In the next few years, no doubt most E&P companies face an exodus of baby boomers who are retiring or leaving to start their own companies. Many executives worry the organizational knowledge these employees took years to acquire will disappear when they walk out the door. Most experienced employees don’t really know how much they know, much less how to impart that knowledge, or to whom, before they exit.

In addition, every oil and gas company needs to attract and train new talent, reduce costly turnover, and prepare new managers and leaders for the future.

Companies will find it useful to create specific methods to deal with these important issues. Leaving things to chance is not optimum—after all, it is the accrued knowledge of experienced employees that enables a business to succeed and grow. They know the business model, best practices, which technologies to use in particular situations, which people to call, which financial vehicle suits the business—even the unwritten rules of office politics.

This knowledge can be exchanged in two different ways: it can be formally transferred (intentionally, systematically and within a planned knowledge-transfer program that is monitored), or it can be informally shared (whenever and however issues come up, around the water cooler, on an elevator between floors, in a hurried phone call to a recent retiree).

Obviously, the latter method leaves a lot to be desired and may lead to unintentional knowledge gaps. These gaps can end up costing the company time or money later during the execution of specific E&P projects or business-development goals.

Mentoring of all new hires and midlevel employees who are poised to assume leadership roles becomes very important if the company is to compete in a fast-paced oil and gas industry that is already short of skilled employees.

Mentoring can also occur in two ways: between carefully matched partners who work within a planned and monitored, formalized mentoring program, or informally, when a mentor chooses a protégé and provides assistance, often without the protégé being aware of this.

The formalized programs produce intended outcomes.

Formal transfer

For sound business reasons, companies ought to consider systematically ensuring that seasoned employees or knowledge providers intentionally pass on their professional, organizational or institutional knowledge to knowledge seekers before retiring.

Typically, a coordinator of this group matches providers with seekers (who need particular knowledge) and then regularly monitors the knowledge-transfer process to ensure it occurs in a timely way and is meeting the business’ needs. What is transferred is typically knowledge about something, but it can include practical know-how as well.

It is important to note that the knowledge provider-seeker partners do not have to have high interpersonal compatibility, nor commit to a long-term relationship, because they may interact only a few times, unlike mentor-protégépartnerships that tend to last longer.

Formalized mentoring programs are much more complex to plan and implement, as mentors are apt to fulfill many functions over six to 24 months, such as role model, coach, teacher, gate-opener and gate-keeper, motivator, adviser, a sounding board for ideas and a confidante.

Effective mentors equip less-experienced protégés with practical know-how, the tricks of the trade, the unwritten rules, and new competencies, so protégés become part of the company family and are more productive workers. Effective mentors also empower their protégés to use their diversity and uniqueness to fulfill their passions, dreams and goals, and to be creative contributors. This prevents organizations from stagnating.

If only equipping occurs, this can produce an “organizational” man or woman with little independence or creativity. If only empowering occurs, this can cause chaos, as individual employees tend to “do their own thing.”

Getting started

When mentors equip and empower protégés, they help reduce costly turnover. They also develop their protégés’ talents by developing core competencies. They help them navigate career-path options and prepare them for advancement to new positions within the company.

Achieving any one of these goals will more than pay for a formalized mentoring program. For example, a 1999 emerging-workforce study conducted by Spherion was cited by Business Week, reporting that in an organization of 1,000 employees, some 350 or 35% will leave annually when mentoring is not provided regularly, compared with 160 employees or 16% when it is.

If it costs $50,000 to replace an employee, losing 350 of them will cost $17.5 million annually to replace them, versus $8 million annually to replace only 160 employees. This means that regular mentoring saves $9.5 million annually in employee-replacement costs in an organization of 1,000 employees.

An AccountTemps survey showed that Fortune 500 chief executives believe mentoring is one of the top three factors affecting career growth. Mentoring on a formal basis gets new hires up to speed faster, and is thus a force-multiplier for the company itself.

A knowledge-transfer program ensures important organizational and professional knowledge is intentionally transferred to those who need it, so they do not have to rediscover this for themselves. Higher-level knowledge that cannot be readily learned from books, courses or Internet searches is important in any company. These include:

• Conceptual understandings about how things work (tricks of the trade).

• Wisdom and insights gained from many life and work experiences (lessons learned).

• Best practices and how they were achieved (resistance, how to overcome).

• Key contacts within the organization (e.g., influencers) and outside in the industry (e.g., customer and partner contacts).

• Intellectual property and inventions.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Dictionary of Occupational Titles says mentoring is the most complex type of human interaction, being more complex than teaching, counseling, supervising or coaching. Why? Because mentors fulfill so many functions within the mentoring relationship.

If mentoring one person is so complex, then even more complex is planning and implementing a formalized program for a targeted group of employees. Managers must be sure each protégé and mentor benefits, as well as the sponsoring organization, so the formal program will succeed. To produce such mutual benefits requires thoughtful planning, followed by coordinated implementation of key tasks.

Understanding the five-level model proposed by the Dreyfus brothers in “Expertise in real-world contexts,” published in Organizational Studies, can prevent failures and ensure success when planning and implementing a mentoring program.

The novice knows nothing about the formal structures, processes, expectations, training, coordination or monitoring needed to plan a program, and is not concerned with producing intended results.

The advanced beginner might have such knowledge, but cannot properly align all these essential components to produce intended results.

A competent person has practical know-how gained from planning and implementing one kind of program that produces an intended result (e.g., orienting new hires better), but cannot do this for a different group and purpose (e.g., developing competencies in future leaders).

The proficient person can plan and implement several different programs, each of which produces a desired result.

An expert has at least 10 years of dedicated experience planning and implementing many different programs, each producing multiple outcomes (e.g., reducing turnover while developing talent throughout the diversified workforce).

To maximize success and get best results, companies must use a proficient person or an expert to plan and implement a formalized knowledge-transfer or mentoring program.

Another key to success is to use a web-based software system that can be easily configured in different ways to support different groups doing different things, while reducing the time, labor and costs required to implement each type of program.

Chevron is now working on worldwide career-development programs to prevent employees from leaving the company, and more important, to help employees realize what other career paths may exist within the company.

It is using a web-based system called Colaboro in its global mentoring program for career development. This facilitates mentoring success in multiple ways by quickly matching best-fit mentoring partners on the needs and expertise related to core competencies.

Such software can provide online training, or virtual meetings, to develop a good mentoring relationship, and it provides an online mentoring action plan that schedules activities to develop core competencies and permits progress to be monitored.

This same system can connect knowledge providers and seekers to ensure that systematic knowledge transfer occurs and can be monitored. Because this requires much less time and partner commitment, it is a way to quickly connect a larger number of people to transfer knowledge.

As colleagues progress from being strangers and get to know one another, their relationship might then develop into a mentoring partnership over a longer time period. The partners will end up working on increasingly challenging goals, such as developing core competencies that protégés need to be able to advance.

In the end, the organization itself needs to become more competitive, and will be if its employees can benefit from the knowledge of all members of the team.

William A. Gray is the president of Corporate Mentoring Solutions Inc., based in Victoria, British Columbia. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Texas, and 29 years of experience in creating mentoring, career-development and knowledge-transfer programs and web-based software for companies such as Chevron, Shell, Exxon, BP, Pan Canadian Petroleum (now EnCana Corp.), Dow Chemical and Occidental Chemical. He can be reached at 877-955-0314.