The Handoff

If you’re one of the runners in a relay race, your job is straightforward: hustle around the track as fast as you can from point A to point B and hand off the baton to the next teammate.

But that last part, handing off the baton, is often the transition that separates a good race from a great race.  And a successful handoff requires many things: planning, practice, communication, and most of all paying attention to the next runner.

Sometimes in our rush to do a job well, we focus on the part that will be hardest or most time-consuming for ourselves (e.g. the run itself).  And we forget about what the next person on the team will face:

• After I hand in the report, what’s my boss going to do with it?
• When we inform our client that they’ve lost 5% market share, who will they need to explain that to?
• When our daughter learns she got into the college of her dreams, what’s she going to need from us as parents? (financially, emotionally, and otherwise)

The handoff is not what we do after the job, it is part of the job.   And doing the job well includes nailing the handoff so the next person can take our contribution and run with it.