Here is another valuable Management Tip of the Day from Harvard Business Review. To sign up for a free subscription to any/all HBR newsletters, please click here.

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When a valuable employee tells you they’re leaving, worrying about losing their institutional knowledge and experience is understandable. How can you oversee the transition in a way that helps you retain that expertise?

o Your first step is to outline how you will transfer the knowledge, whom you will transfer it to, and the timeline you’ll transfer it on.

o Resist the urge to ask the departing employee to compose a hefty here’s-how-to-do-my-job manual. Too often the person doesn’t bother to write it up, and no one ever reads it.

o Instead, have another employee shadow the departing employee to learn as much as possible about the job.

o If you’re short on time and don’t have an identified successor, hold a meeting in which the departing employee shares stories with colleagues about how they handled problems and crises that arose during their tenure.

o The goal is to reveal insights into the expert’s thought process.

Adapted from “The Right Way to Off-Board a Departing Employee,” by Rebecca Knight

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Also, you may wish to check out an anthology, Management Tips from Harvard Business Review, by clicking here.