Author Archives

Peggy Salvatore

Peggy Salvatore writes on business and health care issues, and she is a proud mother of three.

Posted on

Tips for Choosing the Best Subject Matter Expert

by

This post is one in a series that answers questions from viewers of the January 28 KnowledgeVision Google Hangout where we talked about the challenges of working with SMEs.

Question from Andrea:

What are tips for figuring out in advance what type of SME you will be working with i.e. before you sit down to interview them – so that we are better prepared (incl. equipment) to employ the right tactics?

 

I partially cover this in the book  but you bring in the idea about preparing to have the right equipment as well, which is a good aspect to think about.

When you are designing a training program with the stakeholders, they usually have an idea of the type of person or, even more commonly, the exact person they would like you to work with. It is a good idea to get that in writing when you are doing a project charter, project scope document or putting together your project plan. That way you and your stakeholders know in advance the resources they are committing to the training.

If the customer asks your for suggestions, I would ask them for the person most familiar with the process, knowledge, information, skill AND who has the time to spend with you. Sometimes the person who is the most knowledgeable is also the person who is in most demand and so it really isn’t helpful if you can’t get their time!

It is good to define or name your SME in your project charter for any number of reasons, one of which is that if the SME cannot fulfill their obligation you have a description of the kind of person you need and can refer back to it.

Also, yes, you really bring up a good point about knowing the person so you can be prepared with the right equipment and tactics. I recommend to almost always capture your interview with an audio recording. If you have a particularly iconic SME who you might want to capture for posterity, try to get the video.

Use whatever tools are most comfortable for you when you are note taking.  Personally, I am comfortable taking handwritten notes, but some people are more comfortable typing. I have read that handwriting actually imprints the information on your brain in a way that typing does not, which is one reason I will often have learners physically write out parts of some exercises.

In any event, in my opinion, note taking and equipment are a matter of personal preference.

 

 

 

Posted on

Incentivizing Your Subject Matter Experts

by

This post is one in a series that answers questions from viewers of the January 28 KnowledgeVision Google Hangout where we talked about the challenges of Working with SMEs.

We got this question from Nicole:

Any tips for incentivizing and rewarding busy SMEs to deliver part of the training in the classroom? Internal SMEs maybe would like to teach others, but they are working on BHAGs, for which there are greater career and financial rewards?

First, I was not familiar with the term “BHAG”. Now I know! It means “big, hairy, audacious goals”.

As for the question, when you have a subject matter expert who is being reluctantly pulled away from their job, the first approach is to remind them how important their role as a SME is to the organization. They will be training people who are their colleagues and working along side them. It is an opportunity for the subject matter expert to have a lasting impact on the company.

Beyond that, when their time spent working on the training program interferes with their ability to generate commission-based income or pulls them away from some other activity they value, then the company needs to think about incentivizing the SME to offset their loss.

We recently had this come up with a sales training team. We had written a coaching and mentoring program that required a fairly significant amount of classroom time with ongoing commitments to training new hires. The mentoring program would get the new hires up to speed much faster and the organization stood to benefit. But the individual mentors? Not so much. Their perceived return was just not worth their time.

Solutions? The company can structure a bonus or incentive program for sales people or anyone who stands to lose income if they participate as mentors. SMEs need to be recognized for their efforts in a way that it puts a finger on the scale during their review process or in some other way is related to a measurement of their job performance.

The upshot is that when you invite or require a subject matter expert to be involved in taking time away from other activities that they value – such as generating sales or working on a research project – you need to reward them in some way to recognize their  contribution and offset their loss. Otherwise, you may end up with a SME that doesn’t want to spend the time working on developing or delivering the training program. That’s just lose-lose-lose. No good for the SME, no good for the training, and no good for the company.

 

 

Posted on

Join Us! Eight Different Types of SMEs and How to Work with Them: Webinar and Article

by

On Wednesday, January 28, KnowledgeVision is sponsoring a Google Hangout where we will discuss the eight types of SMEs and how to work with them. You can still register here.

