Your most experienced employee can be the one who gets stuck, and it is not their fault. Their professional skills may be excellent, and still nobody has told them how things work in your business.
The lawyer who could not raise a purchase order
The source gives a case worth knowing. Law takes so long to learn that an executive can overlook the fact that the lawyer's post has no hat.
The problem surfaced only when a whole series of cases was neglected. It turned out that the staff lawyer, an excellent one, had no idea how to raise a purchase order, or that raising one was even possible or expected. When the post was investigated there was no post hat and no staff hat. In the source's words, there was “Only a legal degree.”
A post hat holds the duties of one particular post. A staff hat holds what is true for everybody who works in the business, whatever their role. The lawyer had neither.
That is the line that matters. The lawyer's professional skill was flawless. The missing piece was knowing how things run in this particular place.
Suppose an owner who took on a bookkeeper with years of experience. Invoices went out late for three months, because no one had explained where the information came from.
Or suppose a senior designer who joined a studio. Her design work was excellent, yet she had no idea when she could release anything to a client.
In every one of these cases the recruiting worked. There is somebody in the post, and a very good somebody. What failed was the hatting, which is whether that person knows exactly what to do in this post.
Now suppose an installer who took on a fitter with little experience and gave him a written hat. The fitter was soon working on his own, well ahead of the specialist who never received one.
The more experience a candidate has, the stronger the pull to skip the hatting, and that is exactly where skipping is most expensive.
Two kinds of people who are not put to use
The source has a category that is easy to miss. The source puts two groups together. One is people who have no idea what they are doing. The other is people who have no idea, yet believe they do. It calls both of them nonutilized personnel, meaning people who are present and not put to use.
The second kind is the more dangerous. They do not ask anything, because from where they stand there is nothing to ask. They carry on with confidence in a direction you never wanted.
Suppose a long-serving employee who is still working to a procedure that was replaced a year ago, and is completely sure of himself. He is working to what he knows, and what he knows is a year out of date.
Once the hats in that business were updated in writing, the gap closed in a single conversation.
According to the source, personnel are not really personnel until they are utilized.
Twenty years for one conclusion
According to the source, it took 13 months of hard work, on top of 20 years of experience with organisations, to learn one thing. Given a product, the lack of hats was the reason things drifted away from how the business should be running, and working toward complete hats was the way back.
That is twenty years for one conclusion, and you are getting it on a page.
Suppose an owner who tried for four years to fix people problems through recruiting. Five employees came and went, and the outcome never changed.
Now suppose the same owner wrote hats for three posts. The two employees who remained were no longer a problem.
The camouflaged hole
The source has a phrase that is hard to forget. An untrained person on a post will be, at best, somebody who does not do too much damage and, at worst, “a camouflaged hole.”
So the post looks staffed. There is a person in it, they turn up every morning and they are busy. In fact the post is empty. That does more harm than a vacancy, because a vacancy at least shows.
Suppose an owner who was certain somebody was following up on quotes. Not one quote closed in three months.
Once the same owner defined a clear product for the post, the hole showed up in the first week. A product can be counted, so once it exists its absence becomes visible.
Or suppose an owner who assumed an assistant was checking the day's orders. Nobody had ever defined that check, so it never happened, and the owner heard about it from a customer.
The booklet gives this chapter two short exercises, called check and identify.
So when you take on someone with a rich background, their experience does not excuse you from the hat. It only makes it easier to forget that one needs writing.
The booklet is general knowledge about managing people, not legal advice.