Phrasal Verbs 2: Work, Study and Communication

Story · all 20 words

The Handover

Marguerite ran the department for eleven years and then decided, in the February, to step down at the end of the summer. She gave six months notice, which she did not have to do, and which turned out to matter enormously.

I was asked to take over. I had been there four years and was, on paper, the obvious person, and I said yes in the way you say yes to things at thirty-four – instantly, and without any real understanding of what had been agreed.

The handover was scheduled for six weeks. Marguerite offered to draw up a plan for it, printed, in a folder, which I have kept.

What she did in those weeks was not what I expected. I had imagined being told how things worked. Instead she spent most of it introducing me to people – the man in finance who could authorise things quickly if you asked him properly, the caretaker who knew which rooms actually had working sockets, the woman at the county office who would answer an email in an hour if it came from Marguerite and in three weeks if it came from anybody else.

None of that was written down anywhere. It could not be. That is the thing a good handover transfers, and it is the reason six months of notice is worth more than any document.

She also told me what she had got wrong, at some length, which I found uncomfortable and which was the most useful part.

Then she left, and in the October the funding decision came through and it was forty per cent less than we had planned for, and I discovered what taking over actually meant.

We had to call off the autumn programme. Six events, two of them already advertised. I had to ring people and explain, and I took down the same apology in slightly different words fourteen times, and I got better at it in a way I did not enjoy.

The mistake I made was in the meeting where we decided it. I had the figures. I had gone over them four times and I knew we could not carry the programme. And I explained it badly – I chose to bring up the problem too late in the agenda, when people were tired, and I let it sound like a decision that had already been made.

The point never got across. Two of my colleagues left that meeting believing the cuts were my preference rather than my arithmetic, and one of them still believes it, four years on.

What I should have done was put forward the numbers first, before any proposal at all, and let the room reach the conclusion on its own.

Priya, who had been there two years and said very little in meetings, was the one who eventually managed to come up with the way through. She suggested we carry out a proper survey of who was actually attending, rather than assuming – and it turned out that two of the six events were bringing in almost nobody, and one of them had been running since 2009 purely because nobody had ever asked.

She had to speak up twice before anyone listened to her, and I have thought about that a good deal since, because I was chairing.

We had to run through the new plan the following week, handed out one page rather than eleven, and it took forty minutes instead of three hours.

The administrative part I underestimated completely. There are forms in that job I still resent. You fill them in, you send them, and if you do not follow them up in nine days nothing whatsoever happens, and nobody tells you that.

Marguerite sent one email in that first year, in the November, when things were at their worst. It said: “You will not be able to do it the way I did it. Do not try.” I did not get back to her for a fortnight because I did not know what to say.

I have her folder in a drawer. I look things up in it perhaps twice a year, and most of what is useful in it is not the procedures. It is the list of names at the back.

To sum up five years in a sentence: the job was never the work. It was knowing who to ring.