My manager has resigned and left me high and dry. Help!

My manager has resigned and left me high and dry, how can I stop this happening again?

About a month ago Karen told me how, after almost 10 years in business, she finally felt able to take a bit of time out of the business because she had a great manager on board.

Then yesterday she told me that her manager had resigned.

To say Karen was gutted is a bit of an understatement. She understood why her manager was leaving (personal reasons) but felt drained at the thought of hiring and training a replacement. To make matters worse the outgoing manager needed to leave quickly so there wouldn’t be much time for a handover.

The big problem, Karen said, was that because her manager had been so very good, she had willingly let him take control of many facets of the business. In fact, he was so “in control” that Karen only had a vague idea about some of those areas herself.

She was starting to wonder whether the effort involved in hiring and training a person who was then, in all likelihood going to leave in a few years, was really worth it. In fact she was toying with getting back into the manager role herself.

But Karen knew that she didn’t really want to get back into the day-to-day of the business so she asked what could do to prepare the business for what is in all likelihood going to be a change in manager every few years.

To start with I asked Karen what she, with the benefit of hindsight, would do differently. Here are some of her points:

• Require the manager to draft and keep updated a detailed role description for the manager position.
• Require the manager (or their assistant) to document the processes that the manager controls and assists in.
• Karen to meet with the manager regularly to understand how he is managing the various parts of the business.
• Karen and the manager to identify other people in the business who could step into the manager role should he fall sick or take leave. In this way full knowledge of the role (albeit shared among team members) would be retained by other people in the business.
• Karen to identify a successor to the manager from within the business, someone that she and the manager can train over, say, a three year period.

Once Karen had thought through the basics of a plan to routinely capture and retain the knowledge of the person in the manager role, she felt that the work of finding and training a new manager was manageable and the right thing to do.

I saw this morning that she had put a call out for a new manager: a much better option than stepping back in to the fray herself.

Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses:Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business”  and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).