Rules or Suggestions

You wrote the process down. Everyone agreed to it. And still — half your team follows it to the letter while the other half treats it as a helpful suggestion, and both sides are quietly deciding the other lot are the problem.

This episode is about why. Meet Claire and two of her best people: Kenji in Osaka, who follows every step every time, and Rafa in São Paulo, who skips the review to rescue a client in a panic. Both are doing their honest best. Both are certain they're the sensible one — and the trust between them is quietly draining away.

Drawing on Michele Gelfand's research into "tight" and "loose" cultures, we unpick why the same rule reads as a binding promise to one person and a sensible default to another, why enforcing harder (or relaxing everything) both backfire, and four moves you can start this week to turn the divide from a fault line into a real strength.

It looks like a discipline problem. It almost never is. Here's what to build instead.

Work with Brendan: If this is a live issue for your team right now, it's exactly the kind of thing I work through one-to-one with leaders — advisory, coaching and workshops. More at https://brendanthomasquinn.com

Subscribe so you don't miss the next episode.

Music by Denis Pavlov / DPmusic via Pixabay.

Sources: Gelfand et al., Differences Between Tight and Loose Cultures: A 33-Nation Study (2011) · Gelfand, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers (2018)

Cultural Friction is hosted by Brendan Thomas Quinn who works with leaders and teams navigating cultural friction within teams that work together or are dispersed around the world — as an advisor, coach, and workshop facilitator, and as Adjunct Lecturer on an International Business Masters programme teaching Cross-Cultural Communication, Cultural Friction brings that same real-world, research-backed approach to your ears in 20 minutes.

Enjoying the show? A quick rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify genuinely helps other leaders find it.

