Everything I have seen is two lines long and I want to write five sentences. Is a long retirement message welcome, or does it put the person on the spot?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIt is welcome, as long as it does not land on the group card. A paragraph squeezed into three lines between fourteen signatures is unreadable; the same paragraph in a place of its own is the thing that gets kept. So put one legible sentence with your name on the card going around, and send the long version separately \u2014 an email on the last morning, a note handed over privately, or a letter tucked in with the team’s gift. That also solves the audience problem, since a paragraph about a hard year the two of you got through was never written for fifteen readers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thirty-one years is the headline and everybody leads with it. What do you put next to the number so it means something?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nOne thing that happened inside those years. The figure alone is a line from a personnel file: plenty of people last three decades without changing anything around them. Put the number in the first sentence and spend the next two on a single concrete item \u2014 a habit of theirs the team copied, a process they built that is still running, one afternoon they saved something expensive. If you honestly have only one year alongside them, use that year and say so plainly. A small true thing beats borrowed history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They trained me my first week. Does that belong in the message, or does it make the whole thing about me?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIt belongs, as long as the sentence ends on them. The trap is the version that turns into a summary of your own career: I was new, I was struggling, then I got promoted. Cut it down to the transfer itself \u2014 what they told you, that you still use it, and who else has it now because you passed it along. Three clauses, and the subject of the last one is not you. That framing also does the delicate part of a retirement message without ever stating it, because it says the work continues in other hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They said to keep in touch and handed out a phone number. Do you write that down as an actual plan or leave it as a courtesy?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nWrite a plan, and make it small enough that it will really happen. Keep in touch, said by both sides on a last day, is a pleasant nothing and everybody knows it while they are saying it. A month from now, coffee, I will text you first \u2014 that is a sentence somebody can be held to. It matters more here than at most send-offs, because the week after a retirement the phone goes quiet in a way people are rarely prepared for. One named, dated, ordinary thing beats any amount of stay in touch. Then do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Everything I have to say about them is about work. Is a message that never leaves the job too thin?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nNo, and reaching for the personal when you do not have it is exactly what makes these messages sound hollow. Work is where you know this person, and the message is allowed to live there: how they handled pressure, what they refused to cut corners on, the way they treated somebody junior on a bad day. Those are observations about character, not job duties. What to avoid is the achievement list, which reads like a performance review and belongs to the company rather than to them. If you know about the boat or the grandkids, that is a closing line, not the frame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Somebody is retiring and you have been handed the card, or the microphone, or both. The short lines come easily enough \u2014 all the best, enjoy it, you have earned it \u2014 and they are also the ones nobody keeps. What gets kept is the message only a person who worked alongside them could have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":605,"featured_media":4562,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4008],"tags":[],"moimportance":[],"motype":[],"moformat":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4561","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-greetings"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dallas-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dallas-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dallas-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dallas-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/605"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dallas-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4561"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dallas-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4565,"href":"https:\/\/dallas-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4561\/revisions\/4565"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dallas-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dallas-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dallas-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dallas-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4561"},{"taxonomy":"moimportance","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dallas-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moimportance?post=4561"},{"taxonomy":"motype","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dallas-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/motype?post=4561"},{"taxonomy":"moformat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dallas-name.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moformat?post=4561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}