You Are The Smartest Person in the Room…and probably, in your company in your area of specialization. With that, comes responsibility.

This week, I had the opportunity to put together a speaking proposal to a group of subject matter experts about how best to work with them. Which leads me to this week’s blog, how a SME can make easier the process of working with writers and corporate trainers to transfer their knowledge for organizational continuity.

“If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room.” – Unknown

I’ve long held the belief that this saying is true. Fortunately, for me, this has never been a problem! But for PhD neurobiologists, it can occasionally present a challenge. It is to you, that really smart person who studies quarks or polymerase chain reactions, that I address the following.

As a subject matter expert, your contribution to the sales, marketing and training efforts of your company are irreplaceable. You are the smartest person in the room and they need you.

That means there comes a time in the life of every astrophysicist that they must communicate with other humans, humans who just aren’t on your rung of the intellectual food chain. Sometimes those humans are writers who need to communicate your message for marketing or sales purposes. Sometimes those people are in the training department of your corporation who are structuring your expertise to transfer it to other employees. Whomever they are, rest assured they are working to transfer your knowledge intact.

You can help them in their endeavor.

Writers and training designers are educated to know how to collect, organize and relate information in a logical and comprehensible way, but they are not PhD neurobiologists. Who is your writer or trainer? He is a master learner and organizer. He is a student of human behavior and good communicator. If you are lucky, he majored in microbiology as an undergrad in college. But when it comes to your area of expertise, he is not the smartest person in the room.

For someone who is intellectually curious and loves to learn, working with you is very interesting. Your writer or training designer is going to learn a lot from you so he can teach it to others. But he doesn’t know your subject yet, and he may or may not have a good base of knowledge in your area of expertise to ask good foundational questions.

So, if your writer or training designer needs some background, provide him with resources so he can study on his own time. It is not a wise use of either of your time for you to teach him the basics of chemistry, for example. It is in his job description to learn some simple terminology and concepts on his own before diving in. Don’t be afraid to give him homework; in fact, it is a good idea to do so.

Here are a few basic rules for getting started with your writer or training designer. Before meeting:

1. Give him any articles, books, slide presentations or speeches you’ve made on the topic before you meet. If you don’t have your own materials, point him to basic materials on the topic.
2. Ask for a list of questions before your first meeting. Try to answer some of them in writing. If any questions are irrelevant, say so and suggest a better question.
3. Set aside an hour or two of uninterrupted time in your schedule for your meeting.

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As a subject matter expert in your corporation, your time is very valuable. If you do these simple things, you will set a baseline of understanding and have a productive use of your limited time with the writers and training designers who are working with you.

Are you a subject matter expert? What are some of the challenges you’ve faced when working with writing and training colleagues?

The workforce is entering a unique period between 2015 and 2020 when fully five generations will be in the labor pool at the same time. Organizational development experts have given much attention to the interpersonal challenges of this circumstance. You can hire any number of experts who will train you how to work to successfully integrate the styles of multiple generations in the workforce. Let me suggest that tensions extend beyond the social implications of this phenomenon.

This particular demographic distribution as shown in the Bureau of Labor Statistics chart below demonstrates a convergence of talents, skills, and attributes that need to be conveyed not from one generation to the next but perhaps from one generation to another that is three degrees removed from it. That transfer presents several challenges including both what and how that learning is relayed. It is also happening in a time of technological advances that alter assumptions about what is important.

Generational filters require that knowledge, skills and attitudes (KSA’s in training parlance) not only be captured, but also preserved and translated in such a way that the knowledge itself remains relevant and usable to a workforce with different frames of reference.

In this context, organizations face the challenge of finding their experts and preserving their knowledge in ways that make it accessible to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Start by reflecting on the context of the kind of labor that is leaving your organization. Each business must examine the kinds of KSA’s that built your successful organization so that you can accurately identify what to capture and how to capture it. Then organizations need to create a system for identifying and transferring the critical knowledge and talent that is leaving the workforce in unprecedented numbers.

When people leave, the worst thing that can happen is that they take critical skills sets with them that you cannot replace. The second worst thing that can happen is that, when you discover they possessed irreplaceable pieces of your corporate puzzle, you hire them back as consultants at exorbitant rates on their own time schedule. And the best outcome is that you use their last, best years with your company capturing what they know. If you are shooting for the best outcome, make sure you have a process in place today to preserve your organization’s competitive advantages.