The book Working with SMEs identifies characteristics that you may encounter when working with subject matter experts and gives you some tactics for overcoming these behaviors. The webinar and article that you will receive when you register discusses these issues taken from the book. In advance of our Google Hangout tomorrow, you can view a presentation on the eight types of SMEs here.

The eight types of subject matter experts we discuss are:
1. Speedy SME – impatient and tries to control the pace of the session
2. Scattered SME – does non think sequentially and believes their knowledge is too complex to be captured in steps
3. Shortcut SME – been doing their job so long they use shortcuts a novice could never follow and is not best practice for the organization
4. Defensive SME – feels their job is threatened if they tell you anything
5. Not-Quite-Expert SME – doesn’t really know best practice, or thinks they do not know it
6. Overcommitted SME – consistently misses or is late for appointments because they are overburdened
7. Interrupted SME – on the phone, email or other interruptions during your interview sessions
8. Reckless SME – doesn’t review the draft carefully

To learn more, you are invited to join us for a Google Hangout at 1 p.m Eastern.

KnowledgeVision has developed applications for capturing the knowledge of experts in an easy-to-use platform. Find out more here.

I look forward to hanging out with you tomorrow!

Posted on

Deep Time: Preserving and Storing Knowledge for the Long Haul

by

If you are working in a corporate environment, and especially if you are writing training programs, your focus of knowledge capture and transfer is immediate. You have a procedure or a technique or a leadership program that you are instituting now, and it is relevant for the immediate future.

Sometimes, however, you are writing training or capturing knowledge for the long haul. You might be preserving the words of a founding CEO. Or one of your R&D people has made a groundbreaking discovery that changes the way things are done in your industry. That kind of knowledge capture requires the guarantee that it is preserved in a way that it can be recovered later.

We really like physical documents for that reason. Nothing like a stone tablet to preserve some good ideas, right? Monks have dedicated their lives to rewriting valuable works because paper products disintegrated over time, and it was the only medium they had at their disposal. Not all valuable knowledge is codified in writing. After all, there is good old on-the-job (OTJ) training. Through apprenticeships and mentoring, processes are demonstrated and passed on in the working environment and preserved as a matter of common practice. Recent wisdom tells us that training is a 70-20-10 split – 70% OJT, 20% elearning and 10% classroom learning.

Our age, though, the information age, holds so much more possibility for what we can capture, preserve and pass on to future generations. Wouldn’t you like to watch a craftsman from 1860 build a window? Imagine the little tricks of the trade that have been lost to the ages.

Those things don’t have to be lost anymore. The trick is to find the right medium for capture, and that medium has to be one that can be accessed in the future. So, those early elearning programs I wrote that landed on VHS that people watched on a big old cathode ray tube in the conference room, or those audio cassettes they listened to in the car? Gone. Nothing on there is of much relevance anymore, so nobody will lose sleep over that.

But what of the precious words of your founding President who set the tone for your company, and maybe an industry, a la Steve Jobs?

Today, the technology of knowledge capture makes possible watching someone assemble a window and see all the little tricks that might not make it into the assembly manual.

Which leads us to the issue of preservation.

A Very Cool Book on Preserving Knowledge

Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia by Gregory Benford is a curious little book written in 1999 by a University of California physics professor whose work includes experiments in the fields of astrophysics and plasma physics. He is best known for his award-winning science fiction including the Galactic Center Saga series. In his non-fiction work, Deep Time, he describes how humanity interprets former civilizations by studying architecture, tombs, layers of the earth and time capsules. For example, he explains, we leave behind clues relevant to our time and culture, like placing a Buns of Steel video in a time capsule to tell future generations…what? (I will leave it for you to interpret the value of this human legacy.)

