TRM & EKT For The Finance & Insurance Industries

By working with Steve Trautman Co., you reduce talent risk and gain access to our team of certified Consultants, who will guide your company through the knowledge-management process. Our Consultants are global experts in knowledge transfer and talent risk management, and they will mitigate your risk at the technical task level where your competitive advantage lives or dies.

Let’s look at each of these knowledge-management systems in more detail.

How Our Talent Risk Management Process Helps The Insurance & Finance Industries

Talent risk is occurring when you have crucial industry knowledge held by just one or two employees — these linchpin experts could severely cripple your organization if they retire or get poached by the competition.

At Steve Trautman Co., we use our Talent Risk Management process to identify where there is talent risk within insurance or finance companies and to mitigate that risk by spreading linchpin-knowledge across an organization.

Here is a brief explanation of how our Talent Risk Management process works:

Step 1: Identify The Talent Risk Within Your Company

Our Consultants will use the Steve Trautman Co.’s Knowledge Silo Matrix (a talent-risk-specific database) to quantify individual units of knowledge in your organization and identify exactly where this industry-knowledge is held.

The Knowledge Silo Matrix will reveal, at a quick glance, your talent redundancies, shortages, overloading, lack of backups, and more — all of which contribute to talent risk within your company.

Step 2: Agree On Which Risks Are Priorities

Now that you can see where knowledge risk exists in your company, your leadership team will be guided by our certified Consultants in deciding which risks need to be dealt with immediately and which ones can be mitigated over time.

Beyond identifying talent risk, the Knowledge Silo Matrix will also help you make better decisions when delegating tasks between teams and individuals. Knowing who has what knowledge in your company enables you to assign tasks that fall exactly within team members’ strengths. This will increase efficiency, as people will come to better understand their role in the organization — after all, knowing what not to do is just as important as knowing what to do.

Step 3: Use Knowledge Transfer To Mitigate Your Talent Risk

Once you have used the Knowledge Silo Matrix to identify risk and decided which risk needs to be mitigated, then it’s time to begin the knowledge transfer process.

Our Consultants will be instrumental during this phase of the Talent Risk Management process, as they will teach your team how to use Steve Trautman Co.’s specialized knowledge transfer tools — the Skill Development Plan and the Knowledge Transfer Workshop.

The Skill Development Plan is a comprehensive list of all the skills that must be learned for a specific job. The skills are organized into a learning schedule, to ensure that the necessary knowledge is taught, and that linchpin knowledge risk is mitigated.

The Knowledge Transfer Workshop teaches your experts how to share their knowledge. Our certified Consultants are global authorities when it comes to teaching others how to teach. During the Knowledge Transfer Workshop, they will equip your experts with 15 proven techniques for transferring their knowledge to apprentices.

Steve Trautman Co.’s Talent Risk Management In Action

One of our clients, a major financial institution, hired Steve Trautman Co. to help identify talent and knowledge risk within the organization. Our Consultants created a Knowledge Silo Matrix and discovered that our client was relying heavily on outside contractors, even allowing a majority of the company’s unique technical and industry knowledge to be held exclusively by outside contractors.

This posed a huge risk for our finance client. What if a contractor suddenly quit or was hired by the competition? Our client would have been severely handicapped.

Steve Trautman Co.’s Consultants were able to successfully mitigate this risk by walking our client through the three steps of Talent Risk Management and helping our client transition key knowledge from contractors to in-house employees.

How Steve Trautman Co.’s Knowledge Transfer Plan Strengthens The Finance & Insurance Industries

Whether your company simply needs to transition knowledge from a retiring employee, or is seeking to mitigate the risk of a linchpin expert, the Knowledge Transfer Plan is your tool for shifting information from top talent to successors.

What makes Steve Trautman Co.’s Knowledge Transfer stand out from the competition is that we don’t stop at transferring institutional knowledge; rather, we enable your experts to transfer tacit knowledge, soft skills, key relationships, habits, and other abilities which are normally difficult for experts to teach apprentices.

Whereas the Talent Risk Management focuses on mitigating risk company-wide, the Knowledge Transfer Plan is implemented on the small-scale transfer of information from a single expert to their apprentices.

Here is a brief explanation of how our Knowledge Transfer process works:

Step 1: Identify & Prioritize Knowledge Risk Areas

The Knowledge Transfer begins with a highly structured Q&A, in which our certified Consultants will dialogue with your expert and record the job skills that need to be transfered. We will enter these skills into a Knowledge Silo Matrix (a specialized database), in order to identify which skills are most important and the order in which they will be taught to successors.

Step 2: Divide Skills Into Teachable Tasks

Next, our Consultants will take the skills recorded in the Knowledge Silo Matrix, and will work with your expert to divide these skills down into teachable tasks — within the context of the Knowledge Transfer, “tasks” are specific duties that can be taught to successors within a single hour.

Once all skills have been broken into individual tasks, we will create a Skill Development Plan that strategically schedules every learning hour required to bring apprentices up to the expert’s level. This plan will also note all the resources needed to properly teach these skills to apprentices.

Step 3: Train Experts To Transfer Knowledge Effectively

One of the unique advantages of working with Steve Trautman Co. is that we don’t expect your experts to be able to handle the knowledge transfer on their own.

We understand that not everyone is a born teacher, and so our certified Consultants will train your experts how to transfer skills and tacit knowledge to their apprentices. Our Consultants have over 25 years of experience teaching others how to teach, and will equip your finance or insurance experts with the tools they need to effectively transfer their knowledge.

Step 4: Transfer Knowledge

Now that your experts know how to teach and your successors have the Skill Development Plan to follow, the actual knowledge transfer can begin!

Knowledge transfer will take place during highly-structured sessions, in which the expert will teach their successors. One of our Consultants will monitor the first few sessions to ensure that the Skill Development Plan is working and to troubleshoot should issues come up.

Step 5: Test & Measure Knowledge Transfer

Once the Skill Development Plan has been completed, we will administer a knowledge transfer test. This test will gauge the success of the knowledge transfer by identifying which areas may need to be taught again and whether or not the successor can perform tasks independently.

Steve Trautman Co.’s Knowledge Transfer In Action

Finance and insurance case study

Talent Risk Management & Knowledge Transfer Tools

As our client, you will have access to a suite of tools that we have spent over 25 years refining for the insurance and finance industries. We have used these tools to successfully mitigate talent risk and transfer knowledge from thousands of industry experts to their successors.

• Knowledge Silo Matrix: identifies at-risk knowledge areas for your team and company and helps determine possible successors.
• Skill Development Plans: breaks down your experts tacit finance and insurance industry knowledge into tangible skills that can be taught and learned in one hour.
• Knowledge Transfer Workshop: teaches your experts how to effectively teach their knowledge to successors.
• Knowledge Transfer Test Questions: measure knowledge transfer progress and confirm that successors have the ability to perform tasks independently.

Why Steve Trautman Co. Is The Knowledge-Management Solution Your Company Needs

The high success rate of Steve Trautman Co.’s knowledge transfers is a direct result of the experts we employ. Our Consultants are highly-trained specialists that excel at identifying knowledge risks and talent shortages. Nothing surprises our team. No task is too difficult or too complex.

For effective knowledge transfer solutions that complete on schedule, look no further than Steve Trautman Company.