The Hidden Cost of Experience Walking Out the Door
Real stories, practical lessons, and firsthand observations about institutional knowledge, leadership, and the experience that keeps organizations running. Explore what happens when valuable knowledge is concentrated in a few people, and what organizations can do to preserve it.
Roger Campbell Sr.
10/17/20265 min read
The Hidden Cost of Experience Walking Out the Door
By Roger Campbell, Sr. | Founder, Over 60 Dam, LLC
During my first week at a new company, I noticed something that made me nervous.
A supervisor in the contact center, I’ll call her Linda, seemed to know everything about the operation. She’d been there since the beginning and had worked almost every position. She knew the phone systems, the CRM, and the software that kept the business running, including the quirks that never made it into a training manual.
But what caught my attention wasn’t how much she knew. It was how many people needed her.
Her phone rang all day. Emails kept coming. People walked into her office looking for answers, some of them managers several levels above her. And every time, she stopped what she was doing to help.
Each interruption pulled her away from the people she was supposed to supervise and develop on the floor. The knowledge that made her so valuable was keeping her from doing her actual job. I kept asking myself one question: What happens if she isn’t here tomorrow?
Then we learned she would have to leave for medical reasons. The question was no longer hypothetical.
What We Did Before Linda Left
Linda and I started meeting regularly. We went through the calls, the emails, and the office visits, every question people kept bringing to her because they couldn’t get an answer anywhere else. We broke each one down. Why did they come to her? What did she know that nobody else did? How did she handle the situations the procedures didn’t cover?
We had training manuals. We had standard operating procedures. This was different. She'd learned this from years of solving real problems across almost every part of the business. As we captured it, we used it to cross-train other employees.
When she left, we felt her absence, but the work we’d done together gave others a better chance to step in. And it confirmed something I’d believed for most of my career:
Knowledge-sharing can’t start when someone announces they’re leaving. It has to be part of how the organization runs.
The Executive Who Could Get the Call Returned
I saw the same problem at the top of the organization.
During a period of fast growth, we had a senior vice president who helped find and secure locations for new operations. These were big projects, anywhere from 500 to 2,000 jobs coming into a community. That meant real estate developers, contractors, state officials, and sometimes people connected to the governor’s office.
He had spent years building those relationships. Some came from business. Some came from college, fraternities, and shared history. He knew the people. More importantly, they knew him. When he picked up the phone, people answered. When he needed several of them in one room, he could usually make it happen.
Then he left.
We did what most companies do. There was a 90-day transition. There was a debrief. A very capable person stepped into the role, backed by a strong team. But here’s what I learned. You can hand someone a contact list. You can walk them through the history of every project. You can introduce them to every developer and state official.
You cannot transfer years of personal trust in 90 days.
His successor had to build those relationships himself. That took time, and site-selection work that used to move quickly slowed down. The company kept moving forward, but we had lost something that wasn’t in a file cabinet or a computer.
If I’d had six months to plan that transition, I would have approached it differently. I would have put the incoming executive alongside the outgoing one for at least three months, working on the same projects, attending the same meetings, and getting to know the same people. Then I would have made sure the new executive had opportunities to meet those contacts independently and start building his own relationships.
Alongside that, I would have established a structured handover covering the projects, the decisions, the relationships, and the history behind them. The goal isn’t to transfer information. It’s to transfer as much operating capability as you can while there’s still time.
The People Who Aren’t on the Succession Plan
Linda wasn’t an executive. She never would have made it onto a succession plan. That’s the point.
I’ve seen the same dependency in purchasing, where a long-time buyer knew every supplier and the history behind each relationship. In mailrooms, where a supervisor knew how to move anything through a large facility, including all the exceptions nobody wrote down. In building maintenance, where an experienced crew fixed problems that would otherwise have meant calling in outside contractors.
Leadership often doesn’t see these dependencies, because everything looks like it’s working. The person who knows how to fix it fixes it. Someone stays late or comes in Saturday, so Monday runs smoothly. The problem never reaches the executive office, so everyone assumes the process works.
I’ve learned to question that assumption. Sometimes what looks like a good process is really an experienced employee quietly covering for a weakness nobody else has noticed.
What I Learned to Do Differently
For years, I held weekly debriefs. We’d get people together and take apart something that had happened in the operation. Sometimes it had gone wrong. Sometimes it had gone exceptionally well.
What happened? How did people handle it? What did they know that others should know?
If someone found a better way to handle a difficult customer, I wanted the whole team to learn it. If a process failed, I wanted to know why and how to keep it from happening again.
Those meetings did more than I expected. People got more involved. They learned how other parts of the business worked. We found gaps in our procedures, improved our training, and developed people who could handle situations that used to depend on one person. The manual tells you how the process is supposed to work. Experience tells you what to do when it doesn’t. You need both.
The Question Every Executive Should Ask
I’ve walked through many operations where everything looked fine. People were busy. Customers were served. Reports were on time. But the most important question isn’t whether the operation is performing. It’s this:
Who are we depending on to make it perform, and how much of what they know does anyone else understand?
That question goes beyond job descriptions, org charts, and succession plans. It makes you look at the judgment, relationships, and practical know-how people have built over years of doing the work. I call that Experience Capital.
When an experienced employee walks out the door, you don’t just lose a person. You can lose years of judgment, relationships, and knowledge that kept the business running. Too often, organizations don’t realize what they've lost until they try to run without them.
I’ve learned that lesson more than once. I’d much rather help an organization learn it before the departure than after.
Roger Campbell, Sr. has spent more than 40 years managing people and operations nationally and internationally. He founded Over 60 Dam, LLC and the Experience Advantage Program, which helps organizations identify and preserve the institutional knowledge, judgment, and relationships concentrated in experienced employees.
Learn more at www.over60dam.net.
Note: Linda is a substitute name used to protect the employee’s privacy.
Over 60 Dam, LLC | Experience Capital Insights