Rules or Suggestions: Why Half Your Team Follows the Process and Half Doesn’t

Picture this. It’s Tuesday morning, we’re in a meeting. Nothing dramatic — a team of eight, a project everyone cares about, and a process they all signed off on two weeks ago. Six clear steps. Everyone nodded, everyone said yes. And here’s our manager — let’s call her Maya — looking at two pieces of work that landed that morning. The first followed the process exactly: step one, step two, all the way to step six. Boxes ticked, sign-offs in place — the kind of work you could hand to an auditor and sleep soundly. The second is also finished. It’s good; it might even be better than the first. But it went nowhere near steps three and four. Whoever did it looked at the process, decided two of the steps weren’t earning their keep on this job, and quietly skipped them. No note, just gone. And Maya feels that little flare of irritation, because she’s thinking: we agreed. We all sat in that room and agreed. So why does half my team treat the process like scripture and the other half treat it like a friendly suggestion?

Here’s the thing: Maya’s about to reach for the wrong explanation. She’s about to decide this is a discipline problem, and that’s going to cost her — not today, but slowly, expensively, over months — because this is not a discipline problem at all. I’m Brendan Quinn, and this is Cultural Friction. Twenty minutes or thereabouts, one real problem, and what you can actually do about it. Today: what to do when half your team follows the process to the letter and the other half treats it as a rough guide — and why the usual fixes make it worse.

Let’s split this into two people. Dan did the work that followed all the steps; Lena did the work that skipped steps three and four. On one side you’ve got your rule followers — that’s Dan. To them, the process is the point. You agreed to it, so you do it. All of it. Skipping a step isn’t a clever shortcut; it’s breaking your word. When they see a colleague deliver work that skips steps, they don’t think ‘oh, that’s efficient.’ They think ‘that’s sloppy, unprofessional, even a bit disrespectful’ — because in their world we all made a promise, and one of us just decided the promise didn’t apply to them.

On the other side you’ve got your improvisers — that’s Lena. To them, the process is a tool; it exists to get to a good outcome. On this job, steps three and four weren’t adding anything, so she dropped them and got there faster. When Lena hears that someone’s annoyed she skipped a couple of steps, she’s genuinely baffled. The work’s done, it’s good — what exactly is the problem? To her, insisting on every step regardless of whether it helps looks like box-ticking. Rigid. Bureaucracy for its own sake.

And here’s what’s really going on underneath — the part nobody says out loud. Both sides think this is about character. Dan has quietly decided Lena is a bit unreliable, a bit cavalier, not quite a team player. Lena has quietly decided Dan is a bit of a jobsworth — can’t see the wood for the trees, more interested in looking correct than being useful. They’re both being completely professional, by two different definitions of the word. That’s the collision: not laziness meeting diligence, but two whole, coherent, sensible ideas of what doing your job properly means, crashing into each other over a six-step process — and nobody can see the crash happening. They can only see the other person being annoyed. And if you’re the manager, you’re standing right in the middle of it, holding a document everyone signed, wondering why the document isn’t working.

So let’s get underneath this. Why do two reasonable people read the exact same process and come away with completely different ideas of how binding it is? Two things are going on, and here’s the first: some of us learned that a rule is a promise, and some of us learned that a rule is a tool. There’s a piece of research I keep coming back to, from a social scientist called Michele Gelfand. She and her colleagues ran a study across 33 groups, thousands of people, measuring something deceptively simple: how strong are the norms here, and how much trouble are you in if you break them? Some environments are what she calls ‘tight’ — the rules are clear, everyone knows them, and stepping outside the line gets noticed and corrected. There’s a narrow band of the right way to do things, and you stay inside it. Others are ‘loose’ — the band is much wider, there’s more room to improvise, more tolerance for doing it your own way, and far less consequence for colouring outside the lines.

And this is the whole ball game: these aren’t opinions people hold, they’re settings people are running — usually without any idea they’re running them. If you grew up and worked your whole career inside a tight environment, a rule feels like a promise, because that’s what a rule has always been to you, everywhere. If you grew up inside a loose one, a rule feels like a strong recommendation, because that’s what a rule has always been. Neither person chose this, neither can see it. It’s the water they’re swimming in.

