# Why the owner's own role is the one that never gets written [Home](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en) › [Study](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/study) › [Articles](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/study/articles) author: [Axel Jedlitschka](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/about) published: 2026-10-13 updated: 2026-10-13 language: en reading time: 5 min topic: Organization source booklet: [Your Hat](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/shop/introduction/your-hat) Owners write roles for the team and forget themselves, so the owner's own role is almost always the one that stays unwritten. Almost every owner who starts writing hats, meaning everything someone else needs to fill a role without them, writes them for the team. The role that nearly always stays without a hat is the owner's own. In the booklet this is the chapter aimed at you. ## The two points every problem traces back to This may be the sharpest claim in all the material. In the source's words, a boss who fails to make sure their people hold full hats, and fails to make sure they were checked on them, is a liability to the organisation. Those two points are what the troubles of any organisation trace back to. There are only two. The source gives no long list of causes. In a small business the translation is direct. If something does not work at your place, your first two questions are: did I write the hat, and did I check that it took? Most apparent people problems sit behind one of those two. Suppose an owner who stuck both questions on a note facing his desk. A month later he no longer began conversations with how things were going, and began with what was missing for them in writing. Picture a manager convinced that better people were the answer. He recruited three, gave none of them a hat, and saw the same result three times. ## The hat of the person who manages The source gives several marks of someone who genuinely manages, as opposed to someone who only holds the title. One of them catches nearly everybody: a hat of your own, with you knowing what is written in it. Owners tend to write for the team and skip themselves, and then the team treats the whole exercise lightly. The check starts at the top. In a small business the top is you, and a senior must know the duties of everyone below, even without performing them. A senior who does not know their own hat gives orders that contradict what is written, and in practice cancels other people's hats. Suppose the owner of a small law practice who wrote himself an explicit hat, with his product as owner and what he is responsible for, before he asked the same of his staff. His team quit bringing him every small decision, since they finally had a yardstick. Picture the owner of a digital marketing agency who carries in her head precisely what each employee should do, and has never put it on paper. During two weeks of travel, the team went quiet. The only hat in existence was whatever she says. The booklet puts it in one sentence: "You cannot hat anyone out of a role you have not written yourself." ## Your hidden hats Any owner who has been in the field for a few years recognises this at once. Over time, roles stick to you that you never decided to take. You order the toner. You talk to the cleaning company. You are the only one who knows the password for that system. The booklet calls these hidden hats: roles that sit on your head and were never written down anywhere, which is why they cannot be handed on. Suppose an owner who found eleven hidden roles of his own. Seven of them moved to other people within a month, since once they were written it was obvious who they belonged to. Or a clinic owner who found out that nobody except her could reset the ultrasound machine. She spent five minutes showing a colleague, and one more hidden hat was gone. ## Why your hat comes last The booklet ends with a short sequence of steps, and writing your own hat is the last of them. That is deliberate. It is easier to write other people's hats, and an owner who starts with their own usually never starts at all. An earlier chapter explains why. An owner who holds both production and organising always picks production, because it is urgent, and the organising never happens. Writing your own hat is organising work, so it is the first thing to get put off. The booklet still insists that you do not skip it, because it is what makes everything else hold over time. There is one more principle, about the start itself. Suppose an owner who read a booklet like this, got excited and planned two weeks of sorting out systems. The two weeks never arrived, so he never began. Someone starting with twenty minutes would have finished a whole role. Picture a garage owner who went through the whole sequence on one role only, receiving a vehicle. Three months later he repeated it for the second role. He never tried to do everything at once. The booklet closes this chapter with two exercises, called build from scratch and analyse, and sets out the full marks and the sequence. In the practice section at the end there is also one called your own hat. You can write hats for the whole team and leave yours for last. Just know that without your own hat, the hats of everyone else will not hold for long. - [Your Hat](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/shop/introduction/your-hat): A way to turn a role into something that can be handed over, and a check that tells you whether it actually landed. --- [עברית](https://theonlyaxelj.com/he/study/articles/the-owners-own-hat) · [Español](https://theonlyaxelj.com/es/study/articles/the-owners-own-hat)