Correct the work, not just the words
The single highest-leverage teaching move is a specific correction while work is happening. When your assistant’s first attempt misses the mark, don’t just fix the output yourself — tell it what was wrong:“That total is off — exclude internal transfer rows and net refunds against spend when computing monthly spend.”Your assistant revises the work, and when the job wraps up, the review pass turns your correction into durable material: a playbook rule it will apply to every similar job, and often a corrected, reusable skill alongside it. One correction, permanent fix.
Say “remember this”
If your assistant just did something exactly the way you want it done again, say so while it’s working: “remember this”, “save this workflow”. It stores the approach without breaking stride. The same works for pure telling: “remember: invoices always go to accounts@ — never to the requester directly” becomes guidance on the spot.Show it once
For anything easier to show than describe, use a Unify Meet call with screen sharing:“Whenever a customer calls about a billing issue, you always check this Override section first, then click the Transactions tab to see the full history.”Walk through it once, narrating as you go — your assistant captures the procedure (screenshots included, when useful) as a playbook. This is also the natural setup for recurring work: show it once, then “do this every Friday”.
Hand it the reading
Anything you’d give a new hire, you can give your assistant: process docs, style guides, links, past examples. Send them over any channel and it will go away and digest them. Facts land in Knowledge; procedures become Guidance.Try the guided demo
Onboarding includes a hands-on step — “Teach me by correcting me” — that walks the whole loop with a deliberately contrived example: your assistant computes a monthly spend total from two bank exports, makes a naive mistake (double-counting an internal transfer), and hands you the exact correction to send. You send it, watch the fix get saved, then ask for the next month — and it’s right the first time, using what it learned. Five minutes, and you’ll have seen every stage of learning with your own eyes.Habits that compound
- Correct early. The first time something’s off is the cheapest time to fix it forever. Letting a wrong pattern repeat teaches the wrong pattern.
- Give the reason, not just the fix. “Use the exchange rate from the first business day of the quarter — finance reconciles against that” makes for a much better playbook than “wrong number, redo it.”
- Watch the first run. When a newly-taught workflow or new task runs for the first time, keep an eye on the Actions pane — a small correction on run one beats a cleanup on run ten.
- Audit occasionally. Skim Guidance every so often, like reviewing a colleague’s notes. If something reads wrong or stale, say so and it gets fixed or removed.
- Teach the team, not just one assistant. If a rule applies to everyone, say so — it can live in a team’s shared pool, where every assistant on the team follows it.