You wrote a hat for a role, meaning everything someone else needs to fill it without you. Now comes the part most people skip: handing it to a person. The booklet calls this hatting, and it happens in a conversation rather than in an email.
Hatting is spoken
Hatting is handing the hat to a person together with training on it, until the role is in their hands in practice. It happens out loud, and while it happens you confirm in real time that the person is taking it in.
Almost every owner knows the sign that it did not happen. The employee read everything and still routes every question back to you.
What counts is that a person who holds the role comes out of the conversation, whatever number of items you covered. A tick on a list proves nothing. A good sign is that they can say, in their own words, what the product of the role is.
This matters more than it looks. A person who never actually received their hat becomes insecure in the role, starts cutting corners and passes responsibility on. And an owner who fires such a person without ever having hatted them hires a new one and is back at the same point six months later.
Suppose the owner of a sports shop sends a new employee to read a forty-page file alone on the first day. On paper the employee knows the role, and in practice he passes every call to someone else. Nobody asked a question out loud, so nobody found a gap.
Picture a salon owner who gives the new receptionist no folder of procedures. She stands beside her and asks, out loud, about her role. Inside an hour, the new person is handling client calls correctly.
Or a baker who hands a role over standing by the oven, in the middle of work, with three minutes of questions. By the end of the day the employee answers them himself.
The question people skip
The booklet has a short script of questions that hands a role over faster than any document. The last question in it is the heart of the script, and it is the one most people skip.
The reason is simple. An employee will not stop you in the middle of an explanation to say they did not follow. You have to ask for it explicitly, and then leave room for the answer. The silence after the question is part of the tool.
Suppose a clinic owner who asked a new receptionist what she had not understood, and waited. After ten seconds of silence came a question about a client who cancels an hour before the appointment. The answer was written nowhere.
Or a shift lead who asked a new cook to say what he produces. The cook answered that he makes food. Only after a correction did he reach the product: a dish that goes out correct within twelve minutes. From there he started working.
Hat a little, get production, hat a little more
A person never reaches the moment of being finished with hatting. Hatting runs in cycles, and every cycle relies on the earlier one having really produced something. You hand over one part of the role, you watch it come out, and only then do you hand over the next part.
It works as a loop. Anyone who hands over everything at once and waits for the result at the end finds out then that the first part never landed.
Suppose a garage owner who handed a new employee only vehicle reception and logging the complaint. A week of work followed. Then initial diagnosis, and another week. A month on, the employee held the full sequence and had skipped no step.
Picture a studio owner who gave a new hire one full day of concentrated training. A week later she remembered the end and forgot the beginning, because the parts were never anchored in real work in between.
Every problem is an invitation to hat
You do not need to plan a project to know when to hat. The moment is when something drops. A fault shows exactly which part of the role is missing, and with whom.
The sequence is short. A fault turns up, you find out who was supposed to hold it, and you hat them on that part on the spot. That changes hatting from a task you keep postponing into an ordinary reflex. You no longer have to find time to write hats, because you hat whenever something drops, and within two months most roles are covered.
Suppose an order went out to a customer without an invoice. Rather than get irritated, the owner put a line into the packing hat: the invoice goes inside the box before it is closed. He showed it to the employee, and the mistake did not return.
Or a client who was never sent a reminder. The owner spent five minutes with the employee on who sends it, when, and what to do if nobody replies, and the hat gained three lines that day.
The booklet gives this chapter two short exercises, called do it and analyse, along with the full script of questions. In the practice section at the end there is also one called apply.
A file you send shows you nothing about what the person understood. A conversation in which you ask and then wait for the answer shows you.