What to Say When Handing Over to a Colleague

You've written the handover document. Now you have to actually talk to the person taking over your work. The conversation matters more than the document, because it's where the real knowledge transfer happens — the context, the warnings, the things you'd never put in writing. Here's what to say, in what order, and how to make it stick.

Before the meeting

Don't walk into the handover conversation cold. Send the document at least 24 hours ahead with a short note: "Have a read through before we meet — I'll answer questions and walk you through anything that needs context." This shifts the meeting from a monologue into a conversation, which is where the value is.

Block 60 to 90 minutes. Anything shorter and you'll rush. Anything longer and both of you will be exhausted. If your role is genuinely complex, schedule two shorter sessions a few days apart so they have time to absorb the first one.

How to open the conversation

Start by setting expectations for the meeting itself. Two minutes, no more.

"Thanks for making time. I want to use this to do three things: walk you through the active projects, flag the people and processes you'll need to know, and give you the stuff that isn't in the document. The doc has the structure — this conversation is where I tell you what to actually watch out for. Stop me whenever you have a question."

That last line matters. Handover meetings fail when the person leaving talks for an hour and the person taking over nods politely. Invite interruption explicitly.

The five things to actually say

Whatever your role, the conversation should cover five things, in roughly this order. The document supports each one — your job in the meeting is to add the colour the document can't.

1. What's live, and what's about to break

Walk through every active project. For each one, say: where it is, what the next action is, who owns the next action, and what could go wrong in the next four weeks. That last part is the bit only you can give them.

2. Who the people really are

The document lists names and roles. The conversation is where you tell them how those people actually behave. Who's a blocker. Who's a champion. Who looks senior but defers to someone else. Who answers email at midnight and who needs three reminders.

Be honest but professional. "Sarah is great to work with but she'll say yes to everything in a meeting and then forget — always follow up in writing" is fair. "Sarah is hopeless" is not.

3. The rhythms of the role

Walk them through what a typical week looks like. The recurring meetings, the reports that go out on Fridays, the monthly review they need to prepare for. Then the bigger cycles — the quarterly thing, the annual thing, the busy season.

This is where most successors get blindsided. They handle the day-to-day fine, then a quarterly deadline arrives in week six and nobody warned them. Pull up your calendar and walk forward three months explicitly.

4. The unwritten rules

Every team has them. The Slack channel that looks unimportant but the CTO reads daily. The deck template you must use because the CFO hates the alternative. The fact that Friday afternoon meetings are unofficially banned. The thing that's technically allowed but will get you side-eyed.

These don't go in the written document because they're hard to phrase without sounding political. Say them out loud instead. Your successor will thank you in month two.

5. "If I were you, in your first month, I would..."

End with this. Give them a concrete first-month plan. Three or four things, in order. Who to meet, what to read, which project to start with, what to leave alone for now.

What not to say

Three things that turn a good handover into a bad one:

• Don't vent. However tempting it is to explain why you're leaving, or who made the role unbearable, the handover meeting is not the place. It poisons the well for your successor before they've started.
• Don't promise what you can't deliver. "Just message me anytime after I leave" sounds kind, but you won't reply at the same speed in three months. Be specific: "I'm happy to take one or two questions by email in the first month, then we should let go."
• Don't pretend it's simpler than it is. Underselling the complexity to seem helpful sets your successor up to feel inadequate when reality hits. Be honest about what's hard.

How to close the meeting

End with two things. First, ask them to summarise back to you: "What are the three things you're going to do first?" If they can't answer, you haven't handed over yet. You've just talked at them.

Second, agree on what happens next. Will there be another session? Should they shadow you on a specific meeting before you leave? When does it become reasonable for them to stop asking you and start asking their manager? Make this concrete.

The whole conversation rests on the document being good. If the document is vague, the meeting becomes a chaotic dump of half-remembered context. If the document is solid, the meeting becomes what it should be — the parts only you can explain. If you're working in Google Workspace, OneLast.Day reads your emails, calendar, and files and builds the handover document from your actual work data, so you can spend the meeting on the things that matter instead of trying to remember what the document forgot.