And, if you have comments or would like to suggest future topics to be discussed, let us know, we'd love to hear from you.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Picture this. It's Tuesday morning and we're in a meeting. There's nothing dramatic, a team of eight, a project everyone really cares about, and a process that they all signed off on two weeks ago. Six clear steps. Everyone in the room nodded, and everyone said yes. And here's our manager, let's call her Maya, looking at two pieces of work that have landed that morning. The first one followed the process exactly. Step one, step two, all the way down to step six. Boxes ticked, sign-offs in place. It's the kind of work you could hand to an auditor and sleep soundly. The second one is also finished. It's good, actually, it might even be better than the first work. But it did not go anywhere near steps three and four. Whoever did it looked at the process, decided two of the steps weren't earning their keep on this particular job, and quietly skipped them. No drama, 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 we 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 gonna 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. 20 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. Okay, so let's split these into two games. Dan Lena. So Dan, he did the work that followed all the steps, and Lena, she did the work that skipped steps three and four. So on one side you've got your rule followers, that's Dan. To them, the process is the point. You agree 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 three and four, they don't think, oh, that's efficient. They think, hmm, that's sloppy, that's unprofessional, uh, even a little 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. So to them, the process is a tool, it exists to get to a good outcome. And on this job, steps three and four weren't adding anything, so obviously, she dropped them and she got faster results. 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 here? To her, insisting on every step, regardless of whether it helps, looks like box ticking. It's rigid, it's bureaucracy for its own sake. And here's what's really going on underneath the part that nobody says out loud. Both sides think this is about character. Dan has quietly decided that Lena is a bit unreliable, she's a bit cavalier, she's not quite a team player. Lena has quietly decided that Dan's a bit of a job's worth. 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 professional, and that's the collision, not laziness meeting diligence. 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. That's the friction. And if you're a 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 two completely different ideas of how binding it is? In my opinion, there's two things that are going on here, and this is 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 that I keep coming back to on this from a social scientist called Michelle Gelfand. She and her colleagues ran a study across 33 different groups, thousands of people, and what they were measuring was something deceptively simple. It was how strong are the norms here, and how much trouble are you in if you break them? Some environments are what she calls tight. So in a tight setting, the rules are clear, everyone knows them, and stepping outside the line gets noticed and you get corrected. There's a narrow band of the right way to do this, and you stay inside that band. Other environments are loose, and in a loose setting, the band is much wider. There's more room to improvise, more tolerance for doing it your own way, and a lot less consequence for colouring outside the lines. Now, and this is the whole ball game, these aren't opinions people hold. They're settings people are running, usually without any idea that they're running them. If you grew up and worked your whole career inside a tight environment, a rule feels like it's a promise, because that's what a rule has always been to you everywhere that you've ever been. If you grew up and worked inside a loose one, a rule feels like a strong recommendation because that's what a rule has always been for you. Neither person chose this, neither person can see it, it's the water that they're swimming in. And here's the second. Nobody ever told either of them which steps actually mattered. And I want to be clear and careful here because it would be easy to hear tight and loose and start mentally sorting your team by nationality. Don't do that. 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 them shaped by the industry that they trained in. Someone who came up in aviation or surgery or accounting carries a very different relationship with the procedure than someone who came up in early stage startups or advertising. You'll find it shaped by family, by school, by the first bus they ever had. It's an orientation, it's not a passport. Treat it as a passport, and you'll be wrong about half of your team and insulting to the other half. So here's the sentence I really want you to take away from all of this. 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, and they walked out of the room, each certain they knew what had been agreed, and they agreed to different things. Let me show you how this plays out because once you see it, you'll see it everywhere. You know the classic manager complaint. They agreed in the meeting, and then they went off and did their own thing. Feels like betrayal, doesn't it? But look what actually happened. To the loose orientated person, agreeing in the meeting meant yes, that's the direction, that's the plan. To the tight orientated manager, it means yes, that's the commitment, that's what will happen. Agreement as direction versus agreement as binding. Nobody has lied here. They just shook hands on two different things. Or this one. Why does this person escalate every little thing instead of just using some common sense? He is a tight orientated team member who says 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 just freelance a solution. That would be the reckless thing to do. So they escalate it. And 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. Low-bearing, immovable. To the other half, a deadline is a strong preference, a really good target that you'd of course hit unless something more important came up, in which case, obviously, you'd have the sense to re-prioritize. Both of them 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, quietly stops trusting Lena to be reliable. Not in a big blow-up, just a gradual withdrawal of trust. He starts double checking her work, he stops handing her the things that really matter. He roots around her. And Lena has no idea what's happening because from where she's sitting, she's been delivering good work to this whole team for this whole time. That erosion is a real cost, not the skip steps, the slow, silent draining away of trust between two people who, if Maya gets this right, could have been each other's best compliments. Dan keeping Lena safe and Lena keeping Dan moving. So what do we do in these situations? If it's not a discipline problem, which it isn't, you can't discipline your way out of it. So let me tell you what most managers reach for and why both instincts fail, and then let me give you four things that actually do work. The first instinct is this enforce harder, crack down. The process is the process, and from now on we follow it, all of it, no exceptions. And here's the cool joke: that only lands on half of the team that was already complying. Your rule followers not, they 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 rooting 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 judgment, 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 overcheck, they over-document, they slow right down because no one'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. So what do you do? The only thing that actually works is make the invisible contract visible. Stop letting one sentence mean two things. Here's how in four moves, and you can start all four of them this week. Move one. And this is the big one. The highest leverage thing in this entire 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, it's non-negotiable, and here's precisely why. It's a legal requirement, it's a safety gate, it's the thing that stops us getting sued or getting someone hurt. Bucket two, this is the default path. It's how we'd normally do it. It's a good route, but you can deviate if you've got a reason. The magic here 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. But 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 with an enormous payoff. Move two. This is the one from Kwok Lung 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 are not trying to rewire anyone's soul here. You're just trying to agree on how this team works. And a norm the team helps set binds very differently from a norm 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 low-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, a 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, and Dan reads it, and and this is the important part, nothing in him objects because the thing that bothered Dan was never the fact that Lena skipped the step, it was the surprise. Give him the heads up and he's fine. Better than fine, he may even reply, good call. And look what that one habit does at the level of the whole team. It turns your improvisers from a source of nasty surprises into an actual process improvement engine. Because now every deviation is visible, and if the same step keeps getting skipped for the same good reason, well, congratulations, you've just found a step in your process that you don't need. And at the same time, it gives your Thai-oriented people the one thing they were actually 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. Because 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 that 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 that you enforce. So before you go correcting anybody 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 of these again feels like a lot for one week, just start with one move. Just 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, none of that. You could do it before lunch, and the only person who has to change anything is you. Okay, so here we are at the one thing. If you take one thing from this episode, please take this. The next time you feel that flare of irritation, half my team follows the process and half of them 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 just still living in your head, then it's invisible and your team are just left to guess, and they've guessed according to their own settings, and those settings are tight or loose. Say it out loud, sort those steps, and that single act of labeling 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, through coaching, and through workshops. You can find out more about the work that I do by visiting BrendanThomasQuinn.com, and you can also find me on LinkedIn.