And here’s the second thing: nobody ever told either of them which steps actually mattered. Let me be careful here, because it would be easy to hear ‘tight’ and ‘loose’ and start sorting your team by nationality. Don’t. That’s not what this is about. You’ll find tight-oriented and loose-oriented people who grew up two streets apart. You’ll find it shaped by the industry someone trained in — a person who came up in aviation or surgery or accounting carries a very different relationship with procedure than someone who came up in early-stage startups or advertising. You’ll find it shaped by family, by school, by the first boss they ever had. It’s an orientation, not a passport. Treat it as a passport and you’ll be wrong about half your team and insulting to the other half.

So here’s the sentence I really want you to take away: when you write ‘the team will follow this six-step process,’ that one sentence gets read two completely different ways. To your tight-oriented people, you just wrote a commitment — a promise with their name on it. To your loose-oriented people, you just wrote a sensible default — the recommended route, unless there’s a good reason to go around it. Same words, same meeting, two different contracts. They walked out of the room each certain they knew what had been agreed, and they’d agreed to different things.

Let me show you how this plays out, because once you see it you’ll see it everywhere. The classic manager complaint: ‘they agreed in the meeting, and then went off and did their own thing.’ Feels like betrayal, doesn’t it? But look what actually happened. To the loose-oriented person, agreeing in the meeting meant ‘yes, that’s the direction, that’s the plan.’ To the tight-oriented manager, it meant ‘yes, that’s the commitment, that’s what will happen.’ Agreement as direction versus agreement as binding. Nobody lied. They just shook hands on two different things.

Or this one: ‘why does this person escalate every little thing instead of using some common sense?’ He’s a tight-oriented team member who’s hit an exception the process doesn’t cover. And in a tight world, what do you do with an exception? You flag it, you check it — you don’t freelance a solution; that would be the reckless thing to do. So they escalate. From a loose-oriented manager’s chair, that looks like someone who can’t tie their own shoelaces. But it isn’t helplessness, it’s correctness. They’re doing exactly the right thing by the setting they’re running.

And my favourite, because every manager has said it at least once, usually into a cup of cold coffee: ‘why do we even have deadlines if nobody respects them?’ To one half of the team, a deadline is a fixed point in the universe, immovable. To the other half, a deadline is a strong preference — a really good target you’d of course hit, unless something more important came up, in which case you’d obviously have the sense to re-prioritise. Both think they’re respecting the deadline. They just mean different things by ‘respect.’

And then there’s the quiet one, the expensive one — the one that doesn’t show up in any meeting. Over time, Dan slowly stops trusting Lena to be reliable. Not in a big blow-up, just a gradual withdrawal. He starts double-checking her work, he stops handing her the things that really matter, he routes around her. And Lena has no idea what’s happening, because from where she’s sitting she’s been delivering good work this whole time. That erosion is the real cost — not the skipped steps, but the slow, silent draining away of trust between two people who, if Maya gets this right, could have been each other’s best complements: Dan keeping Lena safe, Lena keeping Dan moving.

So what do we do? If it’s not a discipline problem — and it isn’t — you can’t discipline your way out of it. Let me tell you what most managers reach for, and why both instincts fail, and then give you four things that actually work. The first instinct: enforce harder. Crack down. The process is the process; from now on we follow it, all of it, no exceptions. And here’s the cruel joke — that only lands on the half of the team that was already complying. Your rule followers were doing it anyway. Your improvisers hear something quite different: they hear ‘this team now values ticking boxes over getting results.’ And a good improviser, hearing that, doesn’t argue. They just quietly conclude you’re not serious about outcomes, and they start routing around you. You didn’t fix the split; you just taught half the team to stop telling you what they’re doing.

The second instinct is the opposite: loosen everything. Let’s not be bureaucratic — use your judgement, we’re all adults. And now your loose-oriented people are delighted and your tight-oriented people are quietly panicking, because to them the absence of clear norms doesn’t feel like freedom, it feels like risk. So they compensate: they over-check, they over-document, they slow right down, because nobody’s told them where the guardrails are and they’re not about to drive at speed in the dark. So you can’t out-enforce it, and you can’t out-relax it. The only thing that works is to make the invisible contract visible — stop letting one sentence mean two things. Here’s how, in four moves, and you can start all of them this week.

