. 

And then as you build experience, you’ll add on some of these other elements of it and having [00:07:00] somebody who could help a new person understand that, there are a couple of benefits of that, right? So if I know that Gina is the go-to person for, you know, software program, X, Y, Z, then I can facilitate a connection with the new person to you, and you can help that person streamline some of that early learning and say, okay, yeah, there’s all this other stuff, but what you really need to get started is this.

And the added benefit to that is A, the person has that basic stuff that they need to get started, and they don’t need to bog themselves down with everything else that you know is gonna muddy, muddy the waters for them. They’ve also now established a relationship with you. Even if you are not on their immediate team or in their department, they know, okay, if I did have a question, I could reach out to Gina, and she could help me rather than me, you know, spending a whole bunch of time trying to figure it out on my own, which might be not particularly efficient. 

Host: And I love that added benefit that you mentioned of actually helping foster [00:08:00] relationships that this is one I actually didn’t even think of. And I think that’s fantastic. Now, you also said that it’s, you referred to it as a living system, so it’s not really something static, can you unpack for me a little what that might mean in practice?

When you said that, what kind of came to mind for me was like, are there certain events that should trigger the review or the updating of a knowledge map once it’s done? 

Julia Phelan: Yeah, and I think the key thing there is that it’s never really done. You know, that we’re all living and growing and changing and learning stuff.

So, you know, whatever the state of the knowledge map is at one particular point, that’s this point, and now people are gonna grow and learn and add different things. People are gonna leave, people are gonna come into the company. And one of the really interesting things about having a knowledge map is, let’s say you have somebody who comes into a company as a new person, there are reasons that person was hired.

Yeah. They’re not usually a [00:09:00] completely blank slate. They’re bringing some skills and experience to the table, and so adding that into the knowledge map, a, it’s just a good thing to do, obviously, but also it’s a bit of a boost for that person, you know, to say, Hey, you know now, now everybody here knows some of the reasons that I actually was hired to be in within this organization.

So I think that we can be adding to it when we think about things like: what are some of the questions that people are frequently asking. So if let’s say your organization has a Slack channel or something like that, that if there are lots of questions that are being frequently asked then you know if somebody else says, if one of the experts within your organization has answered that, then that question and answer can be saved.

And then that way, if somebody else comes along and has the same question, they can actually just search for that and now actually can capitalize on some previous conversation that has happened within that map. So I think that’s another way that it can be [00:10:00] turned into more of a learning tool and something that is always evolving and growing.

But again, building into the culture a mindset of, yeah, this is something that has to be revisited. This is something that people need to keep coming back to. And maybe I make a discovery, I discover I’m talking to you over coffee or something, and I make a discovery like, oh, I didn’t realize that you had this background or that you’ve done this in the past.

We can go and add that to the map too. It might be something that you didn’t really even think of that would be relevant. But maybe I’ve been talking to somebody else who would really benefit from that expertise. 

Host: That’s amazing. I’m loving so much of what you’ve just pointed out. I really like the idea of keeping track of questions that are asked informally, kind of like an internal FAQs and looking at what’s getting asked and where can we more formally kind of point people towards.

And it’s so true what you say about new hires. Often new hires are hired by a small group, a [00:11:00] hiring team, and everything that they bring to the company is only known by those select few that have reviewed their CV, have, uh, conducted the interviews. So actually this is such a goldmine. Better understanding what every new hire can actually bring in terms of knowledge as well.

So Julia, let’s say you’re a manager of a workforce or a department of around maybe 40 people. The company’s growing fast. It’s an exciting period where you’re onboarding new hires. You’re looking maybe to transition into a more distributed way of working. What would your advice be to someone in this position that wants to map and capture the knowledge, but isn’t sure exactly where to start?

I guess my first question to you is, do we start by mapping out the knowledge held by each person, or do we first define the knowledge that’s key to the business and then seek out the holders of that knowledge? 

Julia Phelan: So it’s an interesting point and yeah, you can, you could think about it as going in two different [00:12:00] directions, and I think about this sometimes as if you are, let’s say in a restaurant and you have a menu that your menu is all the things that you want to be able to create, and then you could do a sort of an inventory, like, do I have all the things I need to make that?

