You wrote a hat, meaning everything someone else needs to fill a role without you, and you handed it to an employee. One question remains: how do you know it landed? The booklet answers with a check, and the check looks different from what most owners do.
Why asking whether they read it checks nothing
The question of whether the employee read the document always gets a yes. It checks nothing.
A hat checkout confirms in practice that the person knows what is in the hat and applies it, beyond having gone through it. A proper check has them do something, or deal with a situation the hat never spelled out. Asking what they would do if a key ingredient ran out tells you more than any question about the written steps.
Suppose a restaurant manager who is not satisfied that the new cook went through the menu. He has him make a dish, and then asks what he does when something is missing. The cook has no substitute in mind, and the manager fixes that before it happens in front of a customer.
Picture the manager of a dental clinic who writes training completed beside the new receptionist's name, having emailed her a procedure. A month on, it turns out she has been double-booking appointments again and again. Nobody ever checked in practice.
The difference in wording can be small. A shop owner says show me how you close the till, where another would ask whether the employee knows how. The second question always gets a yes.
Check the seniors first
The order here runs against instinct. You check the people at the top first, and only afterwards the people below them.
The reason is practical. A senior who is unsure of their own hat sends instructions to the wrong people and overrides what is written, which quietly cancels the hats below. That is how hats fall out of use: the person above keeps working against them without noticing, and the staff are not to blame.
The source adds an explicit rule. A senior must know the duties of everyone below them. Knowing them is enough, and the senior does not need to perform them.
In a small business the senior is you. So the first check is a check of yourself.
Suppose an owner who wrote hats for the whole team and wondered why nobody worked from them. It turned out he was giving direct instructions almost every day, and they bypassed the sequence he had written.
Or a nursery owner who learned the assistant's hat before she demanded that the assistant meet it. She found two items in it, written by her own hand, that nobody could carry out.
The false hat
One state is especially dangerous, because it looks fine from every angle. The booklet calls it a false hat: a write-up that is missing or wrong, which gives the look of a hat.
The person holding it feels they have a hat, because they were handed a document. Everyone watching sees someone who behaves as if they have none. Both views are correct, and nobody can work out why it fails.
The remedy is to return to the write-up and look for the gap in it. More pressure on the person fixes nothing.
Suppose an employee handed a five-page customer service procedure that has no product and no number. He can quote it, and he cannot tell when he is finished. Or a document lifted from a business elsewhere in the same trade, where every word is correct and none describes what happens here.
The tidier the document, the harder it is to suspect. In the booklet's words: "A false hat almost always looks polished."
When someone fails
Someone who fails the check goes back over exactly the part that fell down, and then comes back to be checked again. No penalty comes with it.
That may sound soft, and it is what keeps the check useful. Once failing carries a penalty, everybody pretends to know, and you have lost the one tool that showed you the truth.
If it fails a second time, the question moves elsewhere: whether this is the right role for them at all.
Suppose an owner who told an employee not to worry, to go over that part and talk the next day, and got a correct answer the next day. A scolding would have bought him an empty yes.
Picture a manager who made the checks an exam with consequences. After a month everyone could recite the answers, and the real work stayed exactly as it was.
According to the source, this check is one of the two points that every organisational problem traces back to. A senior who fails to see that people hold full hats, and that they were checked on them, is a liability. In a small business that means: when something does not work, the second question after whether you wrote a hat is whether you checked that it landed.
The booklet gives this chapter two short exercises, called do it and spot it. In the practice section at the end there is also one called check.
If the only way you know that an employee has taken in the role is that they said yes, you have not checked yet.