ONE:
People Circulate.
Institutions Learn

This proposition stands in the place of the old maxim: “Personnel Turnover is BAD.”

When losing an employee always meant losing knowledge capital (skills, experience, personal processes), we fought to keep the employee longer; we sought to increase retention and avoid turnover.

But what if, when an employee moves out of the company, we are able to keep that knowledge capital? And, what if, as we gained the person’s knowledge capital, s/he lost nothing (maybe even gained something) in the process? Would personnel turnover be bad?

In the old economy, you either “have” the employee or you don’t. What if you could have continual use of the person’s contributions to the organization, even though you did not have the physical presence of the person in the job? When we begin to see great value in the person’s knowledge, and when we apply the natural laws of the new economy, it is possible to lose the employee, but keep the value.

We can only expect to increase the wealth of the enterprise with personnel turnover if the organization is in the business of learning. Since the beginning of organizations, it has been assumed that the old-timers must teach the newcomers. That, only after this value is added to the newcomer, can that person make a useful contribution. The “master” has always had an obligation, not just to work, but also to teach apprentices. How different life would be if the master had an obligation to learn from the apprentice as well. What if the apprentice came on board with an obligation to teach?

New information technologies enable our organizations to build systems that capture an individual’s knowledge. If knowledge is wealth, we must become much more serious and much more capable about doing just that.

But, if knowledge is also power – as people have been hearing since at least the times of Sir Francis Bacon – then why would an individual employee agree to “give up” that power? Easy. What if the new proposition were this: “You teach us everything you know and, in return, you can have access to everything the entire organization knows.”? Not a bad trade.

If the norm is for organizations to learn and for people to circulate among them, then we increase our personal value by the efficiency with which we learn from the organizations we serve. The new, more potent question for screening interviews is not “Where did you work (and for how long)?” but “What did you learn?”.

We further increase our personal value if we develop a fine skill to integrate all we have learned – to make creative connections between all our disparate bits of knowledge – and to apply that knowledge in new and interesting ways.

If your organization were to become an increasingly efficient learning machine, it could profit greatly from a steady stream of newcomers who stay and work for a while, teaching and learning, then move on.