Stop Blaming Your Team. Start Looking at Your Leadership.

I’d spent weeks creating what I thought was the most thorough set of SOPs my team had ever seen. Templates in Asana, step-by-step workflows, naming conventions, the whole thing.

I organized everything into folders, recorded a Loom video for each SOP, dropped the links in our Slack channel, and told the team to review the new process before the following Monday.

Monday came.

Spoiler alert: Nobody reviewed anything.

Not because they didn’t care, and not because the new processes weren’t valuable. But because I had confused documenting something with actually teaching someone how to do it.

And that distinction, the gap between having a process and making sure your team can actually execute on that process, is one of the most expensive mistakes a founder can make.

The Google Drive Dilemma

So here’s the thing.

I see this with almost every client we work with at Cirface when we start a new engagement. We’ll sit down with the team lead and say, “Walk us through how your team handles [insert process name].”

And they’ll open Google Drive, open a folder, and pull up a Google Doc or Sheet that looks like it was last updated in 2021.

“Yeah, this is how we [insert explanation of the end-to-end process].”

Then one of their team members pipes up and says something to the effect of “I’ve never seen that before. And I’ve been here for two years.”

That moment hits different when you’re the founder.

Because you spent your time creating that document, and most importantly, you thought you were setting them up for success.

But all you actually did was create a file that made you feel organized while everyone else continued figuring things out on their own.

Documents aren’t training. They’re just documentation.

And there is a massive difference between the two.

Telling Is Not The Same As Teaching

I think the reason so many founders fall into this trap is that we’re wired to move quickly.

You figure out a better way to do something, so you write it down, share the link, and move on to the next fire. And in your head, you’ve done your job. You’ve communicated the expectation. You’ve given them the playbook.

But you told them once.

Maybe you showed them where to find the document.

And then you assumed that was enough, because they were hired as professionals and they should be able to take it from there.

You see how dangerous that thinking is?

Because what happens next is predictable. The new hire doesn’t follow the process. Or they follow part of it and improvise the rest.

And then you get frustrated because the output doesn’t match what you expected, and you start telling yourself that it’s easier to just do it yourself, that you clearly hired the wrong person, that nobody cares about quality the way you do.

But the truth is, you didn’t train them. You informed them.

And those are two completely different things.

Take Accountability

When I think about why I was so bad at this early on, I have to be honest with myself.

I wasn’t just skipping the training because I was busy. I was skipping it because I didn’t have an accountability loop.

I had no way of knowing if people had actually read what I shared, if they understood the latest version, if they could apply the process under pressure when a client was waiting, and the deadline was today.

The question I had to start asking myself was this: how do I, as an employer, create the expectation with my team that says, “Here is the job I expect of you, and here is the current best practice for how we do it”?

Because if you’re not communicating the current best practice, how can you possibly expect someone to perform at their highest level?

How can you expect them to succeed when the information they need is buried in a folder they’ve never opened?

Bad Training, Not Bad People

This is the part that really stung for me to accept.

Because I had to look in the mirror and acknowledge that when my team wasn’t performing, the first place I needed to look was at my own leadership.

A lot of founders, when someone on their team drops the ball, go straight to “they’re not the right fit” or “they don’t have the work ethic” or “I just need to find someone better.”

But the reality is, most of the time, it’s bad training. Not a bad person.

And there’s a huge difference.

When someone fails because you threw them to the wolves and said “figure it out,” that failure belongs to you.

When someone underperforms because you communicated the process once during onboarding and never revisited it, that gap in performance is a leadership gap, not a talent gap.

I’ve had to sit with that realization more times than I’d like to admit.

And every single time, when I actually invested the effort to teach, to walk through the process, to answer questions, to check for understanding, to give people room to practice before the stakes were high, the results changed.

Not because I found better people. But because I became a better leader to the people I already had.

What I’d Tell the Founder Who Feels Like Their Team Doesn’t Get It

If you’re reading this and thinking, “Yeah, my team just doesn’t follow the process,” I want you to ask yourself a few things before you blame them.

1. Did you teach them, or did you just tell them?

Sharing a doc is not onboarding. Mentioning something in a meeting is not training. If they heard the process once, that’s information. If they practiced the process with your guidance, that’s education.

2. Did you check for understanding, or just compliance?

There’s a difference between someone nodding along and someone who can actually execute under pressure. If you never verified that the knowledge landed, you were hoping, not leading.

3. Did you explain the why, or just the what?

People follow processes they understand. When your team knows why something matters, not just the steps to complete it, they make better decisions when the process doesn’t cover the edge case in front of them.

4. Did you create space for them to make it their own?

The goal isn’t for your team to do things exactly the way you would. The goal is for them to achieve the same result, and maybe find a better path to get there. But that only happens when the foundation is solid enough for them to innovate on top of it.

5. Did you revisit it, or set it and forget it?

Processes evolve. Teams change. If the last time you trained on a workflow was six months ago, your team is operating on outdated information and filling in the blanks themselves.

If the answer to most of these is no, then the gap you’re seeing in your team is a mirror.

And the fix isn’t a new hire, or a new tool, or a new SOP document.

The fix is you, investing your time as a leader in the people who are already showing up every day to help you grow this thing.

That’s the work.

And I know it feels slower than just doing it yourself. But doing it yourself is exactly how you become the bottleneck you started a business to escape.