Product Description

Every organization relies on internal subject matter experts (the peer mentors) to teach what they know to new hires and other team members (the apprentices). This book is the first comprehensive, how-to manual that provides peer mentors, apprentices, and the people who manage them a process and toolset for getting each other up to speed. The checklists, templates, questions, and step by step procedures help organize knowledge into manageable chunks, teach it, and ensure it's received as intended, all while the peer mentor manages the pressures of a full workload. The ideas in the book improve communication and reduce frustration between all players by helping to clarify expectations in the plainest language possible. Author Steve Trautman first developed Peer Mentoring for engineers at Microsoft more than 15 years ago and has since presented the ideas to thousands of people from every type of organization. The universal truths that the book addresses translate easily from software development, to manufacturing to sales to social work.The Practical Leader's Guide to Knowledge Transfer is for anyone working in a fast paced, no-nonsense environment where rapid growth or sudden transition means employees must assimilate new knowledge fast.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #519915 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From the Back Cover

“Do you find yourself reading books that just ‘make sense,’ so you end up reading the entire book but not doing any of it? Don’t let that happen with this book. The ‘tools’ Steve presents in this book work great. We’ve been using them for over a year at EA Canada with dramatic improvements in onboarding time and knowledge transfer. Here's the key: when you find a tool in the book that sounds perfect for your situation, stop reading and actually use the tool at least once before you resume reading.”

—Jerry Bowerman, vice president, chief operating officer, Electronic Arts Canada

FROM BLAH, BLAH TO AHA!

Breakthrough Knowledge Transfer Techniques for Every Professional!

No matter where you work there are people with experience teaching people who need to learn. Everyone is part of this exchange yet few people know how to do it well. Now, there’s a comprehensive how-to manual for effective knowledge transfer: Teach What You Know.

Steve Trautman introduces simple, practical mentoring techniques he created for engineers at Microsoft, and has proven in many diverse organizations ranging from Nike to Boeing. This is real-world, get-it done advice, organized into a framework you can use no matter what you need to teach. Trautman provides common-sense tools to successfully pass along years or even decades of experiences: easy-to- use checklists, sample training plans, lists of questions, step-by-step procedures, and a start-to finish case study.

Teach What You Know will help you orient new employees, support transitions to new assignments and promotions, prepare for employee retirements, build teams, roll out new technologies, and even move forward after reorganizations and mergers. You’ll learn how to

•   Create a plan for the entire knowledge transfer process
•   Clarify roles for each type of peer mentor in your organization
•   Set expectations for communication so you can mentor and still get your other work done
•   Organize what must be learned into manageable chunks
•   Develop a measurable training plan in less than an hour
•   Uncover the list of information and support that your apprentices can’t live (or at least learn) without
•   Explain the mysterious “big picture” to your apprentices
•   Create one-hour “lesson plans” in five minutes
•   Give a demonstration that is guaranteed to sink in
•   Help your apprentices take responsibility for their own learning
•   Make sure your apprentices have mastered what you’ve taught
•   Provide feedback that your peers will appreciate hearing

About the Author
Steve Trautman created Peer Mentoring to help developers and testers at Microsoft deliver on-the-job training to their peers. He has since customized the program for a wide range of organizations, including Nike, Nordstrom, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Electronic Arts, Boeing, Standard Insurance, Phelps Dodge, Southern Company, the U.S. Air Force, the Coast Guard, and the Army Corps of Engineers. A former program and group manager at Microsoft and general manager at Expedia.com, Trautman is author of the Practical Leader Series: programs that have helped thousands of leaders, managers, and employees improve communication, performance, and quality.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface

This book is the first comprehensive how-to manual for knowledge transfer. It gives subject matter experts a set of practical tools to organize their experience into manageable chunks, teach that material, and then make sure that the information was received as intended. The content stems from my experiences delivering a workshop I developed more than 15 years ago to help engineers at Microsoft communicate with and teach each other in a fast paced, no-nonsense business environment. That means there is no fluff, just straightforward, get-it-done advice that has been tested and refined in the real world.

The ideas have been further customized for many major organizations including Microsoft, Intel, Nike, Nordstrom, Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Standard Insurance, U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force and U.S. Coast Guard, Food Services of America, Electronic Arts, Phelps Dodge, Southern Company, and others. The concepts have been honed in a variety of industries, roles, and work environments, including software development, IT, government/military, call centers, manufacturing, engineering, research, biotech, sales organizations, social services, mining, project management, unions, and many small businesses. In each situation the issues are basically the same; people with experience need to teach their co-workers how to get things done.

