When someone who works for you is not performing, there are two possible reasons and no third. Either you did not recruit the right person, or you did not train them on the exact post they hold. Both depend on you, and both can be fixed.

The cycle every business owner knows

You hired somebody, and it is not working. Then the guessing starts. Maybe they lack experience, maybe they have no drive, maybe it was never a good fit. Three months on you are hiring again, and the same thing happens all over.

The source the booklet is built on does not leave room for that list of guesses. It narrows it down to two reasons, and puts both of them on your side of the table.

Two reasons, and there is no third

According to the source, any drop in an organization's results traces back to one of two points. The first is a failure to recruit, meaning you never brought in the person. The second is a failure to train people on their posts. Then the source goes further: “ANY ORG'S TROUBLES CAN BE TRACED TO THESE TWO POINTS.”

Look at what is missing from that list. There is no character in it, no motivation, no generation, no market and no luck.

Suppose a repair shop owner goes through three service advisers in one year. The third behaves exactly like the first, because the thing that was missing was never inside any of them. Now suppose the same owner sits down and writes a single page: what to say to a customer, what to note down, and when to phone back. The next adviser stays for two years.

Recruiting versus hatting

Telling the two reasons apart is simple. Recruiting answers whether there is anyone in the post at all. Hatting answers whether that person knows exactly what to do in it.

The word hatting comes from hat. In the source, a hat means the duties of a particular post, and the name comes from the way many jobs are recognised by the hat that goes with them, like a firefighter or a police officer. Hatting is training a person on that hat: this post, in your business, rather than their trade in general.

The source splits the failure to train into three parts. No checksheet was made, meaning a list of what someone has to know to do the post. No hat and no set of materials were put together to go with it. And the employee was never fully trained on either. All three are things you did not do, not flaws in the employee.

Suppose a studio owner explains the whole job to a new hire out loud, once, on the first morning. What follows is three months of arguing about why it was not done the way she said. Or take a heating installer who tells his new man he will learn on the job. The man does learn, but his own version, and that version has to be corrected later.

Whose job the training is

The source treats this as a duty, not an option: “ANYONE WHO HAS JUNIORS UNDER HIM IS A TRAINING OFFICER FOR THOSE JUNIORS.”

In a small business with one or two employees, that training officer is you. There is no training department to pass it on to.

The source also says what happens when the duty is left undone. A manager who does not make sure that the people under him have a written post and full training ends up with a complete breakdown.

Suppose an owner sees training as wasted time. In practice he spends three times as long fixing mistakes. Going the other way, an owner who gives a new employee three hours in the first week finds, two months later, that the employee is working without him.

Why this is actually good news

When both reasons sit with you, it can sound like blame. It is really the good news of the chapter, because anything outside your control is also outside your power to repair. You cannot change someone's character. A written page and proper training are things you can give.

The source also offers a way to spot, in advance, an area of the business that is about to come apart. It has three signs: it is short of people, it is disorganized, and the people in it were never trained. These signs add up. Being short-handed alone still holds together, while being short-handed and untrained at once is already a countdown.

Suppose a landscaper runs his business with two people where the work needs three, with no written procedures and no training. He is sure the problem is headcount. If he takes on a third person without fixing the two he has, he ends up with three untrained people instead of two.

The booklet gives this chapter two short exercises, called diagnose and check. The practice section at the end of the booklet also has one called the first hat, and another called the two checks.

The next time someone is not performing, the list you are looking at is far shorter than it seems. It holds two reasons, and both of them are yours.

The booklet is general knowledge about managing people, not legal advice.