Knowledge Transfer: The Invisible Glue Connecting Experts and Learners

An Essential Guide to Knowledge Transfer in the Retail Property Business

Join Gary Marshall, host of That Retail Property Guy, as he discusses the critical concept of Knowledge Transfer in business. Knowledge Transfer is not just a vital part of informing current and future employees; it’s critical in preserving existing knowledge against risk of dilution or loss in risk areas including outsourcing, mergers and acquisitions, restructures and the loss of a key person through unexpected absence, leaving or retiring. 

In this episode, Gary emphasises the importance of sharing expertise and experiences to ensure continuous growth and preparedness within organisations. He explores various facets of knowledge transfer, from mentoring and teaching to creating comprehensive process guides. Highlighting real-life examples and personal anecdotes, Gary details the steps needed to effectively communicate and preserve valuable knowledge, and the glue that holds it all together in the recipient’s mind. This episode is a must-listen for professionals at all levels seeking to future-proof their businesses and enhance their skills.
 

00:00 Introduction to Knowledge Transfer

00:21 The Importance of Knowledge Transfer

01:10 Methods of Knowledge Transfer

01:54 Challenges in Knowledge Transfer

03:28 Practical Examples and Anecdotes

04:21 Five Steps for Effective Knowledge Transfer

05:12 Adapting to Different Learning Styles

07:00 Cultural Differences in Learning

07:38 The Role of Facts and Experience

08:36 Knowledge Transfer in Business

10:59 Creating and Maintaining SOPs

13:52 The Importance of Structured Training and Follow-Up

15:54 KT as the Glue for the Future

For more KT through anecdotes! Try: 

Bailiffs, Billboards, Breaking and Entering: Five Cautionary Tales of Landlord Encounters

