What leaders interpret as resistance is frequently information. The person pushing back may be the very one who understands the process better than anyone else in the room.
A few months ago, I sat with a team and asked what I thought was a simple question: “Can you show me how you onboard a new client?”
The answer should have been straightforward. The firm had documented procedures, compliance manuals and process maps. Everything was professionally organised and presented. But nobody opened the process document… Instead, each person explained their own version of the process… The outcomes were broadly similar. The methods were not.
I was reminded of something I have seen repeatedly throughout my career in financial planning practices: good people do not automatically follow good processes.
At first glance, that sounds like a process problem. But the longer I work with businesses, the more convinced I become that it is a people problem. Or perhaps more accurately, it is a misunderstanding of how people respond to change, pressure and complexity.
The financial planning profession certainly does not lack knowledge: we have a variety of conferences, CPD events and webinars to choose from. We implement new technology, CRM systems and invest heavily in improving our businesses.
Most practice owners genuinely want to create better experiences for their clients and improved environments for their teams.
Yet despite good intentions, many businesses find themselves asking the same question: “If the process is so good, why isn’t anyone following it?” The answer is often far more human than we would like to admit.
A common assumption made when a process is not being followed is that people are resistant to change. Sometimes that is true. Every organisation has at least one person who can identify 17 reasons why a new idea will never work before the meeting invitation has even been accepted.
The people pushing back know where the shortcuts are hiding, where the workarounds have quietly evolved over the years and which parts of the process look efficient on paper but take 45 minutes to complete in real life.
They know which system requires three passwords, two verification codes and what feels suspiciously like a small sacrifice to the technology gods before it agrees to cooperate. More importantly, they know where clients and staff become frustrated.
These individuals are often the subject matter experts of their corner of the business. Yet they are frequently the last people consulted when processes are redesigned.
Organisations spend hours discussing improvements in meeting rooms while the people doing the work every day wonder why nobody considered asking them. It is an interesting contradiction. The expertise is sitting three desks away, but the conversation somehow happens everywhere except there.
One of the things I have noticed when facilitating process reviews is that the best ideas rarely come from the boardroom. They usually come from the person who has been quietly doing the task every day for the last five years.
The administrator who knows which client communication creates confusion. The paraplanner who knows exactly where information gets lost. The operations person who can tell you which report nobody reads despite everyone spending hours producing it.
Another reason good processes fail has very little to do with the process itself and everything to do with the environment into which it is introduced. Most people are already operating close to capacity.
When leaders introduce a new process, they often view it as a single change. But the person expected to implement that change experiences it very differently. From their perspective, the new process arrives on top of existing client commitments, reporting requirements, compliance obligations, overflowing inboxes, looming deadlines and whatever unexpected crisis happened to emerge that week.
The process itself may be perfectly reasonable. The timing may not be.
This is where many organisations unintentionally create frustration. They assume that because the new process makes sense, people will naturally adopt it. What they fail to recognise is that human beings are remarkably efficient at conserving mental energy.
Behavioural researchers have long observed that when people are under pressure, they default to behaviours that are familiar and require less cognitive effort. In other words, when workloads increase and stress levels rise, people rarely rise to the echelon of the new process. Instead, they fall back to the level of their existing habits.
This is one of the reasons why training often produces disappointing results. People attend the training. They engage with the content, take notes, leave the session motivated and inspired and then return to the office, open their inbox and discover 127 unread emails.
The training itself was not the problem. The problem is that nobody translated the learning into practical actions that fit within the reality of their daily work. The new knowledge ends up sitting alongside the business instead of becoming part of it.
Research on workplace learning has repeatedly shown that knowledge transfer is not automatic. People do not learn something once and then permanently change their behaviour. Without reinforcement, coaching and opportunities to apply new knowledge, much of what is learned during training is forgotten surprisingly quickly.
The challenge is not getting people to understand a new idea; it is helping them translate that idea into the hundreds of decisions they make each day.
I have noticed another recurring pattern in many firms. What appears to be a process is often actually a person. You know exactly who I am talking about… Every business seems to have one. The person who knows everything. The one everyone calls, who can locate the document nobody else can find and who understands the system nobody else does. The person who keeps everything moving.
At first, this appears to be a strength and creates a sense of comfort. Everyone knows there is somebody who has the answer. The difficulty emerges when that person takes leave. What looked like a robust process reveals itself to be a dependency. The business functions because of an individual, not because of a system.
Ironically, these individuals often become victims of their own competence. They struggle to disconnect, battle to take meaningful breaks and carry an invisible operational burden that few others fully appreciate. And over time, many become exhausted. Overwhelmed. Burnt-out.
Which brings us back to the original question: “Why do good people ignore good processes?”
In many cases, they do not. What they ignore are processes that have been designed without fully considering the people expected to use them. Because a process does not change behaviour. People change behaviour. The process is simply a vehicle.
What ultimately determines success is whether people understand it, believe in it, see value in it and can realistically apply it within the context of their daily work. That requires something many organisations overlook: translation.
People need to understand what the change means for them and how it improves their work, benefits the business and why it matters. Without that translation, even the best process remains little more than an exquisitely documented intention.
The irony is that most organisations already know where their biggest process challenges are. They hear about them in passing conversations, in frustrated comments during meetings and in the workarounds that people quietly create to keep things moving. The clues are usually there. We simply become so focused on fixing the process that we forget to listen to the people experiencing it.
Perhaps the next time a process is not being followed, we should ask a different question. Instead of asking, “Why won’t people follow the process?” we should ask, “What is the process asking people to do?” Because somewhere between those two questions lies the answer.
The businesses that close that gap are usually the ones that spend more time listening. Listening to the people doing the work, those carrying the hidden operational weight who know exactly where reality and theory part ways. Because when you understand the humans inside the process, the process itself becomes infinitely easier to improve. And perhaps that is the real lesson.
Good people do not ignore good processes. They ignore processes that were never designed with people in mind.