In one particularly striking example that leads me to discuss this book, however, Dr. Benford was part of an Expert Judgment study group hired by the Department of Energy to leave a “Warning: Do Not Enter” message on a nuclear waste site in New Mexico to be interpreted by future inhabitants/visitors/species for up to 24,000 years. So it begged the question not only of how messages are sent and delivered across time, species, and cultures, and what kind of messages are sent, but also the methods by which those messages are preserved.

At our present level of technology, we deem that we can preserve what is valuable – or we perceive to be valuable (see Buns of Steel video) – using digital language preserved in the cloud.
Professor Benford writes: “Strikingly, no libraries survived antiquity, though some were quite grand. A Christian mob burned the greatest trove of ancient writings, the Library of Alexandria, taking from us hundreds of thousands of papyrus and vellum scrolls. Writing on organic sheets is vulnerable to fire, whether from fanatics or accident. Acid-free paper withers in a few centuries.” (Deep Time, p. 15)
He goes on a bit later in the book to describe the vulnerabilities of what, in 1999, was state-of-the-art technology.

“Worse, nothing dates more quickly than computer equipment. Already, historians cannot easily decipher the punch card and tape technology of 1960s computers, and the output of early machines such as Univac are unintelligible.” (Deep Time, p. 61)

“…I imagined my own works, stored in some library vault for future scholars (if there are any) who care about such ephemera of the Late TwenCen. A rumpled professor drags a cardboard box out of a dusty basement and uncovers my collective works: hundreds of 3.5 inch floppy disks, ready to run on a DOS machine using Word Perfect 6.0,” he wrote(Deep Time, p. 60)

If you are a trainer, you probably have very little concern for this type of long-term preservation. After all, you aren’t capturing and passing on knowledge that needs to be preserved for a thousand years. Or are you?

Posted on

“MONEY Master the Game” Masters the Art of Interviewing Subject Matter Experts

by

If you don’t know Tony Robbins, you are among a rapidly dwindling group.

The leadership heavyweight and inspirational guru to the powerful and famous just published the second book of his dynamic and storied career. Money Master the Game contains lots of great investment principles but, more than that, it contains lots of advice for living life and being a great leader as well as a gracious human being. And for our purposes here, as I poured over it during a long holiday weekend, I found that the book lives as a stellar example of how to interview and get the most out of subject matter experts.

In this 600+-page tome, Robbins interviewed “more than 50 self-made billionaires, Nobel Prize winners, investment titans, bestselling authors, professors and financial experts” including 12 of the top investors in the world to learn the strategies employed by them to manage the portfolios of high-net-worth individuals and share those strategies with us – the hoi polloi.

Although I read the book to better understand investing, it became clear to me that this book stood as a testament to great gathering and organizing complex content from subject matter experts. MONEY Master the Game demonstrates some of the most important strategies for working with subject matter experts, and as a result, Robbins wrote what is truly a must-read book for investors, leaders and just about anybody else who wants to know how the financial world works.

Robbins described his interviewing process within the pages of the book, which makes it a wealth of information for people who work with subject matter experts.

1. He prepared thoroughly before meeting with each expert. He learned about their background and studied what was already written about them and by them. He didn’t waste their time.

To be able to sit with yet another of the great investment legends of our time was truly a gift. I spent close to 15 hours studying and preparing for my time with Ray [Dalio], combing over every resource I could get my hands on (which was tough, because he typically avoids media and publicity). I dug up some rare speeches he gave to world leaders at Davos and the Council on Foreign Relations. I watched his interview with Charlie Rose of 60 Minutes (one of his only major media appearances). I watched his instructional animated video How the Economic Machine Works – in Thirty Minutes (www.economicprinciples.org). It’s a brilliant video I highly encourage you to watch to really understand how the world economy works. I combed through every white paper and article I could find. I read and highlighted virtually every page of his famous text Principles, which covers both his life and management guiding principles. This was an opportunity of a lifetime, and I wasn’t going to walk in without being completely prepared.