Or you could do it the other way around, you could think about what’s my inventory, and then I’ll make some stuff like based on what I have here, yep, and I think both have benefits, but there’s a slightly different goal for thinking about it in those two different ways. But if you think about a company like you were describing, my advice is always to A, you have to have that person we talked about earlier, or a person or a small team who are taking ownership or in charge of the whole effort.

And then maybe you begin with one department, and it could be something where… I’ve worked with one organization where they had a whole bunch of people who were working out in the field, uh, field officers who were, it was a utility company, and they were going out [00:13:00] doing all sorts of different inspections and various projects outside.

And then you have the internal people who were more of working in the office. And so what they started with was one person being in charge of the field people, one person being in charge of the office folks. And they also, and again, this is just, I think another good practice is, they began with an area that had been surfaced to them as like, oh, this is actually an area that we really don’t know a whole lot about.

And so there was a situation where there was a new project came in, somebody needed some particular type of expertise and experience and they didn’t know whether or not they had it within this team of field folks that they were working with. 

And one of the people within this company had decided that they were going to go the route of hiring somebody external and then somebody else said, oh, so and so has that experience. You should talk to him. And so she thought, ah, I really don’t have a sense [00:14:00] of what the background and the specific skillset of all these folks is.

So that was where they started. So it could be helpful to let a, a certain specific goal or need drive it, too. But I think starting with a smaller, more contained area and then, you know, socializing the idea a little bit and then growing it from there. 

Host: So starting with those perceived gaps could be a good place to start.

In your experience, where is this tacit knowledge usually hiding, and why is it hiding? 

Julia Phelan: Well, I mean, where it’s hiding I think is everywhere. I think it’s, I mean, there’s a few reasons why it’s hiding, and I think in what, in some cases it can be that when you have a big company or an organization that has people spread perhaps all over, all over the world, all over the country, it’s not easy because you don’t know the other people within these other sections or these other teams.

So people talk all the time about companies being very [00:15:00] siloed. And so that’s certainly one reason that people don’t always know knowledge that other people have. Another, I think bigger and maybe sort of under the surface issue is that some people see their knowledge as a source of power and a source of …they, it gives them some leverage.

And so for some people they’ll think, well, I don’t really want to tell everybody else what I know because then they’ll just steal that, and then I won’t be special anymore. I won’t have this, this secret skill that I’m holding over everyone, even if it’s somewhat subconscious. 

So I think when you have an organization where that type of behavior or knowledge hoarding is really embedded in the culture. That can be really difficult. 

Host: Yeah, I mean, my hot take on knowledge hoarding is that it’s potentially a symptom of wider problems within an organization, perhaps mistrust or a lack of psychological safety or even broken systems.[00:16:00] 

If we unpack knowledge hoarding just a little step more, what’s your take on it? What’s your thought on it? 

Julia Phelan: So I think exactly that. I think oftentimes these things are, yeah, signaling deeper issues. The thing that I feel about it is that I think sometimes it happens because there’s just that culture that has been established.

Who knows where it comes from, and these things build on themselves that it’s not valued, or it’s not going to be received well, or people are going to misuse, you know, things that you tell them or things that you help them with. And I’ve seen organizations where people will share documents with other people, and then those person who it’s shared with then erases the other person’s name and puts their name on it.

I mean, when you’re playing games like that, then you have no hope of really benefiting from a collective wisdom. So for me, I think that the key thing, as in so many areas, is this has to come from the upper levels. People have to be [00:17:00] comfortable in sharing their knowledge and pointing out the skills and expertise of others very publicly. And also, I think all of these things wrap up together. 

Being not afraid to say you don’t know, being not afraid to say, Hey, that’s a new question. I’ve never, I’ve never figured that out. Like, let’s go and talk to so-and-so. I think they might be able to help us answer that. You know, even coming from the upper levels of a company.

I think when people see that type of behavior modeled and when we see leaders really emphasizing other people’s strengths and talking about them, and again, especially to new people, it’s like saying, okay, new person, you need to know this. I really would love for you to go and talk to this person.

