Retaining Knowledge

Well, I managed to make it 33 years of my life without having to “blog.” All good things must pass. I’m a tad bit late as it has been a crazy few weeks transitioning from the permitting coordinator in Oak Hill DMR to an ERPM 1. I now supervise 15 great employees over two field offices. Well, 14 now. Today we are losing our most senior Engineer, John Scott to that great pipedream of retirement. Along with losing a great colleague, a vast extent of knowledge and history of the mining program within DEP will be missed sorely. I have learned a lot from John over my career. He’s been an engineer or permit supervisor in every field office in DMR over the course of his 24 years with state. I’ve got some awfully big shoes to fill.

Over the past five years, I’ve had an office next to John and everyday I’ve learned something from him. From his mining experience in the industry to anecdotal stories about the DMR program history, unique permitting issues and how the program has evolved over the years, I was lucky to learn from him and extract as much information as I could. I think the experience was mutual, as I was able to teach him a few things along the way. Not a day went by when I started when he’d bust into my office and tell me to pull something up on “The Google” (Google Earth, as he called it) and talk about a permitting issue.

My transition to manager has been relatively easy, though challenging. I have had great support from our staff here and have a working relationship with most of them my entire tenure at DEP. This class has been extremely useful with the vast amount of information on leadership and understanding how to deal with different personalities.

Organizations must have plans in place in order to ensure continuity and to address the loss of institutional knowledge. Documenting and identifying critical knowledge held by existing employees has been one of my key components to being a good manager and identifying strengths and weakness of the review team. I’ve come to realize by type of personality is one that asks questions, especially “Why?” I can read an old policy and understand it, but I often want to know the history behind it. Luckily, a lot of folks are still around to give me that history lesson, but that may not always be the case.