2. He had a prepared set of questions that he asked each expert so he had a baseline of information as a springboard to ask more specific questions tailored to each SME.

[I asked] them some of the same questions you’d ask if you were in the room with me. Here’s a sampling…

…If you couldn’t leave any of your money to your children, but only a portfolio or set of financial principles to pass on to help them thrive, what would it be?

3. He set up short interviews (an hour) and then, by asking great questions and engaging his subjects, he managed to get three to four hours of their time after the interview began.

Most of the interviews were scheduled for an hour or less but turned into three- and four-hour sessions. Why? Because each of these financial giants was interested in going deep when he or she saw that I wasn’t there just for some shallow questions.

4. He recorded and transcribed the interviews.

…you’ll see only five to ten pages for each interview as opposed to the average 75-page transcript.

5. He curated complex information to make it valuable and accessible to the reader.

To keep this section under 9,000 pages, I’m including highlights from just 11 of the interviews. Well, 11 plus one bonus.

6. He cared about his subject and his subject matter experts.

Their answers excited me, shocked me, sometimes made me laugh. Other times they moved me to tears.

7. After he collected and digested four years’ worth of work, he boiled it down and made it useable for the reader.

My mission has been to synthesize the best of all they’ve shared into an integrated, simple 7-step financial blueprint.

Only one of his interview targets, Warren Buffet, declined a formal interview. He told Robbins, “Tony, I’d love to help you, but I’m afraid I’ve already said everything a person can say on the subject.” In a brief biographical sketch, Robbins shared the highlights of Buffet’s career and toplined Buffet’s investment strategies drawing on public information. He added color by describing his personal interactions with The Oracle of Omaha.

Most importantly, Robbins treated his subject matter experts with respect. He delivered their content with the same care that you would use shipping your grandmother’s china across the country – it’s packaged very carefully. For any number of reasons, not least among them as a great example of working with subject matter experts, it is well worth picking through the bubble wrap to unpack the immense value of this book.

How well prepared are you to speak with your subject matter expert?

Posted on

Working with SMEs: Lessons Learned from Ella Fitzgerald

by

My passion for working with subject matter experts is an outgrowth from my early career as a daily journalist. I had the opportunity to interview famous, talented, brilliant people…and some big-time politicians, too. 

Of all the greats I have had the great fortune to meet, Ella Fitzgerald stands out among the crowd. I was in my mid-20s, and she was in her mid-70s. Go ahead, do that math. We were both in our prime. Preparing for that interview taught me one of the foundational lessons that I carried forward into other work with subject matter experts – do your homework!

Ella Fitzgerald is nothing if not the ultimate female vocalist. Her talent went beyond jazz – although it can be stated with some confidence she helped define the genre. She also delivered popular music with a melodic flair and clear voice. I am still in awe over her delivery of A Tisket A Tasket at 70-something in a crystalline, little girl voice.

Know Your Subject Matter Expert

When I was given the opportunity to be alone in a room (seriously) with possibly the greatest female vocalist of all time, I was – let’s just say – nervous. Excited and nervous. What does one ask Ella Fitzgerald?

My father was a jazz pianist. I grew up on Satin Doll. So I told Dad, who was flabbergasted by this opportunity. I needed some help here. What should I ask her? What would you want to know, as someone who has played her book for 30 years?

Boy, am I glad I asked him. He gave me wisdom that has served me well in my career as a journalist, writer and trainer. Get familiar with your subject matter expert before you meet with them.

If you get only one shot at speaking with someone of that caliber, and trust me, you get only one very limited window, make sure you find out something important. Use your time with them wisely. His first advice? “Whatever you do, don’t ask her how she got started. Everybody knows about the Apollo in Harlem. She’ll blow you off as a stupid kid and you won’t get another question. Go read about her background then ask her something about music.”

I didn’t have his background in music, so I downloaded some info from Pop.

“What should I ask her?”

