A retirement date is rarely a surprise. It is usually known a year out, often longer. Yet the handover still gets treated as an admin task for the final month, squeezed in between the leaving do and the last valuation.

9 votes came in before the poll closed. The room split like this: 44% said a rushed handover in the last few weeks, 33% said nothing is captured and it walks out the door, 11% said they come back as a consultant at twice the rate, 11% said we have a real plan and it works.

Three things worth taking from that.

1. What walks out is not the process, it is the judgement. The procedures are written down somewhere. What goes is why a clause was drafted the way it was, which subcontractor needs watching on the final account, and which client contact actually makes the decision. None of that fits in a handover spreadsheet written in the last fortnight. It transfers when someone works alongside them on live schemes, for months.

2. The consultant route is a symptom, not a plan. Bringing someone back at twice the rate tells you the business knew what it was losing and did nothing until it had gone. Sometimes it is the right call to get a job over the line. As the default, it means paying a premium to rent back knowledge you already owned.

3. Succession starts with a name. The one in nine with a real plan can almost certainly tell you who the successor is, and that person is already doing parts of the job. If the answer to "who takes this on" is still "we will recruit", the handover will be rushed whatever the calendar says.

If you are the one approaching retirement, the most useful thing you can do is not write a manual. Take the person below you into the meetings, the difficult conversations and the commercial calls you would normally handle alone, and let them get some of it wrong while you are still there to catch it.

If you run a business, look at your top ten people and ask which of them could leave in the next three years. Then ask who has been sitting next to them. When a senior role comes to market after a retirement, the job description covers the job on paper. The hard part to replace is everything the last person did that never made it into the job description.

So, my answer. Start the handover the day the date is known, with a named successor doing real parts of the job, and treat the last few weeks as a formality rather than the handover itself.

The poll is closed but the thread is not. If your business has cracked this, put how in the replies. The one in nine has something the rest of us want to hear.