One of the funiest things that I see out there in the wild is people who hold their knowledge and skills pretty close to their chest and absolutely refuse to share their experience with anyone else.

It’s funny because in the long run these people end up in a dead-end job because they didn’t free themselves up by passing there skills onto someone so they could cover them while they picked up something new and exciting.

Unfortunately these people also cause heartache for their team members and the organisations that they work for by holding them to ransom for a certain period of time. The solution? Don’t negotiate with terrorists – “shoot them in the head” – metaphorically speaking of course.

Rather than allow these people to manipulate the team and the organisation. Remove them from their specialist setting and get them doing other work while you invest in getting more members of the team up to speed. In some cases its going to be really hard but smart people can learn most things pretty quickly – and you are hiring smart people aren’t you? While the problem of having technology terrorists on your team is interesting and one I love to help people solve I really want to talk about your role as a consultant when you are engaged by a client in which skills transfer is a deliverable.

Believe it or not a consultant is in the business of making themselves redundant by imparting as much of their experience as possible to the client and their teams. This has the uncanny side effect of making the client realise how valuable you are to the team and engaging you again and again – often over a period of years.

Sometimes however you might be working with a client and the skills transfer process just doesn’t seem to be happening. You may be producing all the documentation under the Sun but they just don’t seem to be picking it up.

Well – the problem may be that you are just mothering them too much. Show them a little bit less love. Rather than investing all of your energy looking for the gaps in their knowledge and skills get them to come to you with specific questions. There are a couple of ways you can do this:

  1. Set small achievable challenges.
  2. Hand over responsibility for delivery.
  3. Make them write the documentation.

These are all devices that I’ve used in the past but to be honest I often forget to use them. The problem is that if I do that then the tricky technical work and architectural decisions serialize on me. Use this as a hint that you need to shoot yourself in the head (metaphorically speaking).