Your team members are starfish.

I recently heard a thought-provoking tale: millions of starfish washed up on the beach, putting their lives in grave danger. A young girl made her way along the sand, picking up one starfish at a time and tossing it back into the sea. An older gentleman watched this laborious activity for a while before finally saying to the girl, "You'll never save them all. You can't make a difference."

The girl slowed her pace for a moment and then held up the starfish she had in her hand. "I will to this one," she said before casting it back into the waves.

As workforce demographics shift and training and development programs are increasingly squeezed from corporate budgets, it has become incumbent on senior-level executives to help prepare the next generation of leaders. The imminent loss of corporate intellectual capital is of critical concern, and knowledge transfer has become a key initiative for many enterprises.

According to a global 2006 study conducted by IBM and the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD), it is not a technology-enabled knowledge management solution that is garnering the most action. A full 60 percent of the surveyed organizations are using mentoring as a way of transferring knowledge, accounting for the most popular approach to passing information from maturing workers.

"Document/knowledge repositories" was the second most common method, with 46 percent of surveyed companies acknowledging that they had this technology enabled solution in place, followed by "mature workers used to deliver classroom content" at 30 percent. "Expert systems/artificial intelligence" was only being utilized in 3 percent of the respondent companies.

What I found most interesting — other than the fact that 22 percent revealed that they had not implemented any system for knowledge transfer from maturing workers — was how nontechnology approaches were often the solutions of choice. The 1-to-1 mentoring strategy is the least "techie" but also the most prevalent, suggesting that companies are reverting to the basics when encountering acute challenges, and proving that a difference can be made one person at a time.

Robyn Greenspan
Senior Editor
ExecuNet
Robyn.Greenspan@execunet.com
295 Westport Avenue
Norwalk, CT 06851
800.637.3126

Thought for the Week
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
Aristotle