INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION OF KNOWLEDGE AND KNOW-HOW
Intergenerational transmission of knowledge and know-how is making a comeback in business practices.
This is a series of organizational and managerial measures designed to maintain the knowledge and know-how of one generation to the next.
While the practice of intergenerational transmission is not new, the challenge has never been greater.
Indeed, the importance of knowledge and know-how has taken on a whole new dimension in our complex, globalized economy, which demands constant responsiveness.
The company must be part of this movement, and play an active role in it.
Unable to predict everything in advance, companies are increasingly delegating decision-making. Experienced managers are expected to be autonomous and committed; their skills, both individual and collective, become those of the company.
The creation and sharing of knowledge and know-how contribute to creativity, reactivity and therefore to the company's performance: this knowledge and know-how are sources of competitive advantage for the company.
Preserving them from generation to generation is a matter of business survival.
However, these skills and know-how are regularly called into question in a rapidly changing world, and the company with it.
First observation: to ensure its survival in a dynamic environment, a company must not only perpetuate its resources over time, but also upgrade them. This ability to adapt is an integral part of a company's competitiveness.
Secondly, these resources do not change instantly. The development of individual skills and know-how takes time.
For a period of time, the company finds itself with knowledge and know-how that are out of sync, or even in contradiction.
This inconsistency has an economic, social, strategic and cultural cost.
To ensure its successful evolution, the company needs to reconcile these different sets of resources, which manifest themselves in the form of intergenerational breakdowns.
Intergenerational transmission is therefore back in the company, with a stronger strategic focus.
On the one hand, the aim is to guarantee the continuity of knowledge and know-how across the generations; on the other, to update some of this knowledge and know-how, while enabling the older generation to readapt.
At WeNold, we propose a redefinition of the intergenerational transmission of knowledge and know-how within a framework of strategic dynamics.
INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION - A STRATEGIC CHALLENGE
The intergenerational transmission of knowledge and know-how has been given a strategic role in the continuity of the company.
This is a set of organizational and managerial measures designed to preserve the company's knowledge and know-how.
However, in the way it is currently approached, intergenerational transmission is still too partial and imprecise to make a full contribution to corporate strategy.
The strategic importance of intergenerational transmission of knowledge and know-how is a managerial concern.
Although this practice is natural to any society, it has been neglected in the workplace in the face of various day-to-day imperatives.
Today, it is back on the managerial agenda to meet new challenges. The alarm was triggered by the retirement of the baby-boom generation in 2005.
This generation, which has largely contributed to the development of the company's activities, would take its knowledge and know-how with it, without having passed them on to the next generations.
This is a general phenomenon that affects different sectors and professions, whether manual or intellectual, and at all levels of qualification.
The problem is particularly acute in sectors and companies where the next generation is small in number or insufficiently trained, and especially when the knowledge and skills in question are difficult to identify and explain.
This shortage can even threaten a company's survival.
Intergenerational transmission, as an organized and rationalized managerial practice, therefore appears to be an urgent necessity to avoid this breakdown.
However, the strategic importance of intergenerational transmission goes far beyond the issue of retirement.
Indeed, the issue is not so much the current demographic situation as the fact that companies do not know how to maintain their skills and know-how:
-theoretical knowledge,
-know-how (practices, experience),
-interpersonal skills (attitude, behavior).
The first element - "theoretical knowledge" - refers to explicit knowledge that can be codified through written or oral transmission.
It can be acquired through formal training and the accumulation of information, but is always accompanied by organized interpretation and the construction of meaning.
Its transmission from one person to another, or from one context to another, presupposes a common corpus of language and references to ensure that its meaning is not too distorted.
The second element, "know-how ", refers to the ability to handle tools and carry out a specific task or process. It is often this know-how that needs to be passed on, and which at the same time poses a problem.
Indeed, its behavioral dimension makes it tacit, inarticulate, sometimes implicit and difficult to explain. Know-how is acquired through action and practice, trial and error, observation and imitation.
Finally, the third element, "savoir-être ", is the internalization of informal norms that enable the individual to behave in accordance with the ethics and customs of the professional environment. Largely tacit, it's an attitude developed in and through social interaction.
These three forms of knowledge are considered as objects of intergenerational transmission, which has a role to play in the company's strategic dynamics.
THE NEED TO REDEFINE INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION WITHIN A FRAMEWORK OF STRATEGIC DYNAMICS
The challenges of intergenerational transmission are now well recognized, but the process of transmission does not systematically follow.
When it does take place, the handover is often organized on a case-by-case basis and in a hurry, at the last moment before experienced managers retire.
Intergenerational transmission is therefore not yet an integral part of day-to-day business practice.
Today, a number of companies have embarked on a process of intergenerational transmission. But their schemes essentially boil down to tutoring, in which a mid-career or late-career employee, often referred to as a senior or expert, guides the apprenticeship of a younger employee, without there being any real consensus on these age categories.
Intergenerational transmission is dealt with from four angles, essentially from the point of view of age management:
-The first angle is to approach intergenerational transmission as a means of accelerating young people's learning by benefiting from the experience of experienced managers.
