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When you leave your old job on good terms, you want to ensure a smooth transition to make life easier for your replacement. This succession planning checklist can help you to hand over the reins.
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- Title
- Succession planning for when you leave a job
- Published
- May 14 2019
- Word count
- 2042 words
Shoutout to @kclk @WinterCharm @spit-evil-olive-tips @catt for their help!
This was a good read. Thanks for sharing! I remember the original thread, but it's nice to see it all put together.
Thanks for the shoutout! <3
All I could think about when I was reading this was, "This is a great guide on how to ensure that a company can easily replace you without having to worry about what knowledge they'll lose when you leave."
At every job I've worked, I've always tried to find that one thing that only I know how to do and become the person responsible for that task/area of expertise.
Just as an example, when I worked at a TV station years ago, I was the one who would set up all of the contests and giveaways that we would do. It wasn't a complicated process, but it was one that had to be done exactly the right way so that there was no extra liability to the company because the small print was wrong or the wording on the page implied something beyond the scope of the contest. It sounds dumb, but people have sued over stupider things. It's also a really good and cheap way to boost viewership/website traffic. People love free stuff.
When they laid off some people because they were moving more jobs to their corporate offices across the country, I was spared because I was one of the few people that could run those contests.
But when I left the company for a better job a few years later, I was told that I shouldn't worry about training anybody on how to do the contests, that those would be handled by corporate from now on.
Guess what? They didn't give that responsibility to the corporate people and no one else locally knew how to do it...I left that job quite a while ago, but I still get texts/calls from my former boss asking how to do specific contest related things.
The moral of the story? Document what you can, even if management tells you it doesn't matter...but keep it to yourself until you're ready to leave. It's not always a good idea to wait until you've put in your notice to start planning that kind of stuff, since the last weeks at any given job are usually a rush of trying to finish up your current projects or get them to a place where someone else can take over. That way, you can save the person coming in to replace you a lot of headache without the risk of being easily replaceable.
Wow, I couldn't disagree with this more.
I've survived about 5 layoffs in a multinational corporation and some of the first to go were the information hoarders. Management brought in "process experts" to document all of the processes and as soon as they found these folks obfuscating their job duties (or lack thereof) they canned them.
The behavior you described is detrimental to the company, as you illustrated yourself, and it's a poor reflection on the management there that they allowed that to happen.
Any managers on here should take this as a lesson on why you ask your employees to document process.
I guess from my comment, it might have sounded like this was a large part of my job, so I can understand the reaction. It was an extremely small part.
My point was, they had a choice between me, a video editor who could do this thing no one else knew how to do, or a video editor who didn’t know how to do anything else. So they got rid of the other person and kept me.
On the flip side, I know of people who were denied promotions/transfers because they were the only ones able to do some smallish thing.
Personally, I believe everyone is replaceable, no matter what. Sharing knowledge ensures I don't get called at 4AM when something goes down, and builds a strong team.
Call centers are notorious for this. I was passed over 3 times for different promotions or lateral moves that would have increased my pay rate, and when I asked why all I ever received were oblique answers and an assurance that I would be considered seriously in the future, as always.
Of course they denied that this had anything to do with the fact that my CSR Survey scores were the only reason my team was meeting or beating metric goals every month. I'm not trying to brag, I'm stating a fact: If you removed my contribution to the scorecard for May 2016, for example, the entire team would have scored collectively below goal.
Ymmv obviously, as call centers are money-grubbing cess pools that serve little benefit to the employee beyond providing a paycheck for far too little.
That's the bottom line. It's just a matter of how easy are you to replace.