As a lawyer, I’ve encountered many policies over many years. I’ve read, reviewed, interpreted, and drafted them. I now realise that they were almost all horrible. I’ve seen the light and woken up to a whole new world. The light is a book on rules by Lewis Eisen. It’s called, ‘How to Write Rules that People Want to Follow: A Guide to Drafting Respectful Policies and Directives. We reviewed the book in 2019, and
There are not many people who like policies. There are also few people who read them. People often ignore policies or use them against others when things go wrong. What I’ve realised is that most policies are simply rotten and deserve all the criticism they get. There is a better way and good policies can be very useful tools to implement controls and manage risk. The book is very clever and has changed my whole outlook on policies.
There is such a thing as a beautiful policy.
We reviewed the 2nd edition in 2019. It looks at the cost of bad rules, promoting respect, and drafting tips. The 3rd edition includes new chapters on codes of conduct, the words ‘must’, ‘may’, and ‘should’, and real-life examples.
Example of a bad and good policy statement
Horrible: “Where it is believed that a formal dispute should be instituted against a third party on behalf of the Company, Legal should be advised before any correspondence is issued to the third party.”
Beautiful: “We involve Legal in a dispute with a third party as early as possible in the hope of finding an amicable resolution.”
If you need to review or draft policies, I recommend that you read this book. It will open your eyes to a new way of writing policy statements. We now write all of our policies in line with it and we’ve hosted webinars on having good policies in place. It will be hard at first but the results are worth it. It will take some time to change all your policies to be in line with the book, but you have to start somewhere. What we find is that a good policy can go viral – it makes all the other policies look so bad that people just simply want all policies to be like it. The good policy slowly replaces all the bad ones, and before long the organisation has a whole new set of policies.
Where can you buy the book on Rules?
It is a quick two-hour read and there are many aha moments that will leave a lasting impression on you. You can buy the book on Exclusive Books and Amazon.
