My mission, should I choose to accept it, was to document a procedure. This particular procedure was being performed by one person and had been for more than 10 years. She was the established expert in that process and not eager to give it away even though she had accepted a new position in the company far away from her current position. I was puzzled by her desire to hold onto her knowledge with such a tight fist.
It wasn’t long before enlightenment hit me like a ton of bricks. This was a common practice in this relatively small, rather obscure department of around 40 people. Here, I saw first-hand what a department filled with information hoarders actually looked like. I also understood why their department manuals were so out of date.
Many of the people in this department had been in the department for 15 to 20 years. They had their established hierarchy and they performed their jobs with silent precision. Knowledge sharing only occurred in snips and snaps when it was absolutely necessary. Training only happened if a person in the department got another job and it was performed by the expert sitting with the new person. Yes, I encountered this team of information hoarders in the 21st century, but I’m getting a little ahead of myself.
I found myself in my first meeting since joining this company. It was called by a young woman who had sent out a desperate pleas for help to document this process. The woman from whom I was going to extract this information, we will call her Mary, sat at the head of the table, her arms tightly crossed over her chest. Her expression could have shut down a horde of angry corpses on attack from the “Walking Dead”.
There were maybe six other people in that meeting. I looked around at each of them. There was a supervisor, and four or five other team members in attendance in addition to the subject matter expert.
I was introduced as the contractor who was there to help them document the procedure that Mary had been doing for so many years. I soon learned why all the reinforcements were brought in. This seemed to raise a bit of suspicion and ire on the part of Mary. With her arms still clamped tightly across her chest, she looked me directly in the eye and in a not very pleasant tone said, “Exactly who are you and why are you really here?”
What in the world had I gotten myself into this time? Little did I know at the time that I was on the brink of an opportunity unlike none I had ever experienced before. It would take all the experience I had accumulated throughout my career and all the hutzpah I could muster to take this opportunity and mold it into the vision I would develop for this department and this team.