They’re amazing at this. They’ve been doing this for 20 years. They have some really great strategies at doing X, Y, Z thing. That, then it starts to just become part of that culture, and it just normalizes that, that sharing and that [00:18:00] identifying of people’s strengths. 

Host: Something that’s floating through my mind as we talk on this is how does one define whether somebody does have a skill or a set of knowledge? Do we set criteria on how long they should have been working in an area for, or how many times they should have done a sales demo or presented that product to a prospect? How do we set some criteria in place to say, okay, this person knows something about this topic versus, okay, this person knows enough about this topic for us to entrust them with sharing that knowledge with others within an organization. 

Julia Phelan: Yeah, it’s a really interesting question, Gina, and I think it, I think on the one hand it can get a bit dangerous to do that.

And, you know, we’ve all been in these situations where, and you might think about a hiring situation or even a situation where you’re trying to get somebody on a project to help on a [00:19:00] project, where somebody might say, well, have you ever done this before? And maybe the answer is no, but I would caution people to not necessarily say, okay, well that means that then you are not the person to help me.

Because if we flip it around on the other way and think and, this goes back to the question you asked earlier about identifying skills that are existing within your organization or existing within somebody, and how you map that to what they’re actually doing, it might end up being that whatever you’re asking the person to do is a little bit dependent on them having some experience or having some knowledge of, let’s say again, a tool or a process or a technique. 

But really the key factors that underlie success are other things like, I don’t know, just overall mathematical ability or ability to adapt to new situations or strong communication skill or something like that.[00:20:00] 

And so, I would caution people to not be too dependent on that. Well, how many times have you done this before? What’s your level of experience? And rather think about, what are the other skills that you have and how do they apply to what I want you to be doing, and would your prior experience doing something that might on the surface seem different, actually be exactly right experience. 

Because I think we have, as a society, we have a little bit of an over reliance on this: Have you ever done that before? And it can be really limiting and you, and we see that in hiring where, you know, nowadays, and I know it’s a slow shift, but when people are making these shifts to more skills-based hiring, we start to get away from that.

Okay, maybe you haven’t done exactly this before, but this other thing that you’ve been doing, maybe you’ve been in the military or something, and you’ve been honing all of these skills that actually [00:21:00] are really applicable to this position, even if you’ve never done that specific thing before. 

Host: Yeah, I think that’s a really very valid point.

Let’s have a bit of a think about smaller learning and development teams. Sometimes they’re a team of one quite realistically as well. How can those small teams do this without adding unnecessary layers of admin or needing big systems? 

Julia Phelan: Yeah, I mean, obviously, we can’t have any conversation these days without talking about AI, so yeah, AI certainly has the capacity to make some of these things a little bit more efficient. 

But again, that also rests on the assumption that the knowledge has been documented or surfaced in some way, and it isn’t still residing simply within somebody’s brain. So that’s the first assumption that you have to just make sure that you are, uh, not overlooking.

Or, not making a [00:22:00] mistake where you are coming through all of your, let’s say, 360 review feedback, or maybe employee surveys, or maybe it’s interview documents, or maybe it’s stuff that was gathered during the hiring phase. All of that can be really rich information that can help populate something like this.

But again, I think that there’s a balance between, just like in anything, too much information can get overwhelming. And then it’s like, okay, if I’ve got a six-page document on all of Gina’s skills and everything, then I’m like, okay, well this is just too much for me to deal with. I can’t. So thinking about what are the ways that we need to organize that, and again, this is gonna be very company specific, but again, I like to go back to the data too and think, what are the questions? 

Let’s say it’s a, it’s a hiring manager, or let’s say it’s somebody in HR. What are the things that come up all the time? What are the questions that I’m always getting? And if I could think about a way to streamline that, so I’m not always having to [00:23:00] pick up the phone or reinvent the wheel and explain things to somebody, is there, maybe there’s a piece of knowledge or a little module or something that could then be created that people could access for some of those frequently asked things, or it’s okay, yeah, this person in this department, they are somebody who could help, somebody who had that issue. But, so I think, you know, having some, some technological support is useful.

But without over-relying on that. 