The degree to which this transfer of knowledge goes smoothly can have a tremendous impact on the transitions that employees face every day. Whether orienting a new employee, recovering from a reorganization, rolling out new technology, merging with another company, or preparing to retire, people run into situations where they're either teaching what they know or learning from their co-workers. Everyone benefits from clear, concise, and productive communication. This book sets a standard that anyone can follow.

Customer Reviews

Finally... effective mentoring...
I came across a book that deals with an issue that is often discussed but rarely executed well... knowledge transfer. The book is Teach What You Know: A Practical Leader's Guide to Knowledge Transfer Using Peer Mentoring by Steve Trautman .

Table of Contents:
Roles In Peer Mentoring
Managing Time and Communication
Focusing On The Most Important Information
Developing A Training Plan
Teaching What You Know
Leveraging Learning Styles
Assessing Knowledge Transfer
Giving and Getting Peer-Appropriate Feedback
Peer Mentoring From a Distance
Peer Mentoring in Practice
Appendix A - Peer Mentoring Tools At A Glance
Appendix B - Sample Training Plans
Index

In every IT job I've ever had, there was an expectation that "knowledge transfer" would occur between you and someone else. It could be during your training period when you're trying to learn the ropes. Perhaps you've been "designated" as the person to train the new hire. Or as is often the case these days, you're supposed to learn from the consulting expert (or transfer your knowledge as the consultant to the staff). All this is easy enough to say, but the majority of the time it's approached in a very haphazard manner. Successful learning is more by accident than by design. Teach What You Know attempts to change this all-too-common situation.

Trautman lays out an 11 step approach to successful mentoring. This starts with accepting an assignment as a silo or primary mentor and proceeds through to assessing the learning and providing feedback. There's an acknowledgment than mentoring could be active (planned time and instruction) or passive (availability for questions), and both types can be appropriate given a particular situation. He also defines the roles that are present in the mentoring situation. There's the primary peer mentor (overall knowledge), the silo peer mentor (specific knowledge in a given area), the manager (the overall director of the mentoring arrangement), and the actual apprentice (the person needing the knowledge). In addition to plenty of assistance to the person doing the mentoring, the author also covers how the material should be viewed from the manager's and the apprentice's angle. That final perspective is very important, in my opinion. If you are "the new guy", you can use this information to take a level of control over your training plan. It may feel odd to tell the gurus what you want in terms of training, but that's far more effective than simply hoping for the best.

I'll admit to feeling certain levels of "uncomfortableness" when I was reading some of the chapters. It's not often that you'll hear someone giving you permission as the mentor to tell your trainee "don't interrupt me between times x and y, as I'll be busy and I won't appreciate the intrusion". Nor do you normally see someone spell out exactly what style of communication they prefer, and how adherence to that style will make the mentor much more pleasant to deal with. But if you think about it, those are the exact things that normally go unspoken, leading to a buildup of friction and resentment during the training process. Training isn't easy, and only adds to an already overloaded schedule. A different approach such as the one advocated by Trautman may be just the remedy for the general failure of knowledge transfer in most organizations.

So... You can continue to be put into these training and mentoring situations, and you can continue to muddle through them, hoping for the best. Or, you can take a step back, learn a few new skills yourself, and make the inevitable training sessions become more effective and less of a drain on everyone's resources and nerves.

I know I'll be approaching mentoring situations in a different light now...

Making it painless to train people on the easy stuff
This book is a very clear, easy-to-read book about how to duplicate abilities to carry out repeatable tasks. And lest you think, "my task is special or too complex," think again. For better or worse, a lot of what we do every day is repeatable and not particularly creative. It makes sense to be able to train more people to share those burdens, anything from computer system configuration to project logistics, at the lowest cost to the current experts in our organization. It's all about getting more people up to speed, so we can all concentrate on the interesting part of the work: the creative and problem-solving parts.

For mentoring that part, try searching "lucid quality" on the web.

Awesome. Great stuff.
I highly recommend this book to people that value quality in the workplace. I'm amazed how relevant the information is to different companies and possibly even personal/family life. I work in the high tech industry, customer support. Everything I've read so far (I'm only half way through) has been totally worthwhile and applicable to me and the team I work with. I believe the ideas presented would also be much needed at the coffee shop where my wife works. Pretty basic sensible stuff once you get down to it, but isn't it the basics where we often come up short?

I like the clear writing style. It's refreshing to read something where the intent is obviously to educate the reader, as opposed to some authors that appear to be trying to convince the reader how intelligent the author is. It's one thing to show how much a writer knows, it's an entirely different thing to help a reader learn valuable information efficiently. I think Steve is clearly and thankfully in the second group.

I think this is one of the most valuable books in my library.