Most leadership teams have a process document somewhere. It lives in a shared drive, it runs a few dozen pages, and someone spent a whole quarter building it. Then a customer escalation hits, a key person gives notice, and the document goes untouched for the rest of the year.
If that sounds familiar, you’re in good company. Documenting your processes is hard. Getting your team to follow them is harder. And the gap between the two is where most process work quietly falls apart.
Start with the word “core” A lot of teams use “process” and “SOP” interchangeably, and that’s where the confusion starts. Lisa is precise about the language for a reason.
A core process is the overarching framework everything else lives under. Most companies have five to seven of them — hiring and managing people, generating demand, converting demand to revenue, delivering your product or service, and handling finance. Everything more granular, the step-by-step stuff your team actually executes, is a subprocess or an SOP that sits underneath one of those core processes.
The distinction matters because it tells you where to begin. You’re not documenting 200 procedures. You’re identifying the handful of core processes that run the business, then deciding how deep to go under each one.
Get buy-in before you document anything The most common mistake Lisa sees is teams diving straight into documentation. They package everything up, roll it out, and watch it stall within weeks because the leadership team never agreed the work mattered in the first place.
“Often teams will start getting their processes documented. But if you don’t have buy-in, very quickly you’ll find that something else is going to get in the way.” — Lisa González, EOS Implementer and co-author of Process!
The fix is an hour with your leadership team before anyone opens a document. Agree on what a lack of process is costing you right now — the unhappy customers, the people leaving without their knowledge captured, the flat revenue. Then agree on the benefits of fixing it. The book Process! walks a team through exactly this, and your EOS Implementer can facilitate it in a quarterly session.
That hour is also where you identify your core processes as a team. One meeting, leadership aligned, core processes named. That’s the foundation.
Don’t over-document Lisa learned this one the hard way. In a previous business, she single-handedly documented everything short of how to walk through the front door, presented it to her leadership team with no buy-in, and watched the whole thing get forgotten almost immediately.
The lesson she teaches now is the opposite of that instinct. Assume you’ve hired people who get it, want it, and have the capacity to do the job. Then give them a one-page checklist of the things that need to happen for the work to be done well. If someone needs more detail on a specific task, link out to the deeper SOP from the checklist.
“I would always err on the side of less is more. When you start to have too many steps, people just stop following them.” — Lisa González
What “Followed By All” actually takes Here’s where most of the real work lives. Teams can spend years identifying, documenting, simplifying, and packaging their processes — and none of it matters if no one follows them.
Getting your processes Followed By All comes down to four phases:
Train . You’ve done the work, so now teach it. That can be a company-wide rollout for a process that touches everyone, a departmental meeting for the people who own the detail, or ten minutes carved out of a Level 10 to refresh the team on one piece of a process.
Measure . Tie a key step in the process to your scorecard. Are people following it? Are they doing it often enough? Are they getting the result? Lisa’s strongest advice here: anchor to activity-based leading indicators you can act on week over week, not lagging outcomes you can only review after the fact.
Manage . When someone isn’t following the process, you manage them to it. That rarely means firing anyone. There’s a wide range of options before that point — asking why, adding it to the issues list, offering more training — and the response should match the stakes of the process being skipped.
Update . Processes go stale if you let them. At least once a year, take a clarity break to review each one. Trim a step, add a step, look for ways to improve it, then run it back through documentation and training. That loop is what keeps an organization improving instead of standing still.
Giving your Visionary a single view This is the part we were most excited to build with Lisa, and it solves a problem she’d been working around with clients for years using spreadsheets.
Until now, there hasn’t been a clean way for a leadership team to answer a simple question: where do we stand on our core processes? Which ones are identified? Which are documented and packaged? Which are actually Followed By All?
Strety is the only EOS software with the full three-step Process Documenter and the four Followed By All phases built directly into the tool — and every core process rolls up to a dashboard that gives leadership executive visibility into the Process Component across the whole organization. At a glance, your Visionary sees the stage of each core process and where the work stands. Your operational leaders dive into the detail. Processes link to Rocks, measurables, issues, and the underlying Docs , so the whole effort stays connected instead of scattered across drives and spreadsheets.
We built it working hand in hand with Lisa, down to the AI prompts and templates that help teams beat blank-page syndrome when they start a new process. What you see in the tool reflects the real methodology from the book.
“This really was built for my visionaries who just need a glance, and my operational people who will dive in deeply and make sure this work keeps happening, quarter over quarter.” — Lisa González
Where to start this week If your processes have gone untouched since you wrote them, you don’t need to start over. Pick one core process this quarter. Get your leadership team aligned on why it matters, document the 20 percent that drives 80 percent of the work, and put a measurable on the one step that tells you whether people are following it.
That’s the whole loop in miniature — and it’s how documented processes turn into processes your team uses.
You can watch Lisa and Stu walk through the full framework and the tool in the video above. If you want to see the Process Component in your own workspace, you can try Strety free for 30 days .
Frequently asked questions What is the EOS Process Component? It’s the part of EOS focused on identifying your core processes, documenting and simplifying them, and getting them Followed By All so your business runs consistently as it grows.
What’s the difference between a core process and an SOP? A core process is one of the five to seven overarching frameworks that run your business, like hiring or sales. An SOP or subprocess is a more detailed procedure that lives underneath a core process.
How many core processes should a company have? Most companies have five to seven — typically covering people, marketing, sales, operations or delivery, and finance.
What does “Followed By All” mean in EOS? It’s the goal of getting everyone in the company to actually use a documented process, achieved through four phases: train, measure, manage, and update.
Where should we start with process documentation? Start by getting your leadership team aligned on why the work matters, then identify your core processes together before documenting anything.
Do I need an EOS Implementer to do this? An EOS Implementer can facilitate the work in a quarterly session , but teams can also follow the framework in Process! and run the alignment meeting themselves.