Retail Property Revelations: Four Top Tales of Triumph and Turmoil

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Transcript

0:00

Welcome to that Retail Property guy with your host, Gary Marshall. Sharing stories and insights through Gary's unique lens. We hope you'll be entertained, enlightened, and may be a little inspired. In this episode, let's discuss knowledge transfer. I'm using a capital K and a capital T for added emphasis. Knowledge transfer is a pretty important subject. Without it only the first person to ever figure how to do something, could ever benefit from it. Imagine that if the person who discovered the wheel had never figured how to pass that knowledge on, so the idea died with them. We apply the knowledge that we acquire along the way to help us grow professionally and personally, to derive an income to live our lives. And we are constantly growing. Things change. We get promoted, we get sidetracked. We change jobs, we specialize. We face opportunity and adversity. Now, of course there's that old but much misguided proverb that those who can do and those who can't teach, but Teaching is a skill in its own right and understanding knowledge transfer is a niche within that. So what is knowledge transfer? Am I talking about teaching about learning? Well, yes and no to both. I'm also talking about mentoring, about coaching, about focus groups, reverse engineering, forensic analysis, experience, life skills. There's another old proverb that knowledge can be learned but not taught. Teachers and mentors can teach facts. They can provoke, thought, inspire, challenge, and greater understanding. But the eureka moment when the light bulb goes ping, when all the facts gel together and become knowledge is down to the recipient. So the mentor's challenge is to find the pathway. The recipient's challenge is to recognize the goal and commit to following the pathway to see it through. But in some cases, the recipient is an unknown quantity. Knowledge sharing isn't always about communicating in the same moment. Sometimes it's about setting up the knowledge to be available at some point in the future by a character who hasn't yet entered our play. I grew up in an age when every car owner rushed out to buy the Hanes manual of their particular make and model, Hanes Publications were workshop manuals, sharing knowledge on how to fix a car. Which started by showing how to take the relevant component to pieces and then fix it, and then put it back together. And these process guides were written by skilled and experienced motor engineers who had actually taken that component to pieces and reassembled it. They shared handy hints on how to overcome the same obstacles that they'd faced, giving a heads up warning to do A before B, before C, not to take a shortcut because they tried that and learned the expensive consequences. Knowledge transfer in easy chunks. Of course, nobody really needs a Hanes manual for a new car these days. So the publication has diversified, but the old copies of those manuals are very much in demand within the community of petrolhead and owners of classic cars. So where are we going with this? Basically, we all need knowledge to do what we do, and knowledge isn't just facts. Facts plus experience, maybe connected dots. Maybe that too joined up thinking, filling the gap between the facts with something. Less discernible like a glue. I am a big believer in getting the facts down, whether in print recorded voice or pictures that paint a thousand words, but on top of the facts also preserving the experience, sharing the lessons learned along the way. For example, one of my favorites beware Time of the essence provisions in rent review clauses in commercial leases. Why this? Because I very nearly got caught out. It nearly cost my employer dearly, and it probably put my relatively new job on the line. I learned a valuable lesson. I still get palpitations about it, so let my lesson be a lesson to you too. It's not just the fact, but it's the idea of the consequence. In my capacity as subject matter expert, time served, specialist, mentor, trainer, coach, teacher, I always strive to make a connection with the recipient, the student, the apprentice, the newbie, or even my replacement. Proactive knowledge transfer can be broken down into five basic steps. Identify the subject matter as precisely as can be. No vague ideas here. Engage with other SMEs, subject matter experts to pool knowledge and experience. Identify and record the fundamentals, whether this is the historical background or process, steps. Add the experience, the awareness of consequences, the anecdotes to punctuate the example. This is the glue. Number five, this is the biggie. Be accessible to the target audience. I don't mean physical access, like choosing a central location with good parking and step free entrances. I mean accessible in terms of variables of aptitude, attitude, and culture. Some people seem naturally more gifted as creatives. Others are problem solvers. Investigators. Technical, empaths. Some people can absorb spoken instructions. Others need to see it written down. Others need to actually do the writing down as the act of committing incoming data into print forces it through a mental process, it converts passive to active. It's a valid conversion in knowledge transfer because it gives ownership engagement with the material. There isn't a one size fits all approach to knowledge transfer and the person imparting the knowledge must always reflect on these variables should lean into it to support the recipient in their needs in order to ensure that they take away a hundred percent plus glue an example of accessibility, I once attended a course where the trainer's material was a series of PowerPoint slides, which they whizzed through in quick succession. But the trainer soon realized when many participants started taking photos of the screen, that more time was required to scribble stuff down. I attended another course where the trainer's material relied heavily on color coded content. Their facts were organized by color, and it took me a few minutes to realize this. It was only when the trainers said something that didn't compute, that the penny dropped, and I raised a hand, Hey, I'm colorblind. Am I missing something? What was the detail you just mentioned? The trainer's response was curious. He told me to get a colleague to support me. You can imagine my feedback at the end of that course, which we'd all paid good money for. Hmm. It's a waste of everyone's time. If the recipient doesn't recognize why they're there, and the method must align with the recipient's experiences and values. I saw an interesting post by a student from India attending university in the uk, who remarked on the cultural differences between his peer group and their Western counterparts. Observing that the Westerners were free thinkers, challengers and disruptors encouraged to interact with the lecturer, whereas his own group were not accustomed to challenging authority, were there to absorb information, not to raise a hand with the challenge or a question. I wonder if the academic team running his course took steps to overcome it And I wonder if both groups took away the same valuable lessons. I mean, who's to say which is the right or best approach? Basic level. Of course, facts. Facts are must be learned by rot, okay? In real life situations, we can Google a point when we can't recall the fact, but sometimes you just have to learn stuff. I can still quote my times table from junior school. Of course, I know a lot of relevant stuff too, like the landlord's grounds for possession under the 1954 Landlord and Tenant Act, and the Crow rules for bailiffs on recovery of rent arrears. The assimilation and retention of facts requires organization. Whether the mentor is a lecturer with a lesson plan, or a subject matter expert running a workshop, or a buddy coach