Ask who on the team can really handle the hardest cases, and most managers have a name in mind right away. An employee who’s built up a feel for difficult situations over the years, who knows which employers tend to be open to a new kind of collaboration, who simply knows their craft.
That’s a strength for the organization, seen one way. Seen another way, it’s exactly the opposite: a vulnerability rarely noticed until it’s too late. If that knowledge only exists in that person’s head, and has never been shared or documented, it disappears the moment the person leaves, goes on long-term sick leave, or retires. The organization is back at a lower level of competence, often without warning.
This pattern is common in employment services, where a large share of the knowledge is often built on experience rather than formally written-down knowledge. Method training provides a foundation, but the real skill, reading a difficult situation, knowing when to push and when to wait, is built up over years of practice and rarely through documents that can be read afterward.
A common scenario is an organization that loses a long-serving employee, and only then discovers how much informal knowledge disappeared with her. Which employers were easy to work with and why. Which warning signs she’d learned to spot early in a case. None of this was written down, because it never felt like systematic knowledge, just experience.
Moving expertise from individual heads to the organization as a whole isn’t the same as writing a manual for everything. Digital documentation can preserve part of the knowledge, but the learning also needs to happen through conversation, joint analysis, and practical application: dialogue, observation, training, and reflection capture things that never fully make it into text. Still, far more can be captured in writing than most organizations actually do. Recurring patterns in difficult cases. Common pitfalls and how experienced employees handle them. What signals tend to precede a case becoming difficult.
Gathering that knowledge requires actively asking the most experienced employees, not waiting for them to think of sharing it themselves. Most people with deep experience aren’t aware of how much they actually know, because it feels like common sense rather than a particular competence worth documenting.
The consequence of not doing this doesn’t show in everyday work. It shows only at a loss, a resignation, a retirement, a longer sick leave, when the organization suddenly notices how much depended on a single person. By then it’s too late to gather the knowledge easily, it only survives in what colleagues remember, growing more fragmented with each passing year.
A good first step is periodically gathering experienced employees to jointly review a difficult case afterward, and ask what made that particular person know how to handle the situation. The answers, written down and saved, slowly become a shared knowledge base the whole organization can lean on, instead of relying on the right person happening to be available when the next difficult case comes up.
There’s also a leadership angle to this. A manager aware of where the expertise is most concentrated can actively plan to spread it, by having experienced and new employees work together on difficult cases, or by setting aside time for experienced employees to talk through their reasoning out loud, not just act on it silently. It’s a simple move in theory, but it requires someone to prioritize it, again and again, in a day-to-day reality where there’s always something that feels more urgent.
Want to see how vulnerable your own organization is? Do a simple vulnerability map for the most critical knowledge areas in your organization:
- Which knowledge is critical for the work to stay high quality?
- Who holds that knowledge today?
- How is it currently shared, if at all?
- What’s documented, and where?
- Who could take over if the person holding it disappeared tomorrow?
If the answer to the last question is “no one,” you now know where your vulnerability is greatest.