Handoffs Are More Than a Mere Moment

Life is full of handoffs. In team sports, we find handoffs in the form of passing a baton to the anchor in a relay race or in the passing of a football to the running back. In business, family, and community, handoffs are not always as obvious. Think of the subtleties of handoff interactions involved in raising our kids (daycare dropoff), maintaining our homes (taking turns shoveling snow), or investing in general well-being ("go take a nap, I've got the dishes").   

Just like in sports, those handoffs are more than a specific moment, but instead are the sum of the nonverbal cues that lead up to and support that handoff after it's completed. At Tria Prima we call this a “Collaborative Handoff,” and we invest in it both in how we support our partners' platform implementations but also in how we help people architect their own processes. 

To better explain the Collaborative Handoff, let's look at what it is not.

The anti-Collaborative Handoff is pretty easy to spot when you start looking. Too often in business, we find ourselves relegating a process or touchpoint down to the quickest possible moment. It’s natural! We are short on time, have found ourselves in the dogma of a process we’ve done a thousand times, or just miss out on the not-so-intuitive impact of virtual interactions. We know when handoffs become rote because we have all sorts of terms for them in the business world: “throwing something over the fence,” “stuff rolls downhill,” “your problem becomes my emergency,” to name a few. Or, in anti-collaborative terms: "not my circus, not my monkeys" or "that's a problem for the next cohort."  

What instead maximizes a result would be to invest in the time and care leading up to that handoff. In a physical setting, this would be the eye contact, body positioning, and material connection that drives a secure handoff. Then you get the joy and satisfaction of watching that baton take the next steps in the race. Virtually, this might involve organized thought and the pre-planning necessary to document details or align to the outcome that is to be repeated prior to and immediately following the handoff…moving that handoff from the recognition of a single moment to the documentation of a transition across moments. Any time you have two teams interacting it is imperative that you treat handoffs with the care and intention that you would physical handoffs, taking special note of the conditions leading up to and supporting that handoff, rather than the moment of the handoff alone. 

At Tria Prima, we build this into our implementation process with a “Collaborative Handoff.” We place emphasis on overlapping implementation expertise with hands-on interaction by our partners. The goal isn’t simply to transfer knowledge, but to do so in a way that is more intuitive and more sustainable for everyone involved, taking special care to ensure the smoothest transition of knowledge and with intent to maximize your results over time.

In her book Dare to Lead, Brené Brown says, "Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind." The Collaborative Handoff is a clear, kind, transformational way to empower our clients, and we hope it transforms the way they do business.