The Importance of the Handoff

First, I'll be upfront, I'm a Liverpool supporter and this post is a thinly veiled wrapper around bragging that the team I support just won the Premier League.

WE WON THE LEAGUE!

Alright, now that's out of the way, let me try to pivot this to something more relevant to the general world.

The Boss

Jurgen Klopp managed Liverpool from 2015 to 2024. In that time, the team won:

• The Premier League
• The FA Cup
• The EFL Cup (x2)
• The Community Shield
• The Champions League
• The Club World Cup
• The UEFA Super Cup

He took the team that was regularly ending the Premier League Season in 6th or lower, to a team that was regularly in the running for 1st place. The way he set up and managed the team is the stuff of legend.

On January 26th he announced he was leaving the team. It was shocking and heartbreaking, but it was probably time. After so many years with the team and so many accomplishments, he was rightly tired and ready for a break. The team had a heads up and began focusing on bringing in a replacement.

The Newcomer

Arne Slot was a somewhat unknown name to people who didn't follow Dutch football. His whole coaching career started the year after Klopp took over Liverpool. While he was highly regarded, there were a lot of concerns that he would struggle to come in and keep up the pace due to his lack of overall experience, the general style that the team was built around, and the general step from the Eredivisie to the Premier League.

Now that the team has WON THE LEAGUE, we can see how well he adapted to the pace and style of play.

While we'll probably never know what the behind the scenes process looked like, we do know the public steps that were taken to make the process easier:

1. Klopp provided plenty of notice and runway (almost six months) to the team and players that he was leaving. This allowed for a well organized search for a replacement and left behind the need for an "interim" manager to try and keep things running. Removing that person made the transfer of information 1:1. No game of corporate telephone.
2. At the end of the season, Klopp went one step further and encouraged supporters of the team to not mourn his leaving, but celebrate Slot coming in. Again, driving what had been building for the last six months as information became public.
3. The team made very few player/contract changes over the break. With the way international football works, the players don't have a lot of breaks for their ~80 day off season. They're at various international tournaments. Not turning over the team right out of the gate meant that Slot could look at what was there, their strengths and build from there.
4. Slot came in with the intention to just steer the ship. Not rebuild it, repaint it, or even reorganize the furniture. He had seen that things had worked well and just slowly and deliberately built upon that with his own ideas. The baby didn't go with the bathwater.

If you're leaving a role of any sort, the better landing spot you give your successor will improve the likelihood of success for the whole group. You don't immediately need to make all of the changes. In my career, I can count on one hand the amount of times I've actually seen this done.

Everyone, especially in a leadership position, seems to want to immediately come in and change something major. Sometimes this is a comfort thing and sometimes this is a reaction to a perceived inefficiency in a current process.

So maybe I'll sum it up as this:

Don't ask "how do I go around the fence?" Ask "why is this fence here?"

Also...

WE WON THE LEAGUE