Identification and Documentation of Managerial Experiences: A Conceptual Framework

Recurring mistakes is one of the main issues in organizations leading to major challenges and usually resulting in extra expenditures. Mistakes are not completely preventable and they may occur in different organizational levels. However, some mistakes are unacceptable to occur in management level. Lack of documentation of managers' experiences in organizations is an important reason for repeating mistakes by managers. Experience can be considered a kind of tacit knowledge. Documenting experiences of managers (and leaders) in organizations - which is part of their tacit knowledge-will prevent the organization from losing priceless knowledge and can transfer knowledge from one experienced manager to a younger and less experienced one. This process will ultimately lead to the decrease of knowledge loss and reduction of expenses related to it. It can also be said that the documentation of managers' experiences is effective for improving the success probability of organizations and managers. Of course, one should not forget that a key step prior to documenting the knowledge and experiences is identifying these experiences. Hence, identifying, capturing and documenting managers' knowledge must come together. Despite the importance of identifying and documenting managers' experiences, there is no robust framework for introducing needed phases and steps for this purpose. The paper aims to introduce a new conceptual framework for identifying and documenting the managers' experiences. Reviewing and analyzing the literature lead to the initial conceptual framework. Then, in order to validate the developed initial framework and to finalize it, a questionnaire was applied. To the author's knowledge, this paper may be the first study which introduces a comprehensive process oriented framework for identifying and documenting managerial experiences, which in addition to academic values, can also be practically implemented in organizations.