What the room actually wants to hear
A leaving speech isn't a performance. The room is standing up, holding a drink, and half of it is quietly working out train times. What people want is simple: to hear, out loud and in front of everyone, that the person leaving mattered here, said by someone who actually worked with them.
That's why the speeches people remember are rarely the polished ones. They're the ones with one true detail in them: the habit, the rescue, the running joke, the thing only this team would recognise. A tribute made of adjectives could be read out at anybody's send-off, and everyone in the room can tell.
Before you worry about structure, be clear about what you owe the occasion.
- Something specific. One real example beats five warm adjectives.
- Something fond. Affection is the whole point of a leaving do, so let it show.
- Something that includes the room, so people recognise their own team in what you say.
- Something kind about what comes next, without inventing details nobody has told you.
- Something short. A speech that stops slightly too early is a speech people enjoyed.
Preparing without spending your whole evening on it
You don't need a script, you need notes. The quickest way in is to answer a handful of questions on your phone, in whatever order they come out, then throw away everything that doesn't earn its place. Most of what you write down won't survive, and that's the point of writing it down.
Ask around while you're at it. A message to two or three people who worked closely with them will hand you the story you'd never have found on your own, and it stops the speech from being only your version of this person.
The questions worth answering:
- What did they actually do here, in plain words a newcomer would understand?
- What would have gone wrong without them?
- What do people say about them when they aren't in the room, in the good way?
- What is the one moment everyone here would recognise?
- What will you personally miss about having them around?
- What are they heading towards, and what can you wish them that's true?
A five-part structure that works every time
Nearly every good leaving speech does the same five things in the same order: name the occasion, say what they did, tell one story, say what they leave behind, wish them well. Put a sentence or two into each and you have the whole thing.
The lines below can be said exactly as they are. Anything in brackets is yours to replace.
- Open by naming the occasion, plainly. Say: Right, if I can drag you away from the crisps for a minute, we're here because [name] is leaving us, and that deserves rather more than a wave by the lift.
- Say what they did, so the whole room understands it. Say: [Name] joined us as [role], and has quietly held together [the thing they held together] ever since, which most of us only noticed on the days they were off.
- Give one story, and only one. Say: The moment I'll always remember is [the moment], and if you were there, you know exactly why.
- Say what they leave behind. Say: What [name] is taking with them is easy enough to list. What they're leaving behind is harder, and it's the reason this room is full tonight.
- Close with a wish and a glass. Say: [Name], thank you for all of it. Go and be brilliant somewhere else, and please don't be a stranger. Glasses up, everyone, to [name].
Lines for a resignation, a retirement or the end of a contract
The occasion changes the tone far more than it changes the words. A resignation asks for warmth and absolutely no curiosity about the reasons. A retirement asks for scale, because you're marking a working life and not a job. The end of a fixed-term contract, a placement or an apprenticeship asks you to be concrete, because the person is about to be interviewed by strangers who have never seen them work.
Take any of these, swap in the real detail, and then stop.
- We're losing [name] to [new place], which is very inconvenient of them, and exactly what they should be doing.
- [Name] is off to something new, and I want to be clear that we're pleased for them, even if we'd much rather keep them.
- Somebody out there has just had an extremely good week, and they don't know it yet.
- Thank you for choosing to spend these years with us. All the best, and keep in touch.
- A working life isn't a list of job titles, it's a list of people you helped, and on that measure [name] could fill this room twice over.
- In all that time, [name] has never once made anyone feel slow for asking a question, and that is rarer than it sounds.
- Retirement ought to suit [name] perfectly, given how many years they have spent telling the rest of us to go home on time.
- Whatever you choose to do with your mornings from now on, you have earned every single one of them. Please raise a glass to [name].
- [Name] came to us for [the placement], and leaves having done work we'd happily have paid a permanent member of staff to do.
- Contracts end, which is the only reason we're standing here, and it's the only part of today I'm sorry about.
- If anyone ever asks me for a reference for [name], send them straight to me, because I have plenty to say.
- Go and tell your next employer exactly what you did here. Don't undersell it, and don't let anybody else undersell it either.
Lines for an internal move, and for a redundancy
An internal move is the awkward one, because nobody is really leaving. Resist the urge to play it down. For the team losing them it is a proper goodbye, and pretending otherwise makes everyone feel silly for being sad about it.
