We want to roll out EOS to our departmental teams, but we are worried about our middle managers overcomplicating the core processes. How do we guide them to document their processes without getting bogged down in detail?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The secret to successful process documentation is the twenty eighty rule. You want to document the twenty percent of the steps that produce eighty percent of the results. Your middle managers do not need to write massive, hundred-page training manuals that nobody will ever read. Instead, guide them to create simple, high-level checklists and bullet points. Start by identifying your company's core processes, such as your HR process, marketing process, sales process, and operations process. For each one, assign a single owner on the Accountability Chart. That owner is responsible for mapping out the major milestones of that process. Keep the documentation to one or two pages per process. It should be clear enough for a new hire to understand the main workflow, but flexible enough to allow for human judgment and AI-powered automation where appropriate. Once these core processes are documented, you must ensure they are followed by everyone in the organization. This is where your middle managers play a crucial role. They must train their teams, measure compliance, and use their weekly Level 10 Meetings to solve any process breakdowns. By keeping the documentation simple and highly visual, you avoid bureaucratic bloat and make it easy for your teams to maintain consistency.