He thought about her material, her records, what he played, and asked why she did certain things on certain songs. I had some meaty questions that had some knowledge behind them.

A Blur

I got in to see her with my little reporter’s notebook, no doubt damp from sweat. I asked her dad’s questions. She was interested, really interested. She liked the questions. We had a little singer’s talk. And to this day, it was a blur.

In fact, I recently found the program from the show and now I need to find my article. Somehow, as I look back, that was such a defining moment I need to make sure I’ve preserved it for my dotage.

For you, as a trainer and instructional designer, what are the takeaways?

Two Lessons from The Ella Experience

Do your homework. That means know enough not to ask such a stupid question that your SME disregards you. You won’t get what you need because you don’t really understand the background and context, and you won’t get what you need because the SME won’t waste his or her time bothering to tell you.

Record and document. An interview with a world-class subject matter expert is a once in a lifetime shot to get some valuable information and perhaps even record that person for posterity. No, I wasn’t allowed to record my interview with Ella. But make sure you try to record the incredibly intelligent and experienced people you will meet so you don’t miss anything in the blur of the moment. Ask permission as necessary.

Not all subject matter experts are in the class of Ella Fitzgerald. But there are people of her caliber in all areas of endeavor and all walks of life, yes, even politics. As someone who designs, writes and delivers training, you are sure to encounter people who have risen to the top of their organization or their field all the time.

Respect them all. Honor their greatness. And get to know them before they get to know you.

Posted on

Doing Succession Planning? Find Your Internal Experts

by

When you do succession planning for your organization, start by asking yourself some critical questions as you begin the process of finding your internal subject matter experts. By identifying some initial information, you will ensure that you are talking to the right people and asking the right questions as you collect valuable information that allows your company to thrive beyond the work lives of the experts under your roof.

We’ve all heard of people who have been laid off during downsizing or have retired after 30 years of service only to be called back to their desks under a lucrative independent contract because, when they left, they took critical information or skills with them. With a proactive succession management plan in place on an ongoing basis, companies can save themselves the costs of these valuable contracts and your retired employees can move to Hawaii, even if they are less enriched by the generosity of the company that found it could not go on smoothly without them.

Finding Your Critical SMEs Before They Leave

To find your critical SMEs, ask these questions: What is it that makes your business hum? is it your great products? Your incredible customer service? Your patented product that is nearly impossible to reverse engineer? The personalities of the core founders? The people who understand your financials? The person who does your data analysis?

When you can identify what keeps your customers coming back for more, you will have isolated the knowledge, skills and attitudes that need to be preserved. It’s not as easy as it sounds, but not as difficult as you might think, either.

Rest assured that it is not just one product, one person, or one department that holds the key to your company’s value in the marketplace. The essence of what makes your company hum is a combination of the people, processes and information that come together as your distinctive brand.

Look Beyond Your Secret Sauce

Think of the fast food hamburger. People may come to the drive-up to get a tasty burger with “sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun”. But they may be able to get an equally tasty burger across the street. What is it that keeps them coming back to your drive-up?

Perhaps it is the smiling servers, clean restrooms, dependable quality of the food and the utensils that make the whole experience reliably enjoyable. So while you need to make sure you have the recipe for the burger, you also need to be talking to maintenance about their cleaning schedule, human resources about their customer service training, public relations about the promotions and vendor management about the paper products and bakery suppliers.

Do Succession Planning In An Organized Way

While this is a simple and obvious example, when you extend it to what is probably your much more complicated business, it will help you think through all the important aspects of your organization when you are doing a 360 degree succession plan – one that leaves no stone unturned. The best way to drill down and find your internal experts is to look at your organizational matrix and analyze it by functional area.

Who does what? Who else, if anyone, can do it? What do your knowledge workers know?

You may find it is that quiet guy in the corner who has been turning out reports and talking on the phone to your customers who you may have to call back out of retirement because, in his absence, people really notice what he did.

