We all love having those people in the team: the ones who just know what to do. They’ve been around for a while, they understand how everything works, they know the customers, they know the quirks of the business and they can usually sort out a problem without making a song and dance about it.
They’re brilliant, and we love them! But their brilliance can be hiding some pretty big gaps in your business. Deliberately? Of course not; they’re just too damn good at filling them.
When ‘Sarah knows’ becomes the system
You’ve probably got your own Sarah.
- Someone asks how to deal with an unusual customer request and the answer is, “Ask Sarah.”
- There’s a problem with the system. Sarah knows how to fix it.
- A new team member isn’t sure what happens next. Sarah will show them.
- Something goes wrong that nobody’s seen before. Sarah will know.
Sarah probably does know. All that experience, knowledge and good judgement is sitting in her head, and because she’s always there to fill the gaps, you might not notice just how many gaps there are.
When one person holds all the answers, that person has become your system.
You tend to notice when Sarah goes on holiday. Or gets promoted. Or leaves.
Suddenly, all those things that seemed to work perfectly well stop working quite so perfectly.
Would the work still get done without Sarah?
This is where businesses can get caught out as they scale. Things are working, customers are happy, the work is getting done, so you assume you’ve got a good way of doing things.
Would it still work if your most experienced person wasn’t there?
Could someone relatively new to the team pick up the same task and know what good looks like, how to do it and what to do when something goes a bit sideways?
If the answer is no, then you’ve got knowledge that hasn’t yet been turned into a shared way of working. Our Way.
You can’t scale what only one person knows.
Turn your best people’s knowledge into a shared way of working
The answer is to use what Sarah knows.
Your best people are often the perfect place to start when you’re capturing how things should be done, because they’ve usually learned all sorts of little things through experience that you won’t find written down anywhere.
Start by asking how they do it
Get them involved and ask:
- What do they look out for?
- Where do things usually go wrong?
- What shortcuts have they learned to avoid?
- What does really good look like?
Make that knowledge available to everyone
Capture your best people’s knowledge in a simple How-To, train the rest of the team and make it the way you do things.
Now everyone else can get it right too, thanks to Sarah, which is a much better use of your best people.
Sharing what one brilliant person knows helps you build a whole brilliant team.
