A hat is the set of duties of one post in your business, written down and trained on. Every hat also has a product, which is something that comes out of it and that you can count.
The document that saves the tenth explanation
If you have employees, you know the moment when you explain the same thing for the tenth time. The booklet promises you the document that spares you that, along with the reason almost every hire fails without it. It has a name: a hat.
The word sounds odd the first time, and the explanation in the source is simple. According to the source, a hat means the duties of a post. The name comes from the way many jobs are recognised by the hat that goes with them, like a firefighter, a police officer or a conductor.
The hat describes what a person does while they are in that post, and says nothing about who they are.
Suppose an owner who sells, does the work and collects the debt, all in a single day. That is three sets of duties carried by one person.
Or suppose an employee who serves at the counter and also does the ordering. That makes two hats, and each one has to be written down on its own.
A hat is also a folder
The term has a second definition, and it is the one that turns it into something you can write. According to the source, a hat is a folder with three things in it: the write-ups of people who held the post before, a checksheet of all the data that relates to the post, and a pack of materials that covers it.
The source also gives the short version: “a hat is a write-up, a checksheet and a pack”. Then it adds that the staff member is trained on them.
Each part answers a different question. The write-up says what is actually done in the post. The checksheet lists what a person must know to do the job. The pack is the material itself, such as procedures, manuals and price lists. With the checksheet you can tell an employee who was given an explanation from an employee who knows, and without the pack the checksheet is only a wish list.
The part people skip is the end of the sentence. A hat does not exist until somebody has been trained on it.
Suppose an owner who wrote an excellent procedure and saved it to the shared drive. Nobody opened it, so as far as the business was concerned it never existed.
Now suppose the same owner spent an hour with the technician, taking the procedure one line at a time. The document was the same and the outcome was different.
Writing a procedure and training a person on it are two separate things, and only the second one counts.
Every hat has a product
The source gives one more test, and it sets a hat apart from any other document: “Every hat has a product. The product can be represented as a statistic”.
This is what sets a hat apart from a job description, which only lists activities. A hat ends in something that leaves the post and can be counted. If you cannot say what leaves your hat, you have not finished writing it.
Once a post has a product, it has a number, and the number tells you whether the post is working.
Take a post that is defined as helping the owner out. Help cannot be counted. Define the same post as every vehicle handed back with a signed inspection sheet, and it ends in a product.
Or take a physiotherapy clinic owner who wrote for her receptionist that the product is a patient who leaves with the next appointment already booked. She had a measure the same day.
What you have when there are no hats
The source describes the opposite condition in very few words. When the hats are not known or not worn, what you have is a mob.
You have a crowd of people and no team. Every one of them may be capable, and still nobody knows how the work is divided between them.
Suppose four people on a joint project, all of whom start with the interesting part. Three end up doing the same thing, and one part of the project is never done.
Now suppose the same team with the division written on a single sheet. They are the same people in the same week, and the project is delivered.
The booklet gives this chapter two short exercises, called write and check. The practice section at the end also has one called the first hat.
The word hat sounds odd only at the beginning. Behind it stand duties that are written down, a person who was trained on them, and a product you can count.
The booklet is general knowledge about managing people, not legal advice.