Host: Yeah. Right. So, okay. You’ve got your knowledge map. We’ve created it, whatever form it may take. It’s been part analog, it’s been part online. We’ve maybe we’ve utilized AI to help us synthesize all the information and kind of help us categorize. As far as you know, it’s accurate, and you’ve uncovered some good informal knowledge, and you’ve covered gaps that you weren’t even aware of before.

How can companies then go about turning it from a resource into an actual tool that they’re going to use to help them with [00:24:00] their learning programs and with their social learning, collaborative learning within an organization? 

Julia Phelan: I think it has a huge benefit and I think it goes back to what we were talking about earlier about that inventory of skills versus something that’s a little bit more aspirational. And the world is changing so fast and organizational needs are changing so fast, this is certainly a challenge. 

But can we identify, and again, it’s not always easy, but can we identify certain skills that we think we’re going to need, and do we have gaps? So we can look at these two things? What do we have? What do we think we need? Where do we have gaps? Then there can be some conversations around, are there maybe people who are working in a different area who could be moved over here to help fill this gap within this team?

And that’s where I think we move away from these very rigidly defined job roles, and we start thinking a little bit more about projects that people are working on. And we can [00:25:00] cut the company this way instead of this way and say, okay, yeah, you are sometimes you are the legal expert, let’s just say, and so you are gonna be imparting that for this team over here and now this team over here, they also need some support there. 

So rather than you having to sit in your typical department that you’ve always been in, you get to be spread across in a different way. So I think that’s one element of it. But I think a key thing is we see a lot of issues with internal mobility and that being a stated goal that companies have that they want to have internal mobility, they want people to learn and grow. Employees want that, but it doesn’t always happen. 

And in a lot of cases we see that current employees aren’t necessarily aware of opportunities that exist within their own organization, or they feel that there is just one route for them, and they don’t necessarily see or [00:26:00] encourage to think perhaps about a lateral move that might be to a different team or a different section of the company.

And one thing I think is really important when we think about this issue is to understand that not everybody is on the same trajectory. Not everybody wants to be a manager. Not everybody wants to be the boss. Some people want to have impact in their work in different ways. Some people want the increase in responsibility and managing people and things like that, but that’s not the way that everybody defines their ambition or the way that they want to be fulfilled and happy in their work. 

And I think understanding that there’s not just one path is really important and helping people to see, yeah, you know, I used to be in customer service relations, but I’ve really been developing my skills, or I’ve really been talking to this person over here.

And actually I think I’d like to shift over there and try and see if I could gain some new skills and be a contributing member to a different department. Just because you were doing this over [00:27:00] here, doesn’t mean you’re just stuck there forever. So I think it’s, it helps us to A, identify gaps, but also from the employee perspective, help people see like, oh, okay, this is an area of opportunity that I could upskill, or I could, maybe I have a skill in that area that I just haven’t been using in that my current position, and I could now tell somebody I have that.

Host: And I think that’s also a great way to get more people on board. The second they start to see the immediate benefits to them and the benefits to the business, when it comes to opportunities like internal mobility. It’s very hard to kind of then push back and say, oh, I don’t have time to be a part of this, uh, knowledge mapping because, well, if people know the knowledge that you have it definitely puts you in a much better position for those kinds of opportunities, so that’s great. 

Now, you’ve spoken quite a bit on one of the key areas where it can really help, which is onboarding. I just wanted to step through it a little more from the perspective of a new hire or bringing a new hire into the [00:28:00] fold.

If we look at that onboarding journey. What would be some of those, I guess some of those really strong examples of how an effective knowledge map can make my journey as a new hire smoother, more engaging, and ultimately more enjoyable. 

Host: Yeah. I think that to me, the key thing is when we think about a new person in a company, there’s a lot for them to learn. There’s a lot of information for them to learn of all different types. There’s organizational information, you know, all the sort of values and mission and the rules and regulations and the compliance and all of those things. And then there are all of the things that relate to this specific job role that they are going to be in. 