Posted on

Organizational Survival: Why to Work with Your Subject Matter Experts Now

by

Inside each organization resides all the knowledge needed to run it well and profitably.

The expertise inside each organization is the foundation of the business. The product knowledge, the R&D capability, the customer service structure, the manufacturing ability and logistical support are the individual building blocks that make up the foundation of expertise upon which your business is built. It is what makes your company unique and special. In business lingo, it is your competitive advantage. That expertise is not easily replaced.

In order to thrive, your business needs to have the “lottery ticket” contingency covered. It is important to know the people within your organization who, if they won the lottery and retired to Hawaii tomorrow, would leave a serious and gaping hole in your company’s ability to develop, produce and deliver products to your customers. Those are the subject matter experts who can offer something to your internal training programs that very few other people can provide.

Find those people and begin to work with them today, because they are critical to your corporate survival.

Defining Your Critical Training Programs

Companies would not develop or allocate finite budget resources to a training program this is not important. So, let’s start by agreeing that all types of training are important to maximize the profitability of your enterprise. However, for the purpose of finding your all-important subject matter experts – the people you need to be talking to today – let’s divide training programs into three categories:

1. Non-essential

2. Essential

3. Critical

Non-essential training programs are those that develop people in a way that improves their performance. Without those programs, your business can continue to survive. It may not be as successful or profitable, your products and customer service may not be as flawless as they could be, but you have a sufficient product and viable customer service without that new class you brought in house for your executives called “Learning to Lead with Confidence in a Global Healthcare Environment” (Just made that up so if you provide such a course, no offense. If no such course exists, it would be quite valuable, don’t you think?). Often these training programs can be provided by any competent supplier that specializes in such general areas of soft skills and management optimization.

Essential training programs are those that are required for you to do business. These training programs include things like software training that is provider specific like the training your employees need to use your new hospital electronic records system. Other examples of essential training include compliance training so your employees can operate within the laws and regulations issued by the FDA and OSHA, for example. These training programs are necessary and not optional, but can usually be provided by an outside provider with a little customization for your company.

Critical training programs are those that are specific and essential to your particular organization. These training programs impart the knowledge that is key to a particular company’s survival. Critical training programs teach your employees your secret sauce, whether it is how you make your pills or how much ketchup goes into your Funburger. The secret to your individual business’s survival is finding the people who have this information and downloading what they know into your company’s knowledge base before they win the lottery. Sometimes these people are not just people with scientific knowledge, but they may very well be the people who drive the spirit of innovation or the ones who know how to work successfully to cooperate with customers and product advocates that make your company a star. Whoever they are, whatever they are doing, when you find the people who make your company’s individual difference to your customers, the people who understand the value and distinction your organization brings to your customers, those are the subject matter experts you need to be talking to.

Working With Your SME

After you’ve identified the subject matter experts who can provide the critical information that your organization needs to survive, you need to plan to work effectively with them to capture it. Because your subject matter expert is critical to your organization, that person is also very busy.

When working with your SME, you need to manage your time and schedule to keep your meetings with them targeted and productive. If you don’t have a training project manager, you need to be one. During your interviews, stick to your agenda and, afterwards, make sure you have a review process in place so that your SME approves the information you are collecting.

By identifying your critical subject matter experts and working efficiently with them to capture their unique knowledge, your company will not just survive, but thrive, as you will be building on the solid foundation in which you’ve already invested.

Posted on

Preserving Organizational Knowledge: More Important Now Than Ever

by

Why is it important for your organization to have a plan in place for preserving organizational knowledge?

For businesses that plan to be around awhile, succession planning is a critical but often underdeveloped part of their training plan. And at no time in recent memory can you build as strong a case for having a succession plan in place as today.

Simply, many of your longest running and best performers are baby boomers who are leaving the workforce in droves for sunnier vistas. Now is not just a great time, but may be your last chance, to capture what they know and preserve it for your future employees.

