Eliminating my role made the succession plan’s problems invisible for a little while longer.
The Handover, in Detail
Four weeks is enough time to do a good handover or a bad one. I chose to do a good one, not for Victor or for Luke or for the company that had just let me go, but for the more specific reason that our carriers and clients were people I had worked with for years and they deserved continuity, and also because Jana would inherit the consequences of an incomplete handover, and I was not going to leave Jana in a bad position.
The handover document took six days to write in its complete form. This is not because I write slowly. It is because the document needed to cover the knowledge of eighteen years in a way that someone without that context could use. This is harder than it sounds.
There is a version of institutional knowledge that lives in your head as fluency. You don’t think about it. You just know: Lakeland Trucking’s Marcus is the contact for last-minute changes, not their dispatch line; the Alder eastern warehouse has a receiving manager named Phil who requires a call confirmation, not just an email, for any appointment window change; the hardware chain’s accounts payable contact changed last year and the new contact’s name is in the system but their preferred format for invoice submissions is not, it’s a weekly batch by Wednesday noon.
Translating fluency into documentation requires examining your own knowledge from the outside — describing what you know as if you don’t know it, for the benefit of someone who doesn’t. It is genuinely difficult. I sat at my desk for parts of several days asking myself: what would I need to know, starting from nothing, to handle this account well?