And I think that, you know, we see that because of the way that hiring tends to happen, and you mentioned this earlier, you’ve got this small team of people that might hire somebody, they might be in charge of all that stuff, the handbooks and the [00:29:00] compliance and all those pieces. But they don’t necessarily have any single clue about the actual job that that person is going to be doing above and beyond you are gonna be customer relations manager level two. But what the day-to-day of that really looks like is perhaps not known to them. And again, we, it’s difficult because everyone, every company is different, but if we assume that reality, then a) you know, when we think about streamlining some of the learning that’s happening on that more, also the more orientation side of things, there’s lots of things we can do and there’s lots of things we know about how people learn, where we can make sure we don’t overwhelm people with too much information. 

What’s really useful is, I need someone to tell me what is important and what is less so, and when you talk to teachers about this, they sometimes will say like, oh no, no, no, no, everything is important. I’m like, yeah, okay. And everything is important and if you only had one day to [00:30:00] teach somebody topic X. What would you teach them? 

There is an answer to that. And so if you can help people to think about things in that hierarchical way, we can a) figure out what is that sort of minimum amount of stuff, knowledge that we need to impart to somebody, a new person that will check all our boxes that we need to check, but then allow them in their own time, over time to develop or to engage with more of that. 

So one of the key things with the knowledge mapping is if I as a leader know, okay, I’ve got my new person, I know hopefully that I need to be helping them understand the expectations of the job.

I need to be helping them figure out what are their goals, or what are my expectations for them? What are the projects they’re working on? There’s a whole bunch of things. And again, the capacity or the potential for overwhelm here is huge. And if you can [00:31:00] think about this, rather than, okay, we’re just gonna dump more information on this person, you know, they just pile it on.

Or if I have a strong understanding of where the different types of expertise in my company exist, then I can leverage that by saying, okay, I want this person to, again, get a foundational understanding of what they need to know to get started in this particular area. I know this person knows how to do that, and I can facilitate then a connection with that person.

And it has all sorts of benefits, as I mentioned earlier. But one of them is, it helps me to bump into somebody that I wouldn’t normally bump into, perhaps. And I’m brand new, so I wouldn’t talk to them anyway because I maybe would be too scared. And now I’ve had my manager facilitate this connection, so it’s really about supporting that learning and scaffolding it and providing those connections, all of which are going to help that person get, [00:32:00] just get acclimated to their new role, just that much easier.

Host: And even more so, you know, in the age of distributed work or hybrid or working remotely, this becomes, I think, even more beneficial, 

Julia Phelan: Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. 

Host: So something that kind of keeps coming up for me throughout this conversation is how do we know if our knowledge map is actually working?

What does success look like with a knowledge map? 

Julia Phelan: Yeah, that’s a good question and I think it really helps to, it helps to have some baseline understanding of, you know, how much of an issue was this before? You know, we talked a little bit about knowledge hoarding, and again, sometimes when I think about these things, the very companies that are doing these things well, maybe weren’t the companies that really need it, you know, and so it’s, yeah, how do you get into those places and really have, affect some change. But, accepting that… 

I was talking to somebody recently who does a lot of these employee surveys, not [00:33:00] just at the end, throughout people’s tenure at a particular company. And there was a really interesting disconnection between how much managers said that their employees were willing to share information with each other and how much the employees said that they, that other people were, right.

So the leaders thought that there was no problem, and the knowledge workers thought there was a problem. 

Host: Classic. 

Julia Phelan: Yeah, exactly right. So that to me seems like a perfect opportunity to say, okay, hold on a second, if I think this is all great, these folks think it’s not, let’s have some conversations about that.

And what specifically is it that people are feeling. You know, it could be that they feel that they don’t have the connection, right? They don’t have somebody to facilitate an introduction to somebody in a different department or even in a different country. And so that might be a way to have some shifts in process or shifts in behavior that would address some of those things. So I think gathering some baseline information [00:34:00] about, is this even an issue?

How do people feel about, do they have a good sense of other people’s areas of expertise or to whom they can go for help? And if there has been a knowledge mapping initiative that’s been implemented, then collecting some follow-on feedback from people about how it’s working or if people are seeing a shift.

Host: Sure. And when we talk about culture, which we’ve kind of touched on a few points, um, in today’s conversation, and we look at those kind of on-the-ground habits and rituals that help keep it alive. You know, I’m just thinking about what kind of practices can companies put in place in our daily work lives to help foster that culture where knowledge sharing and open communication can thrive.