A redundancy needs a different register altogether. Keep it sober, keep it about the work, and keep it short. Say nothing about the decision, offer no sympathy that turns the person into someone to be pitied in front of their colleagues, and don't dress the situation up as an opportunity. Name what they did, say it plainly, and say it as though you will be repeating it on the phone to their next employer, because you may well be.
- [Name] isn't going far, which means we keep the emails and lose the person, and I'm not convinced that's a fair swap.
- Congratulations on the move. [Their new team] have no idea what has just landed on them.
- We've been told this isn't really a goodbye. It still feels like one from where we're standing, so we're having the drinks anyway.
- Take all the good habits with you, and feel free to come back for the bad ones.
- What I want on the record today is the work: [the work], done properly, for [length of time], by someone this team relied on.
- Nothing about today takes anything away from what [name] built here, and nothing about today changes a word of what any of us would say about them.
- If anybody rings me about [name], they'll get a very straightforward answer, and it will be a good one.
- Thank you for the work, and for the way you did it. Our door stays open, and so does my inbox.
What to say when you hardly know the person
Sometimes the speech falls to you because of your job title rather than your friendship. Don't manufacture closeness, because a room can hear it instantly. Borrow instead: ask a few people who worked with them for one sentence each, and say whose words they are as you use them. Handing credit to the people who know them best is generous, and it makes a far better speech than anything you could have invented.
Being honest about the distance is disarming when it's done lightly, and it earns you the right to be warm.
- I'll be honest with you, [name] and I worked at opposite ends of this building, so I asked around. What came back is better than anything I'd have written myself.
- [Name] is one of those people whose name keeps coming up in meetings they aren't even in, and always in the useful way.
- Three different people described [name] to me this week, and all three of them reached for the same word: [the word].
- What I know for certain is that when [the difficult thing] happened, it was [name] who sorted it out, and nobody had to ask twice.
- From all of us, including those of us who didn't get to work with you nearly enough: thank you, and all the best.
How long to speak, how much to feel, and running the do
Shorter than you think. One story, one thank you and a toast is plenty, and if you're wondering whether to cut something, cut it. A leaving do has its own rhythm: people are on their feet, the room is warm, and attention drains away quickly once the first laugh has landed.
Read it aloud before you go, twice. Once is never enough to catch the sentence that trips you up, and much more than that starts to sound rehearsed. If you get emotional halfway through, stop, breathe and carry on. Nobody will hold it against you, and several people will be relieved they aren't the only one. A speech that obviously meant something to the speaker is remembered long after a smooth one is forgotten.
On the night itself, a little stage management makes all the difference.
- Choose the moment before people start drifting off, not after.
- Get the room quiet first. Starting over the chatter costs you your opening line.
- Stand where everyone can see the person leaving, not just you.
- Say at the outset that you'll be brief. It relaxes the room and it commits you.
- If other people want to speak, agree beforehand who goes and in what order.
- Give the person leaving the chance to reply, but warn them in advance so they aren't ambushed.
- Finish on the toast, so there's an obvious moment to clap and lift a glass.
What lasts once the glasses go down
A speech does something no card can do: it puts appreciation in public, in front of the people whose opinion the leaver actually cares about. Its weakness is that it's over almost as soon as it starts, and afterwards it lives only in the memory of whoever was standing there.
So it is worth giving the same appreciation in a form they can keep and use. A written recommendation from a colleague sets out the role, the strengths and what actually changed because they were there, and that carries weight in an interview in a way a signed card never will.
That's what the Leaving Pack from Take Your Skills is for. You start a pack in the name of the person leaving and share a link with the team. Everyone writes their recommendation in secret, so nothing spoils the surprise. On the day you hand it over, they receive every recommendation at once by email, and keep them all on their profile.
In practice:
- It's free, for you, for everyone who writes and for the person leaving.
- Everyone signs in with a code sent to their email address, so there's no password to invent.
- It all happens online, so colleagues working from home or at another site take part exactly like everyone else.
- If the person leaving has no profile yet, one is created when you hand the pack over.
- It sits neatly alongside the speech: you say a few words on the night, they read the rest properly later.