Before a person works on their own in a post at your business, they go through five steps, and training in the trade is only the second of them. What prepares them for the post itself is the hat, and according to the source a hat has nine components.
The booklet itself recommends this chapter above all the others. The reason is practical: most of the components can be written tonight.
Five steps, in a fixed order
Before you look inside the hat, look at the order. According to the source, everyone who comes to work for you goes through the same five steps: “Recruit them Train them Hat them Apprentice them Give them a post.”
First you bring a person in. Then they learn the trade, and after that they are hatted on the particular post in your business. Next they work beside somebody who already holds it, and only at the end do they get the post and work alone. The order matters, so read it downwards.
The source also shows what happens when the middle is skipped on a large scale. One organisation recruited until it was full, and a month later fifty-seven people who had been neither used nor assigned were combed out of the debris. The blame fell on the person who recruited them, as if they had been the wrong people. What had been neglected was the hatting, the training and the apprenticing.
Training and hatting are two things
Look closely at steps two and three, because that is where it is easiest to get confused. To train is to teach the trade. To hat is to teach this post, the way it works with you.
A person can arrive with an excellent trade and still not know how things work at your place. Their certificate covers step two and does not reach step three.
The temptation to skip step three grows when the candidate is more experienced, and that is exactly where skipping costs the most.
Suppose an installer who hired a licensed electrician and assumed that was the end of it. The licence is step two, and the three steps after it never happened.
Now suppose a pilates studio owner who gave a new instructor a week beside an experienced one before she taught alone. That is step four, and it saved her a month.
What is inside the hat
According to the source, the hat is a folder, and it lists nine components that go into it. The list starts with the question of why the post exists at all and ends with how you count what comes out of it. Between those two are components that tie the post to the rest of the business, such as its place in the structure and a chart of what comes into it and where it goes.
One of the components is the write-up of the post, meaning what is actually done in it, usually put down by whoever held the post before. It is the simplest of the nine to write, and it saves the most.
Nine components sounds like a lot. You do not need all of them to begin, and the booklet sets out which ones a small business can write first.
Suppose a bookkeeping practice owner who wrote only four of the components. It was good enough, and the new employee was working independently inside a fortnight.
Or suppose a repair shop owner who added the chart of what comes in and where it goes. Only then did it emerge that each of two people believed the other was ordering the parts.
Another owner tried to write all nine in one sitting and completed none. A few written components are worth more than nine that were never written.
The hat that belongs to everyone
There is a second hat, which belongs to everyone who works for you and to no particular post. According to the source it holds what is true for all of them: what the business is for and what it sells, what people get, what happens when nothing is produced, the business's responsibility toward the outside world, how people relate to each other, and the equipment and the paperwork.
So it is written once, for everybody. In a small business that is usually one page.
Suppose a studio owner who found that each instructor answered customers in a different way. A paragraph in the staff hat settled it.
Or suppose an owner who wrote half a page on what the business sells, how to talk to a customer and where the files are kept. Every new employee received a copy.
The booklet gives this chapter two short writing exercises. The practice section at the end also has one called the staff hat and another called the first hat.
A licence tells you only that someone has been through step two. What carries them through step three is a folder of written components, even when it does not yet hold all nine.
The booklet is general knowledge about managing people, not legal advice.