You’ve shared some really uh, nice examples actually, Julia, around publicly thanking and congratulating people for sharing knowledge on a certain topic. And you know, we’ve also looked at perhaps, internal mobility opportunities. What in your [00:35:00] opinion, are perhaps some other ways that we can foster that culture of knowledge sharing within an organization?

Julia Phelan: Yeah, I mean, I think all of those things, and I think also helping individuals to recognize their own strengths, you know, giving them opportunities to both exercise them and develop them, and then acknowledging that and helping them own that in a way that makes them feel good and that they can contribute and share, I think is a really good thing.

Some companies will do regular spotlights on certain expertise, and again, I think that the publicly acknowledging or publicly recognizing people’s wins or you know, this project, we just, you know, we just got this new contract, and it was because of this person’s efforts and this person contributing this, and really just weaving that into the fabric of your culture that you’re celebrating and recognizing strengths.

Again, there’s this balance between having new people come in and bring [00:36:00] innovative, interesting, cool ideas. And also making sure that the expertise that exists within an organization is acknowledged and respected by people. And again, it doesn’t mean that it’s like, oh it, this is the way we’ve always done it, it’s my way or the highway.

It’s not that. But there are things that skills, expertise, and experience that take a lot of time and effort to develop. And in these days it can be easy to think, oh yeah, I see someone doing that. That looks really easy. We all watch these videos on social media of people, you know, painting and things like that, and you think, oh yeah, I could do that.

And you could if you tried hard and practiced and had some instruction and feedback. So again, I think that’s where it’s really beneficial for people to talk about the learning process and talk about how, yeah, I know how to do this, and I’ve been doing this for 25 years.

That’s how long it’s taken me to, to develop this [00:37:00] expertise and being really open about that because it helps people to see and recognize that yeah, learning is hard. Learning takes a lot of effort. It’s really worthwhile, but you can’t learn how to play the guitar in one weekend. 

Host: Yeah, absolutely. So a final question or comment, really, LinkedIn reports that at least a quarter of the workforce in G7 countries will be over 55 by 2031.

And many industries are already feeling the impact of Boomers exiting the workforce. So as more experienced employees retire and a new generation enters the workforce. How do you see knowledge mapping shaping the handover of that expertise across generations? 

Julia Phelan: Well, I, I mean, I think having it is going to be really important, and I think another key thing, and again, you, you know, what do they say, you know, best time to plant a tree is like 20 years ago and second-best time is today [00:38:00] but not being too worried if you haven’t done it yet. 

But I think the worst time to be asking an employee to, you know, someone who’s at the nearing retirement, I think the worst time to be asking them to, to document all their knowledge and to share things is, as they’re heading out the door because their motivation to do so is potentially not as high. 

So in as much as we can be gathering that over time, and in some way, saving, sharing, having people passing things down is really crucial.

And again, sometimes that could be an easier said than done situation, but I think it’s a huge risk for organizations if everybody who has all of that context and all of that history is all of a sudden leaving that, that, yeah, it’s, it’s a risk because again, I think that there are lots of reasons that things happen that can help people understand the types of decisions that have been made within an organization.

And having that context [00:39:00] is really critical. So people don’t then just fill in the blanks with their own assumptions that may or may not be correct. 

Host: Yeah, I think oftentimes there’s such a focus on the knowledge and the skills that are coming through with new hires and newer members of the team, uh, that we often tend to overlook all of that knowledge that will be walking out the door.

Julia Phelan: A hundred percent. Yeah, I agree. 

Host: Julia, thank you so much for joining us today on Talent Talks. I have found this hugely insightful, uh, you’ve given us a lot to think about and a lot of really actionable insights, so thank you again for joining us. 

Julia Phelan: Excellent. Well, it was my pleasure, Gina. Thank you so much for having me. Great conversation.

Host: Thanks for tuning in. In the next episode, we’ll be looking at the growing phenomenon of Quiet Cracking. You can find Talent Talks on all podcast platforms. Subscribe now so you don’t miss an episode.[00:40:00] 

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