Experienced managers can facilitate young people's learning by setting an example and drawing on their renowned experience.
-The second angle of approach refers to intergenerational transmission as a tool for building employee loyalty, particularly topical in a context of "talent wars" and in sectors experiencing recruitment difficulties.
Intergenerational transmission is presented as a means of integrating and retaining young people in a work team, notably through cultural development.
In the more recent context of longer working lives, intergenerational transmission is also a means of retaining the loyalty of employees in transition at the end of their professional careers. It's a way of entrusting these experienced managers, who are at risk of disengaging from their professional activity, with a new mission considered to be rewarding and full of meaning, in order to re-mobilize them.
The third angle of approach, which is more ergonomic and relates to physically-intensive professions, deals with intergenerational transmission from the point of view of health and safety at work.
In the course of their experience, key contributors develop tips and tricks for saving energy and getting the job done with less effort.
From this point of view, intergenerational transmission favors the prevention of workplace accidents and professional wear and tear.
On the other hand, for key contributors with weakened physical conditions, the move to a tutoring or supervisory position is also a way of continuing to work while avoiding a deterioration in their health.
-The fourth, and more recent, angle deals directly with intergenerational transmission as part of a rethinking of age management. These are often collections of best practices.
The main stages in carrying out an intergenerational transmission project are presented, along with the tools that can be mobilized and the pitfalls to be avoided.
But the way in which intergenerational transmission is approached still seems incomplete and imprecise in relation to the strategic stakes it represents.
In particular, two main limitations can be highlighted:
-The first concerns the imprecision of the knowledge and skills that are the subject of intergenerational transmission.
-The second relates to the direction of transmission, which is often from older employees to younger ones, and is primarily concerned with professional techniques, corporate culture, the inner workings of the company, and knowledge specific to the trade.
We must also insist on the transmission of collective skills : rules for working as a team to cope with contradictory demands, hazards, malfunctions and technical content.
We therefore need to think about what needs to be taken into account when passing on knowledge and skills from one generation to the next, with a view to the company's survival.
It's also worth pointing out that one-way intergenerational transmission, from the experienced manager to the young person, is based on a problematic shortcut between age, seniority and experience, one of the main pillars of knowledge and know-how.
This intergenerational transmission can pose a problem insofar as it overlooks the need for experienced managers to readapt their knowledge and know-how.
A "reverse" transmission of knowledge and skills from young people to experienced managers would therefore be of great interest here.
We therefore propose to redefine the object of transmission (knowledge and know-how) as well as the actors of transmission (generations).
So that intergenerational transmission can play its full part in the dynamic evolution of the company.
INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION - A TWO-WAY DYNAMIC
Our ambition is to reposition intergenerational transmission as a strategic challenge for the company, by preserving its knowledge and know-how.
In fact, it would be more appropriate to speak of the sharing or co-construction of knowledge and know-how between the different generations.
The survival of the company depends on maintaining, adapting and renewing skills and know-how over time.
In terms of corporate strategy, the transfer of ownership is a two-way street.
It must combine continuity and change in knowledge and know-how, and consider intergenerational transmission as a dynamic capacity, defined as the company's ability to reconfigure its strategic assets (knowledge, organizational skills, etc.) to adapt to change.
REDEFINE THE CONCEPT OF GENERATION IN TERMS OF KNOWLEDGE AND KNOW-HOW
A generation refers to a group of people born within the same time frame.
Two ways of categorizing generations:
-the societal generation;
-the generation in the professional life cycle.
The term "generation" is often used in companies to refer to the disconcerting behavior of the new generation: young people do not obey the same logic and hierarchy of values as their elders, which disrupts management and relations with older colleagues.
What's important here, then, is not so much the relative position of generations on an age scale (young or old) as their positioning on major themes and values such as work, relationship to hierarchy, mode of communication, need for autonomy and so on.
The breakdown consists in establishing an initial categorization between the different generations:
-the traditional generation (1925-1945)
-the baby-boom generation (1945-1950)
-Generation X (1960-1980)
-Generation Y (1980-1995)
-with the emergence of Generation Z (born after 1995).
If intergenerational tensions do exist, they are rarely due to intrinsic cultural differences, but rather to feelings of injustice, non-recognition, insecurity and intergenerational competition, engendered by managerial and organizational arrangements that create antagonism between the generations.
A second generational categorization consists in dividing the lifespan of individuals into major stages, according to the roles and statuses assigned to them by society:
-youth (study and training)
-adulthood (work, marriage and parenthood)
-old age (retirement from working life and being a grandparent).
This same logic is applied within the company:
-young people (integration and professionalization)
-intermediaries (career management)
seniors (end-of-career management).
In this way, age management and social time management need to be reinvented within the company, where a person with age experience may find himself in an apprenticeship situation as a result of professional retraining.
In conclusion, age is no longer a factor of identity, and notions of life stages and careers seem to be outdated.
If, at the end of a maturing process, the older generation represents a reservoir of knowledge and know-how, then it's time to pass this on to the younger generations.
On the other hand, if the older generation represents skills and know-how that are of less value to the company, then the transmission will have to be in the opposite direction.
