Startups usually start out fitting into one canoe, grow into a raft size and before you know it, need a convoy of boats and hope they’re all rowing in the same direction. When founders begin a company, there are often a few years of really tight knit, heads down, principal driven thinking that guides and motivates the companies’ every decision. The first few hires see the vision, burn their boat and hop in the founders’ one. The next batch of employees see some traction, have some specialization and something unique to offer and take their shot. After that, the flood of minds and talent may start to take reign. While every growing company is different, every company has the same battle with “Tribal knowledge.”
Tribal knowledge refers to any unwritten knowledge within a company that is not widely known. This could be actual data, such as passwords, or more abstract knowledge, such as best practices and processes. Because it is unwritten, tribal knowledge is typically shared by word-of-mouth (if at all) and many times is encapsulated in the learned lessons from mistakes of the past.
Tribal knowledge is usually trapped in the heads of your veteran employees and founders, the ones who've been with you from the beginning and know the ins and outs of your business. While you can reiterate mission statements and the “Why” a million times, it’s the know-how and the methodology of how to get the job done that is often where a lot of the tribal meat lies.
As a team leader focused on sales and revenue, I see this with new hires and the training process we put them through. We require them to sit with many of the other leaders of the company to try to infuse as much tribal knowledge into them as possible so that they don’t make the mistakes of our past. Whether it’s objection handling a certain way, learning how to decode the buyer decision making or it’s just the way in which we treat SLA’s around turnarounds on quotes, tribal knowledge transfer is critical to the success of a company.
As a company grows, many team members hold onto tribal knowledge unknowingly. Meaning, they assume that everyone knows what they know or that other people don't need to know it. So, unless a problem arises that proves otherwise, they keep the information to themselves. While some tribal knowledge is more easily transferrable, the more deeply rooted tribal knowledge tends to have a distribution problem as a company grows. While a CEO can tell a story of the past to the first four employees and it will resonate like an ice bath to the skin, a larger employee pool might not inherit the same emotional draw to that story. The more difficult areas of tribal knowledge must be felt, not told.
In any event, as Xeal reaches 50 employees, tribal knowledge transfer really stands out as a key marker of our future success. We don’t want to do things the way they were done in the past. We don’t want to emulate our competitive set. We want to do things in our own tribal style, the Xeal way.