Teach What You Know
Breakthrough Knowledge Transfer Techniques for Every Professional!
No matter where you work there are people with experience teaching people who need to learn. Everyone is part of this exchange yet few people know how to do it well. Now, there’s a comprehensive how-to manual for effective knowledge transfer: Teach What You Know.
Steve Trautman introduces simple, practical mentoring techniques he created for engineers at Microsoft, and has proven in many diverse organizations ranging from Nike to Boeing. This is real-world, get-it done advice, organized into a framework you can use no matter what you need to teach. Trautman provides common-sense tools to successfully pass along years or even decades of experiences: easy-to- use checklists, sample training plans, lists of questions, step-by-step procedures, and a start-to finish case study.
Teach What You Know will help you orient new employees, support transitions to new assignments and promotions, prepare for employee retirements, build teams, roll out new technologies, and even move forward after reorganizations and mergers. You'll learn how to
- Create a plan for the entire knowledge transfer process
- Clarify roles for each type of peer mentor in your organization
- Set expectations for communication so you can mentor and still get your other work done
- Organize what must be learned into manageable chunks
- Develop a measurable training plan in less than an hour
- Uncover the list of information and support that your apprentices can't live (or at least learn) without
- Explain the mysterious "big picture" to your apprentices
- Create one-hour "lesson plans" in five minutes
- Give a demonstration that is guaranteed to sink in
- Help your apprentices take responsibility for their own learning
- Make sure your apprentices have mastered what you've taught
- Provide feedback that your peers will appreciate hearing
Review By: Robert Jahrling
12/16/2010If you've ever hired someone, been a new hire, or was asked to "show someone the ropes," Steve Trautman's book serves as a useful guide to the practicalities of peer mentoring. Trautman, a former program manager at Microsoft, explains the techniques that he recommends for efficient mentoring success.
This is a good book for managers to have in their arsenal of tools, especially if they're in charge of hiring. Trautman provides several tools in the form of customizable templates for interactions between managers, mentors, and "apprentices" (his term for trainees). He includes several useful chapters on topics such as time management, identifying different learning styles, and tailoring your knowledge-transfer efforts to those learning styles.
Trautman is brusque and a no-nonsense author. His writing style reflects these characteristics. Some of his preferred working styles may rub some readers the wrong way—the two pages he spent detailing exactly what procedures he preferred when receiving email left me speechless—but much of the information contained in this book is revelatory. Although he doesn't say it outright, the reader comes away with the impression that training someone is a lot like testing software: plan, execute, measure, and report.