The Handover Looked Fine on Paper

Someone on my team was going on leave. We did what you’re supposed to do — sat down, went through the handover. Programs assigned. Files shared. A neat little document listing who was covering what. Everyone nodded. Everyone felt covered.

Two weeks later I found out a customer had been waiting on an answer that whole time. Nobody had actively ignored them. Everyone assumed someone else had it. A target quietly slipped through the same gap. And when I went back to figure out where it had gone wrong, the answer wasn’t in the handover document at all. It was in a hallway conversation from three weeks earlier — a commitment made, half-remembered, never written anywhere. The person covering it had no way of knowing it existed.

That’s the part that never makes it onto a handover checklist. Not the tasks — those get listed every time. It’s the things that were said but not documented. The commitments made in passing. The thing management assumed was already sorted, because it usually was, so nobody thought to mention it out loud.

I used to think a good handover was a good list. Programs, projects, contacts, deadlines — tick, tick, tick. What I learned managing a team at Amazon is that the list only covers what needs doing. It says nothing about what’s already been promised, decided, or expected — by the person leaving, by the people above them, or by the customer on the other end of an email thread who has no idea any of this reshuffling is even happening.

Handover isn’t just a task transfer. It’s a communication transfer — sideways to the person picking things up, and vertically to whoever’s expecting the work to land the same way it always has. Miss that second part and everything can look fine on paper while something real quietly falls through.

Now, when someone on my team — or when I hand something to a client, or a client hands something to me — goes through a handover, I ask one extra question before we call it done: what have you said yes to, out loud, that isn’t written down anywhere? It’s the least comfortable question to ask. It’s also the one that actually catches things.

Your turn: think about the last handover in your business — a role, a project, a client relationship. What would fall through if you didn’t ask that question?