Another critical aspect of preserving internal knowledge right now is that many of your workers who need to be drinking from the fountain of your internal wisdom aren’t even in your organization yet. With the economy still running on maybe one cylinder – on a good day – recent college grads who would normally have been snapped up at job fairs are still waiting tables until you are ready to hire them.

A recent study using U.S. Census data shows that 40% of Millennials and 37% of GenXers are unemployed.

Here’s a summary of that study:

(MarketWatch) Some 40% of unemployed workers are millennials, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce released to MarketWatch, greater than Generation X (37%) and baby boomers (23%). That equates to 4.6 million unemployed millenials – 2 million long-term – 4.2 million unemployed Xers and 2.5 million jobless baby boomers.”

Source: www.mybudget360.com/young-unemployment-rate-millenials-economic-trends-jobs-income/

In the intervening time, the skills off the young unemployed are growing fallow and their opportunities to be learning at the knees of your in-house gurus is slipping away.

Now, not later, is the time to start building your internal knowledge base, including but not limited to, building formal training programs that preserve institutional knowledge while the people who know your business best are still under your roof.

Posted on

Three Things Your Subject Matter Experts Can Do For Your Training Programs

by

You want to make sure your training is solid and rises to the next level. Tap into the best knowledge bank in your organization, your subject matter expert.

Subject matter experts (SMEs) are the people inside your organization who hold the unique knowledge, skills and attitudes that keep your customers coming back for more. They hold the keys to your competitive advantage that is the unique value and distinction that your company offers in the marketplace. SMEs are your company’s entrée into your industry.

For that reason, your SMEs are essential to building critical training programs. (See last week’s blog for the distinction among non-essential, essential and critical training) SMEs are the people who know what goes into your unique, probably patented, products. They are also the people who have established irreplaceable relationships with your top customers and make sure the organization hums by promoting a company culture that values employees and innovation. SMEs an be found in all corners of your organization, so whether you are designing a safety program, a manufacturing module or a leadership retreat, make sure to consult closely with the people who are getting it right, right now.

What kinds of information are you looking for when talking with your SME? Three things. They know your past, understand your competitive advantage in the present marketplace, and have the insight to understand your organization’s needs into the future. They can:

1. Ground your training: Your employees already talk your industry’s language to a greater or lesser extent. Your training needs to ground them in the history of how and why you do what you do today. An organization’s SMEs have a grasp on what has been tried, failed and succeeded, or they wouldn’t be there today. Make sure you download some history from them so your training tells a complete story by providing context, and also helps your employees avoid past mistakes.

Your company has already tread the hard road. Preserve those lessons for the future to avoid the curse of “those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” That history resides with your SMEs.

2. Instill best practices. Because your SME already intimately knows your business, they are the best place to start to make sure your employees are getting the full and correct story the first time. When you are building training with your internal experts, you will be forging ahead from your first interaction.

Your employees have a lot to learn from your SMEs. Make sure your training leaves employees with an “Ah-ha!” that shows they are coming up the learning curve. That additional knowledge resides with your SMEs.

3. Find the dragons. Your SMEs got where they are in your company because they are not just a leading light inside your organization, but because they are a leading light in their field. True players can read the tea leaves, not because they are omniscient, but because they are highly skilled in a specialized area and can connect the dots that the layperson does not see. Every business wants to know where the opportunities and threats lie in the industry. Your SME can ensure your training materials see around the corners and build that competency into your future leaders, as well.

Keep your company on the cutting edge by giving your employees vision into an uncertain future. If dragons go there, your SME knows it.

In this highly competitive environment, no matter your industry, your competitive advantage is your best friend and that best friend is your SME. Tap into their knowledge to communicate your company’s value and distinction to your employees. Make sure your training includes the unique solutions that keep your company competitive.

As Grandma used to say, “Don’t hide your light under a bushel basket.” Your SMEs are lighting your organization’s path. Consult with them.