"We Don't Need Policies, They Just Slow Us Down"

You've heard it before, maybe in at a speech, maybe from a founder who wears the phrase like a badge. We're not that kind of company. No dress code. No vacation cap. No one hovering over expense reports or blessing every project before it starts. Just smart people, doing smart things, trusted to figure it out.

It sounds like freedom. For a while, it even feels like it.

Here's the fact nobody puts on a slide deck: no matter how small your team or how talented your people are, some shared understanding of how you work together is not optional, it's structural. Call it culture, call it norms, call it "just common sense." 

The trouble with common sense is that it isn't common. It's personal. It's shaped by the last company someone worked at, the family they grew up in, the manager who let things slide by or didn't. Ask ten people to define "reasonable," and you'll get ten different answers, usually discovered only after something has already gone wrong.

I've watched this play out from the inside, way too many times, in ways that had nothing to do with malice and everything to do with the absence of a page that was never written.

The vacation policy that had no policy

One company I worked with rolled out unlimited PTO genuinely unlimited. No cap, no tenure-based tiers, no country-specific carve-outs, and, critically, no process to request or track any of it. On paper, it was the ultimate trust fall.

Then a manager came to me, frustrated. One employee was taking three-plus weeks off almost every single month. To be clear: the work was getting done. Deadlines were met. Deliverables landed. So, I asked the obvious question, what's actually wrong here?

The answer wasn't about output. It was about drag. 

Colleagues were stalling on shared projects, waiting on approvals only this person could give, absorbing the slack every time this person vanished for a stretch. Nobody could say the employee was breaking a rule, because there wasn't one to break. What there was, instead, was a slow, quiet erosion of trust among the people left holding the work and a manager stuck coaching around a problem that a single clear guideline could have prevented from forming at all. We got through it with coaching, patience, and more than a few uncomfortable conversations. All of it optional, if someone had just written the policy down first.

The policy that existed and was ignored

The second story is almost the mirror image, and in some ways more instructive: this time, the policy existed. A clean, standard, progressive-discipline process, sitting in the handbook, ready to go.

One employee showed a pattern of late arrivals, missed shifts, sometimes with a call ahead, often without one. The supervisor's instinct was to handle it the "nice" way: mention it in passing, hope it self-corrects, avoid the paperwork. So, the issue got raised verbally. Then again. Then, by one count, more than a dozen times.

It did not get better. It got worse, in the way unaddressed things usually do quietly, then all at once. The team was left scrambling to cover shifts on short notice, morale eroding as reliable people absorbed the cost of someone else's inconsistency. When leadership finally sat down and tallied the incidents, the number came to more than fifty. Fifty separate moments where a conversation could have reset expectations and didn't. The employee was talented and genuinely good at the job but the trust had run out, and the outcome was a termination that arrived far later, and far messier, than it needed to.

It's not a paperwork problem it's a "who's steering" problem

The easy read on both stories is that they're not really about policy at all they're about management. And that's true. A document sitting in a shared drive doesn't manage anyone. A well-written handbook clause has never once had a difficult conversation on someone's behalf.

But that's exactly the point, not a rebuttal to it. Policy isn't a substitute for management it's the scaffolding that makes management possible under pressure. It tells a new supervisor what "too often" really means before they have to invent a number under fire. It gives a manager cover to say "here's the standard, and here's where you're outside it" instead of relying on their own appetite for conflict, which as both stories show is not something you want the business depending on. And it protects the good employees, the ones quietly picking up the slack, who notice long before leadership does that the same rules don't seem to apply to everyone.

Skip the guardrail, and you haven't removed the friction of managing people. You've just deferred it, with interest, to the day someone finally counts to fifty.

The actual trade-off

None of this is an argument for a 200-page manual or a dress code memo nobody reads. Over-engineered policy has its own failure mode it slows teams down, breeds box-checking over judgment, and signals distrust to the people who never needed the rule in the first place. The goal isn't maximum policy. 

It's clear enough that a manager doesn't have to improvise the standard in the moment, light enough that it doesn't choke the culture it's meant to protect.

The real question worth asking isn't "policies or no policies." 

It's this: when the hard moment arrives, the employee gone too often, the pattern that's gone on too long, do the people responsible for handling it have something solid to stand on, or are they left inventing the answer alone, under pressure, for the first time? 

Get that answer right before you need it, and most of these situations will never make it to my or your inbox at all.