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/Comment from Dale: Thank you Peggy for the useful tips on dealing with SMEs. Lots of good stuff here! In your section on the Not Quite Expert SME you recommend to loop in other knowledgeable people, but you don’t spend any time talking about the best way to do that. In my experience, I would never go behind the SME’s back. I would ask the SME who I am working with if there is anyone else they would want to weigh in on this content. I am concerned that inexperienced designers would act independently and undermine trust. On the review front, I would ask the SME who they would recommend to proof the content. And, we ALWAYS do dry runs before any content is put out. 

Thank you for this great question, Dale, Without trying to be too self-serving, I cover this in the book Working With SMEs but we couldn’t cover everything in the pre-learning section of the webinar.

If you find that you have a SME that isn’t an expert, you really need to first try to address it with the person themselves if that is possible. Sometimes, if you are lucky, the assigned SME will tell you upfront they aren’t the right person which gives you both a good place to start finding the right person. You are right, you never want to go behind anybody’s back and undercut their trust. These can be very sensitive political situations, too, depending who your SME is, right? So, yes, your instinct to tread carefully is a really good one.

One of the things someone mentioned to me when they were reading a first draft of the book is that sometimes you will get a SME who doesn’t want the task so they’ll tell you they don’t know or they aren’t the right person just to get off the hook. I don’t know how you sort that out if you aren’t on the inside of the department and have a good handle on that. But it is worth mentioning to make sure that if they say they aren’t the right person, that you believe them and then enlist their help to find the right person.

However, if you have a SME and you aren’t getting what you need, and they don’t want to admit it, you should document that. At some point, if you try to fill in information gaps in your training program and you aren’t getting answers from them, you might go to your manager and tell them the problem and show them your documentation. If you aren’t assigned a SME who really can give you what you need for your training program, something probably went wrong when the project manager asked for SMEs to be assigned. Another issue could be that the SME is really afraid for their job if they think that they cannot give you good content. They may be covering up and you really just have to sort that out.

When you are an outside training firm, identifying the SMEs on the project can be part of the Project Charter or Scope at the outset where it is defined who the client company will assign to work with you. Then you have that document to fall back on, where you can say, look, this is what we need to write this program and it looks like this person can’t help us. When it’s an internal training department, the head of training could be involved in helping you solve the problem.

I agree with you, I think you are right about asking for another SME to put an eye on the program. There should be several layers of signoffs anyway because even though your SME may be the most knowledgeable person in the organization about your topic, the SME is very rarely the person who is writing the checks or has responsibility for the final product. The person who has final authority for the project is the person who has the responsibility to approve your training program in a signoff procedure.

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 Sarah:

Can you talk about ways to resolve information discrepancies between SMEs. Example: the SMEs have very different methods of performing the work and have strong opinions that “their way is right”.

I love this question because it happens! First, I am assuming you have presented this material to both of them and they have both dug in their heels. Without the two – or more! – coming to an agreement, here are a few ways to handle it:

1. If you have two subject matter experts who are at very different levels in the organization or different levels of experience, the more experienced one can trump the junior SME simply because a. there is a higher probability they are correct (although not always!) and b. 9 times out of 10 it will politically be the wiser move.

2. If you have two highly regarded subject matter experts of relatively equal weight, you have a sticky wicket, for sure. In that case, the stakeholder in charge of the project who is usually also the person writing the checks or providing the resources, gets to make the call. They may choose one over the other for any number of reasons having to do with personal preference, political considerations in the organization, seniority, favoritism, or any other factors that you may not know or care about. It is just your job to make sure you satisfy your client and that the information is correct to the best of your ability. That sometimes means deferring to the project owner, not the SME. The project owner will have to deal with the SMEs. That’s outside the scope of your job, although don’t be surprised if you end up taking the heat on something like that. Consider it all in a day’s work.

3. A third option is calling in an outside expert to referee the information.  If everyone respects that person, it could be a solution. I’ve actually been in that situation, although in my experience the outside SME can really muddy the waters further. Not because they aren’t knowledgeable but because now the client is faced with more alternatives!  If your client is already confused, yikes! If you can, try to get the existing SMEs and the clients to come to an agreement using 1 or 2. I actually address this option in the book Working with SMEs in more detail because this situation was going on while I was writing it, so it was on my mind.

If readers have any more ideas about how to handle this situation, I’d be interested to hear them.

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.