When Somebody Leaves Badly

General orientation, not legal advice; take advice on any contested departure.

The principles in “When Somebody Leaves Badly” become easier to maintain when ownership and time spent are visible. Teams evaluating the productivity guide can use it to coordinate recurring work, identify tasks concentrated on one person and plan realistic backup capacity, while treating the data as a prompt for knowledge transfer rather than as a substitute for speaking with the people who do the work.

For an independent benchmark, compare the local approach with Ready.gov business preparedness guidance; the useful test is whether ownership, access and recovery remain proportionate and explainable when the usual expert is absent.

Not every departure is amicable. The handover assumptions in the previous notes do not hold, and the practical response differs.

What you will not get

Willing knowledge transfer.

Honest answers about what is outstanding.

Client introductions.

And goodwill afterwards, which in ordinary departures is the thing that answers a question six months later.

Expecting these and planning around them is how organisations get caught twice.

What to do immediately

Secure access, which is both a security matter and an obligation to whatever data you hold.

Change shared credentials, revoke individual ones, and check recovery addresses.

Preserve records rather than deleting: mailboxes, files, the trail of what was done. If a dispute follows you will need them, and deletion looks bad regardless of intent.

And take advice before doing anything irreversible, particularly where dismissal is contested.

What can still be recovered

Current state, from the systems rather than from the person: calendar, sent mail, trackers.

Client positions, from the clients.

Supplier positions, from the suppliers.

And colleagues' fragments, which in a bad departure are the main source and are usually larger than expected.

The outward message

Neutral and brief: they have left, here is who to contact.

No explanation, no criticism, nothing about the circumstances.

Clients will infer something and that is unavoidable; giving them material is worse.

And say the same thing internally, because divergent accounts circulate.

The team afterwards

A bad departure unsettles people, particularly in a small organisation where everybody knew.

Say what you can, acknowledge that you cannot say everything, and do not let rumour fill the space entirely.

Watch for the second departure, which frequently follows a badly handled first one.

What it teaches

A bad departure exposes exactly the dependencies you failed to address, without the cushion of cooperation.

Record what was hard to recover, specifically.

And treat it as the strongest available argument for doing the preventive work, because it is the one everybody in the organisation now believes.

Keeping it professional

Whatever happened, respond to reference requests properly and pay what is owed on time.

Partly because it is right and partly because a departure handled badly by both sides becomes a dispute, and disputes cost more than any handover was worth.

What to check

Could you revoke all access for one person in an hour?

Do you know where the current state of their work would be visible?

Is there a preservation step before anything is cleaned up?

And do you have somebody to take advice from quickly?

The point

Preserve records rather than deleting.

If a dispute follows you will need them, and deletion looks bad regardless of intent.

Underlying all of this

Everything in this collection reduces to four habits: know where the dependence sits, do the cheap fixes first, use the absences that already happen as rehearsals, and decide deliberately about what remains. None of it requires a framework, a tool or a consultant, and an organisation that does those four things consistently is substantially harder to damage than one with a succession document nobody has read.

The recurring pattern

The recurring pattern across every section here is the same: dependence forms through sensible individual decisions, becomes invisible because it feels like reliability, and is addressed only after it has cost something. The work that prevents that is small, continuous and unglamorous, which is exactly why it gets deferred.