supporting a newbie in real life challenges, the recipient needs to be able to categorize the info they receive, to archive it, to link it to other relevant info, to build the connections that are the essential glue until that eureka moment when it all comes together. So back to the main point, knowledge transfer. Transferring skills and knowledge that informs us and helps us rationalize. So it helps us to forecast, to plan, to avoid mishap to succeed, whether we are retailers, maybe from the school of hard knocks, like Theo Fighters or chartered surveyors from the School of Estate Management at Nottingham Trent, or accounting wizards or business leaders with MBAs. Whether we fast tracked or came up through the ranks, we all need knowledge to do what we do, but one of the most important aspects of this knowledge is the underlying awareness that it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Again, let's sum up. We learn. We apply the knowledge, we earn money, we grow, and we achieve great things along the way. But, and here's where altruism pops up. We help others too. We share knowledge, sometimes consciously, sometimes subliminally, in occasional nuggets, in organized sessions, in managed knowledge transfer with a capital K and a capital T. Knowledge and experience are valuable Commodities. Businesses don't survive when key players don't have the relevant knowledge and experience. And I'm not just talking about the C-suite, the top execs, the leaders, I'm talking about every level in any business hierarchy, the top brass need to rely on their specialist teams to be reassured that they know their stuff, that they won't panic. It's an unforeseen challenge, and that someone would know how to resolve that challenge using best practice, not shortcuts. All businesses, whether small or large, need their subject matter experts and they need them to stay up to date with the latest changes. Whether that's variations to rating rules as covid concessions are phased out, or new thresholds that govern how a rates bill is calculated or amendments to accounting rules under FRF 1 0 2, which are effective from the 1st of January, 2026, and which impact how leases show as liabilities on a balance sheet. Or discussions to modify the security of tenure provisions under the 1954 Landlord and Tenant Act. Businesses need to plan how to preserve the expertise, the knowledge, the experience, in case the current subject matter expert is ever unavailable. For whatever reason, they need to ensure against silo knowledge, where only one person knows how to fix the computer, how to pay a supplier, how to challenge a service charge budget, how to negotiate a rent review. No business should be at risk of failure due to the loss of a key person. So they need to capture these key processes, create the go-to resource, like a process manual, so the knowledge and the underlying recognition of consequences remains within the business. This applies particularly in the modern world of outsourcing and subcontracting of cloud-based resources and offshore support teams. I've seen numerous instances of outsourcing or subsequent change of outsourced provider where the original knowledge gets diluted. As the long experienced SME hands over control to an external provider whose teams might be less familiar with the risks and the rules of the specialism in these situations. Knowledge transfer is a complex science requiring skillful management to download the relevant knowledge from the SME and upload it into a, a compendium of process notes, and B, the new provider's mindset. I've seen no end of how-to notes that describe most of the steps in a process, but skip certain key considerations where the experienced SME, who drafted the notes fail to recognize that they make subconscious rationalizations and decisions which inform their next steps. A newbie without that experience can't make the same judgment call, so the process grinds to a halt. A knowledge transfer manager will study the how-to notes will interrogate the SME to identify these judgment calls or experienced assumptions and to ensure they feature as if or statements in the process. If this was computer code, these would be Boolean gates. The output drafted by the SME, tweaked by an analytical KT manager will be signed off as a sop, a standard operating process. This is the go-to document for future reference. It should become the yardstick for the new team's KPI Assessments. A business function like property accounts payable might need multiple SOS all sitting together in a compendium with links where they overlap. And a key rule should be never duplicate. If a few key steps are a common subprocess across several main processes, then document the subprocess independently and connect it by links to and from the main processes. This means that if ever a step in the subprocess should change, it only needs amending once, not multiple times in different places with a risk of divergence. And whether this compendium of SOPs is intended as a safeguard against risk of loss of key personnel, or as a means to outsource, the compendium must be maintained as time passes. Rules change and processes adapt. The final word, of course, though, must go to training. This is such an essential part of knowledge transfer, especially when outsourcing or restructuring or on merger between two companies or when seeking B Corp. Status training is the offer of knowledge. As we discussed earlier, the recipients must have the right attributes, aptitudes and cultural values, and the trainer or mentor must lean in to offer insights, to clarify rationales, to share anecdotes that help cement the lesson. I've witnessed and helped fix many examples where outsourcing managers thought that knowledge transfer could be achieved without a KT specialist, without a structure, without expertise. Simply by putting the incoming team in the same room as the outgoing team who are all being made redundant and expecting those outgoing specialists to impart a hundred percent of their knowledge, including all the experience. Human nature says this will never work. Whether the outgoing team are reluctant or maybe just good at doing, but not gifted at training or are unaware of the subconscious Boolean decisions they make, but also if the incoming team believe they already know it all, or hopelessly outta their depth but won't raise a hand. Training is more often a structured approach, a workshop with clear objectives, a defined pathway chunked down into components as lessons with individual lesson plans, and the process doesn't end with a workshop. There should be follow on practical sessions in a hands-on environment to fix the new knowledge, to convert words to deeds, passive absorption into active output, and then test it. There should be ongoing assessment with clearly defined KPIs and constant recalibration of the success factor. Further governance by the management team ensures the glue has stuck, that the business is getting the required output. Knowledge transfer isn't like just downloading a file. It's a learning and teaching process. Both sides of the coin, both sides of the equation. But it's essential in any business to be future proof. And to ensure quality and cost to raise the bar to be efficient and competent. If you want to discover more about knowledge transfer with a capital K and a capital T, seek professional advice from an expert in this sector with the relevant expertise to help you navigate and deliver the goal, because of course, once the knowledge has done an Elvis and left the building, it can be very difficult and expensive to get it back. Thank you for listening to that Retail Property guy. I hope you enjoyed today's discussion and found it both entertaining and insightful. Be sure to like, share and subscribe so you can never miss an episode. For more information, visit that retail property guy.com. Thanks again for tuning in.