The clock is ticking. 250,000 Canadian boomers will retire this year. Is your organization ready?
In a recent Globe and Mail article, Parkinson, Mcfarland and Mckenna pointed out that 250,000 Canadian boomers are anticipated to retire this year. Even more disconcerting, experts anticipate that in the coming years this number will jump to 400,000.
At first glance these ginormous numbers may not mean much to you. However, there are real consequences for both the labour force and our economy. Not to mention some very dire repercussions for retirees who would fare better working past the age of 65, rather than opting for retirement. I will save the latter topic for a different post. This large number of workforce exits, however, mean that economic growth will inevitably slow down in this country.
Now that may still not mean much to you or your organization, so let me try and better explain how the greying of Canada’s workforce may impact your firm.
Remember Captain Sully Sullenberger?
The man who made an emergency landing in the Hudson River after a flock of Canada geese struck the aircraft and caused the plane’s engines to fail? It’s a hard story to forget.
Sullenberger had less than five minutes to figure out where he was going to land the plane and how he was going to save all 155 passengers on board. Reflecting on his experience that day, the man hailed as a hero explains:
At twenty-four, I was a fighter pilot, learning that I had to pay close attention to everything, because life and death could be separated by seconds and by feet. By fifty- seven, I was a gray haired man with my hands on the controls of an Airbus A320 over Manhattan, using a lifetime of knowledge to find a way to safety ….I’ve come to realize that my Journey to the Hudson River didn’t begin at LaGuardia Airport. It began decades before, in my childhood home, on Mr.Cook’s glass airfield, in the skies over north Texas, in the California home I now share with my wife Lorrie, and our two daughters, and on all the jets I have flown towards the Horizon. Flight 1549 wasn’t just a five-minute journey. My entire life led me safely to that river (Sullenberger, 2009)
Tacit knowledge
The knowledge that resides in Captain Sully’s head is Tacit. Meaning, it is impossible to codify in documents, presentations or reports. His swift response to the emergency situation was a result of his experience in the military, his long career as an aviation pilot and his dedication and consistent commitment to airline safety. His actions on that fateful day are reflective of a collection of experiences that he was able to comb through and determine if his current predicament resembled any previously experienced pattern, and if so, to respond in kind. This is what scientists refer to as expertise or what professors Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap call deep smarts.
Deep smarts emerge from intuition, or what others refer to as a gut feeling. It is honed by years of experience on the job and enables the deeply smart person to see interrelationships that most
of us miss. It is steeped in know-how and know-who and relies less on fact than on experience. Deep smarts foster quick decision making in which the individual can see the big picture while focusing on a few central and critical elements. In essence, it was Captain Sully’s deep smarts that enabled him to quickly assess where and how to safely land US Airways Flight 1549.
Had a less experienced pilot replaced Captain Sully that day would the outcome have been the same?
It is the experience of the expert pilot, doctor, surgeon or carpenter that has us placing our faith in the hands of these professionals. As such, experience is paramount to the development of expertise. And expertise requires time to transfer.
- Do you have any Captain Sullys in your organization?
- Do you know their plans for retirement?
- Have you thought about who is going to replace these people whose wisdom and business acumen is the key to your organization’s survival?
Before your retiring employees exit the workforce make sure you have a plan in place to capture their knowledge. My research has revealed that most mature employees want to share their knowledge with their replacements, providing they feel they are valued members of the organization and that their mentees appreciate their efforts.
Such programs are an investment of time, energy and money. However, having your experienced employees walk off the job without passing the baton is a much costlier endeavour. While not all such scenarios are as dramatic as Sullenberger’s Hudson river rescue, it certainly paints a clear message that you cannot replace experienced workers with novice employees and expect them to work at the same level of proficiency.
If you don’t have a knowledge transfer program in place to capture the experience of your retiring workers, you may be putting your organization at risk of lost knowledge, performance disruptions and in some cases survival.
Act fast before your retiring employees walk out the door. Once they retire it is highly unlikely that they will ever return.
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Dr. Gill is the founder of rewire to retire, a corporate training company dedicated to helping pre-retirees successfully transition from work to retirement while ensuring businesses retain their organizational knowledge