Move one — and this is the big one, the highest-leverage thing in this whole episode: separate the load-bearing rules from the defaults. Go through your process and sort every step into one of two buckets. Bucket one: this step is fixed, non-negotiable, and here’s precisely why — it’s a legal requirement, a safety gate, the thing that stops us getting sued or getting someone hurt. Bucket two: this is the default path — how we’d normally do it, a good route, but you can deviate if you’ve got a reason. The magic is that most processes never tell you which is which. They present all six steps with exactly the same weight, as if skipping the compliance check and skipping the nice-to-have peer review were the same crime. They’re not. And when you don’t label them, your tight-oriented people treat all six as sacred — including the two that really are optional — and your loose-oriented people treat all six as optional, including the two that will genuinely get you fined. Label them, and suddenly everyone’s pointing at the same map. The improvisers know exactly which two steps they must never touch; the rule followers get explicit permission to relax on the ones that were always meant to flex. One sorting exercise, an enormous payoff.

Move two: build the norms with the team, not for them. There’s a useful distinction from researchers Kwok Leung and Michael Morris, between a group’s deep values and its everyday practices — and the encouraging finding is that practices are far more changeable than values. You’re not trying to rewire anyone’s soul; you’re just trying to agree how this team works. And a norm the team helps set binds very differently from one handed down on a laminated sheet. So don’t walk in with the finished rule book. Walk in with the draft and the question: which of these steps are actually load-bearing, and which are just how we’ve always done it? Your team knows. They’ll tell you. And because they built it, they’ll hold it.

Move three: make deviation a protocol, not a betrayal. Right now, when your improvisers skip a step, they do it silently, and your rule follower finds out afterwards and feels ambushed. So build a tiny piece of machinery: if you’re going to deviate from the default path, you flag it — before or as it happens. One line in the channel: ‘skipping step four on this one, and here’s why.’ That’s it. Now imagine Lena does that. She posts one line before she starts, Dan reads it, and — this is the important part — nothing in him objects, because the thing that bothered Dan was never that Lena skipped the step, it was the surprise. Give him the heads-up and he’s fine. Better than fine — he might even reply, ‘good call.’ And look what that one habit does for the whole team: it turns your improvisers from a source of nasty surprises into a process-improvement engine, because now every deviation is visible, and if the same step keeps getting skipped for the same good reason — congratulations, you’ve just found a step you don’t need. At the same time it gives your tight-oriented people the one thing they were missing: not compliance, predictability. Dan can live with a skipped step. What he couldn’t live with was not knowing.

Move four: watch your own calibration. Here’s an uncomfortable truth. If the laminated sheet says ‘we always do step five,’ but everyone’s watched you wave through work that skipped it three times, then the real rule — the one the team is running on — is that step five is optional. You wrote one contract and you’re enforcing a different one, and your team, being sensible, follows the one you enforce. So before you go correcting anyone else’s relationship with the rules, have a hard look at your own. You are the loudest norm-setter in the room, whether you meant to be or not. And if four moves feels like a lot for one week, just start with the sorting: fixed steps in one column, default steps in the other, and the reason written next to each fixed one. No rollout, no all-hands, no slide deck with the word ‘alignment’ in a nice font. You could do it before lunch, and the only person who has to change anything is you.

So here we are at the one thing. If you take one thing from this episode, take this: the next time you feel that flare of irritation — ‘half my team follows the process and half treat it like a suggestion’ — don’t ask ‘who’s being unprofessional here?’ Ask ‘which of these steps is actually essential, and have I ever told anyone?’ The process in your head has a clear sense of which steps are sacred and which are just habit, but that sense needs to make it onto a page. If it’s still living only in your head, it’s invisible, and your team are left to guess — and they’ve guessed according to their own settings, tight or loose. Say it out loud, sort those steps, and that single act of labelling does more than a year of ‘come on, everyone, let’s follow the process.’

If this is a live issue for your team right now, that’s exactly the kind of thing I work through one-to-one with leaders — through advisory, coaching and workshops. You can find out more at brendanthomasquinn.com, and you can also find me on LinkedIn.