Have you encountered an efficient way to deal with key-man-risk dependency?

 

Pain Points

 

Team Dynamics

When I have encountered this before, I have taken the following approach:

As Manager I am responsible for identifying and managing my staffs development needs. So where I had multiple SMEs and single points of risk, I created a development plan where each member of staff had to learn and perform at least one other member of staffs job. It was built into their development plan and I adjusted the work responsibility balance to ensure that this was possible.

The SME 'teaching' was assessed by me in terms of effectiveness and the staff member being taught was assessed by the SME teacher, but they also provided 360 degree feedback on teaching method.

When the teaching/knowledge transfer was completed, the staff member who was taught had to undertake day to day duties for a week to in what they'd learned to ensure that they were effective. This was done in a supervised manner so that they had support where needed.

In practice this worked very well and in a team of six people, five of the six learned at least one other role in the team.

Interestingly, upon completion ‘they’ expressed the desire to learn in other areas of the team (something that was unexpected) and so the exercise was extended beyond the initial agreed period.

 

Hi Christian,

As soon as an organisation is large enough, you need to ensure that your key people are (ideally naturally inclined to) delegating and focussing on developing a successor. I find that self-confident people want to share and develop their people, insecure people will tend to cling to knowledge and not want to develop their people. At this stage you must be prepared to hire and fire to maintain and develop the team. 

Another imperative is to develop Corporate Knowledge as quickly as possible, for example through mandatory use of a CRM system to ensure that everything known about a customer is shared throughout the business.

When you are too small for this, you should do your best to encourage good communication between individuals and use key man insurance to protect the business against the worst case scenarios.