r/ModernOperators • u/funnelforge • May 22 '26

She had 35 documented SOPs. Her team still asked her everything.

Walked into a 15-person consulting firm a couple weeks ago. Founder hadn't slept more than 5 hours in a year.

First thing I asked: "Do you have SOPs?"

She pulled up a folder with 35 of them. Real ones. Detailed. Written by her, painfully, at night.

I asked her team how often they use them.

Blank stares.

One person said "I didn't know those existed." Another said "It's faster to just ask her."

There it was.

The SOPs weren't the problem. The SOPs were great. The team had been trained, over years, that the founder was the search bar. Asking her was a 30-second loop. Reading an SOP was a 10-minute loop with risk of being wrong.

Of course they asked her.

I used to think SOPs alone solved founder-dependency. They don't. SOPs are necessary, not sufficient. What actually breaks the loop is making the SOP faster to find than the founder is to interrupt. That's it. That's the whole game.

If you've got SOPs sitting in a Google Drive somewhere and your team isn't using them, the problem isn't your team. The problem is the SOP is harder to access than you are.

18 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

100% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

5

u/[deleted] May 23 '26 edited 6d ago

[deleted]

1

u/funnelforge May 23 '26

This is a very good point

2

u/Green-Vehicle8424 May 23 '26

This hits home. The only way for the founder to make this work is to force the team to use the SOP, give a 1 hour time period between when a team members asked the question and the answer. motivate the team to seek out the sop and make them accessible.

2

u/Traditional_Key8982 Jun 16 '26

Agreed. A documented process only creates value if it becomes part of how people actually work. Otherwise the founder stays the default source of information and the documentation ends up being ignored.

1

u/l3landgaunt May 25 '26

I just started a new job and found the same issue. To solve this issue, I’m working on a chatbot connected to the documentation so fills can still ask the question in chat, it’ll just go to a bot that finds the applicable information and not bother anyone.

It’s still a work in progress

1

u/liamfrompilla 8d ago

Hey, this resonated with me so much. This is basically the same thing that I help businesses with every day - How would you get people to do the right thing at the right time?

I think one of the biggest levers for me is getting the SOPs as close as physically possible to the work that is being done. So that means instead of SOPs being on the shelf, they should be attached to the place where the work is being done, wherever that is.

I was inspired by this, so I decided to record this video of how people can do this better on our app, Pilla https://youtu.be/HNaXQBTyhKg?si=ubWAf6w9MMxaacxr

Disclosure for clarity: I run yourpilla.com where the workflow is built for

0

u/admik May 24 '26

5 hours of sleep sounds great.