What Good Looks Like: Offboarding
If your organization loses something every time a person leaves, you are not behind and you are not alone. It is one of the most common things a growing team runs into, and it is rarely about the people who left. Good usually does not mean a thick onboarding manual. It means the work living somewhere other than one person’s head, so a departure is a transition instead of a hole. Most of the way there is naming what is fragile and writing a few things down, not a system overhaul, and there is real ground you can cover on your own this week. Here are a few places to start.
Where it stops: you can document the roles you know are fragile. Building so the organization absorbs any departure, and so the docs update when the role does, is a system the checklist points to but does not become a blockage.
Erin Peshoff is the Chief Curator of Vivia Studios. She has spent thirty years inside nonprofit operations, helped raise over $100 million for institutional missions, and built Vivia around the operating discipline most strategic engagements skip.
