How to Get Your Team to Actually Follow a Process
Documenting a process is the part most owners focus on. It feels productive, it is tangible, and once it is done there is a sense that the problem has been solved. But documentation is only the first step. The harder part, and the part that determines whether any of it actually changes how the business operates, is getting the team to follow the process consistently, especially when things get busy, stressful, or complicated.
Clarity Before Compliance
Before expecting the team to follow a process, the process has to be genuinely clear. This sounds obvious but it is where most documentation efforts fall short. The owner writes or records the process from their own perspective, with their own assumptions baked in, and skips the parts that feel intuitive because they have done it a thousand times. The team then tries to follow something that has gaps they cannot fill on their own and deviates, not because they are ignoring the process but because the process did not account for the situations they actually encounter.
John Burdett describes this as the assumption problem. When you document a process you have done countless times, it is intuitive to you, and you take on a lot of assumptions without realizing it. The gaps only become visible when someone else tries to follow it and runs into a situation the documentation did not address.
The fix is not to write a longer document. It is to test the process with the people who will use it, find where it breaks down, and update it before expecting consistent compliance. John recommends the video shortcut — record yourself walking through the process in real time rather than writing it out. It captures the nuance and the decision points that written documentation tends to flatten, and it is faster to produce and easier to follow.
Make It Mandatory, Not Optional
One of the most common process failures is treating the process as a suggestion. The team is encouraged to follow it, asked to follow it, reminded to follow it, but there is no real consequence for deviating and no real accountability for compliance. In that environment, the process gets followed when it is convenient and abandoned when it is not.
John is direct about this: not following the process is not an option. It has to be mandatory. The owner has to model it first, following the process themselves even in situations where their experience and instinct would lead them to shortcut it. If the person who created the process does not follow it, there is no credible case for expecting anyone else to.
Beyond modeling, the process has to be treated as the standard against which performance is measured. When something goes wrong, the first question should be whether the process was followed. If it was and the outcome was still bad, the process needs to be updated. If it was not, that is a performance conversation. That distinction matters because it separates system problems from people problems, and conflating the two produces neither good systems nor clear accountability.
The Worst Time to Abandon the Process Is When Things Are Busy
John identifies one of the most predictable and costly patterns in growing businesses: when things get stressful, people stop following the process. The owner starts handling things directly again. The team skips steps because there is not enough time. Everyone tells themselves it is just temporary, that they will get back to the process once things calm down.
Things rarely calm down. And the deviation from the process during the busy period creates exactly the kind of chaos that makes things worse, because the consistency that the process was designed to provide is gone precisely when it is most needed.
The process is not a fair-weather tool. It is a security blanket for the hard periods. Following it when things are difficult is what prevents the business from sliding back into the reactive, firefighting mode that the owner was trying to escape. Abandoning it under pressure is not a shortcut. It is the long way around.
Solicit Feedback and Build Ownership
A process that the team had no hand in creating is a process the team feels no ownership over. It is something being done to them rather than something they are part of. That dynamic produces compliance at best and quiet resistance at worst.
Building ownership means involving the team in the process from the beginning, not just handing them a finished document. Ask for their input. Find out where the current way of doing things breaks down from their perspective. When they identify a problem with the process, treat that as useful information rather than pushback.
John recommends soliciting feedback actively and adjusting the process based on where there are holes and issues, with the understanding that not following it is still not an option. The feedback loop and the accountability are not in conflict. One improves the process and the other ensures it gets used. Both are necessary.
Link Incentives to the Inputs
One of the most practical levers for driving process adoption is connecting incentives to following the process rather than only to outcomes. Outcomes are partially outside anyone’s control. The inputs — the steps, the behaviors, the adherence to the process — are within the team’s control, and incentivizing them signals clearly that how things get done matters, not just whether the number at the end looks right.
John makes this point specifically: link incentives for your team members who follow these processes, because that will show them how important it is to do these things right. When compensation or recognition is tied to the inputs that produce good outcomes, the team has a concrete reason to take the process seriously rather than treating it as overhead.
This also gives the owner something measurable to manage. Instead of trying to evaluate outputs that are influenced by factors outside the team’s control, you can evaluate whether the right behaviors are happening consistently. If they are and the outcomes are still not there, that is a system or strategy problem. If the behaviors are not happening, that is a coaching and accountability problem. Either way, you know what you are dealing with.
Accept That the Process Will Never Be Finished
A process that never changes is a process that stops being relevant. The business changes. The market changes. The problems you are solving today are creating different problems for tomorrow. A process that was right six months ago may have gaps that have opened up since then, and if nobody is updating it, the team is following something that no longer reflects how the business actually works.
John describes this as the ongoing nature of process work: you are always going to be updating it. The team members who are closest to the execution are usually the best positioned to identify where the process needs to change, because they are the ones running into its edges every day. As they become more invested in the process, they become the ones driving those updates, which is exactly where you want the ownership to sit.
The goal is not a perfect process. It is a living one that reflects the current reality of the business and gets better over time because the team is genuinely engaged with making it work.
If you want to hear more about how to build this kind of process culture in a growing business, a recent episode of The Fast Slow Motion Podcast: How to Stop Being the Bottleneck in Your Business with John Burdett and Eric Housh gets into the specifics of what it takes and what to expect.
Listen to the full podcast episode here.