How to stop explaining the same thing to your employee again, without doing it all yourself

01·Where you are now

You hired somebody, and it isn't working. Now the list of guesses starts: perhaps they are not experienced enough, perhaps they have no drive, perhaps you need somebody else.

Could the problem be not the person, but what they were given? An explanation out loud, once, on the first morning. Or “you'll pick it up as you go”. And “no initiative” is almost always a person who doesn't know what they're allowed to do.

And it costs you. “It's faster if I do it” is true today and wrong next month, because meanwhile nobody learns. “It costs money not to spend money pretraining for a post.”

And as long as what the role requires isn't written down anywhere, three months later you are recruiting again, and you find exactly the same thing.

02·Who's talking to you: Axel Jedlitschka

In every job I asked myself what I could learn from it

I set up sales meetings by phone, ran sales meetings and service meetings, and started building systems and automations for business owners. That is how I learned to deal with business owners and to solve technology problems in business.

I took those jobs from a place of personal growth. In each one I asked myself “what can I learn in this job that will serve me in the future?” And that is why I am against “you'll pick it up as you go”: whoever learns that way learns a version of their own, and somebody has to correct it afterwards.

Axel Jedlitschka

04·There is a way

One page for every role

The list of guesses has no character, motivation, generation, market or luck on it. There are two reasons, both of them yours: you did not recruit, or you did not train the person for the role. The second is solved by one page that says what the role is. In the booklet that page is called a hat, because a hat means the duties of a post.

1. 01Two reasons.For every case of “it didn't work out”, you ask one question: did I fail to recruit, or did I fail to train them for the role?
2. 02The first page.One role, four things: the purpose of the role, what is actually done, what comes out, and how it is counted. One page, tonight.
3. 03The decision boundary.One line: how far the employee decides alone, and above what they ask.
4. 04Go through it together.“I wrote a procedure” and “the person is trained on it” are two different things, and only the second one counts.

Without a page like that, you have a mob, not a team: people who are each capable, with no division between them that anybody knows.

What you get

What is promised, and what is not

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