You Can’t Fix What You Won’t Say Out Loud

Unwritten rules, hidden culture and informal behaviours can derail even the best strategies. Learn how leaders can identify and fix what no one’s saying out loud.

Unspoken rules exist throughout our lives. Whether they’re between a romantic couple, family members, a community or the employees of a company, they’re always there. We all navigate webs of rules; some written, most not.

Most people adapt well to navigating unwritten rules, but they are often a significant challenge for many employees when entering a new company. The challenge is considerably greater for those entering the workforce the first time and those who aren’t neurotypical. Our education system doesn’t prepare people particularly well for the realities of the workplace (in my opinion), and when it does, it tends to focus on formal policies or defined skills, not the silent norms that define a large part of our success.

The Real Culture Lives in the Unspoken Stuff

In the workplace, unwritten rules can look like the following:

• Don’t challenge Robert in meetings, he doesn’t take it well

• If you want Alice to sign something off quickly, you need to make sure that Asha is onboard first

• If you’re seen to be bolting out the door at 5.01pm, you’ll be judged as being not particularly committed

These examples aren’t extreme, they occur across many businesses and are powerful contributors to workplace culture, whether we like it or not.

Unwritten rules can create bad leadership habits, and in the battle between policy and habit, habit will win, every time. When colleagues attempt to question these habits, they are often met with vague logic, a passive-aggressive retort, or a simple “that’s just the way things are done”.

What Happens When Habit Wins

The consequences of unwritten rules enter new dimensions when they contradict official policies or processes. Such a scenario can lead to reduced trust among employees, particularly in the direction of their leaders. This can lead to performance issues, disillusionment in new hires who follow the official line and get burned, senior leaders thinking they’re leading but are being circumvented, and a false sense of the company’s culture among senior managers.

The simplest way to put it: people don’t follow the rules they’re told, they follow the ones that keep them safe. At a junior level, this causes underperformance and high attrition rates. At the senior level, it can lead to manipulative behaviour and political leadership.

This is especially concerning in the public and third sectors, where every wasted minute costs taxpayer or donor money, but self-preservation often wins out. I do have some sympathy - humans are built to protect ourselves.

Still, it’s a leader’s job to make it safe for others to do the right thing, without feeling like they’re stepping into the firing line.

Ask the Questions You’re Avoiding

As in our previous article on the unofficial organisation chart, the first step is to try to map what the unwritten rules are. The simplest way is often to ask your team, a step many leaders might prefer to avoid, as it means hearing some potentially harsh truths. It’s much better to find out though, i.e. forewarned is forearmed.

You may find that such habits and hitherto unspoken truths are in place due to a combination of hierarchy, convenience, history, and unfortunately, fear. True leaders give their people the safe platform to say things out loud, and better still, say things out loud themselves.

Moving in such a direction makes culture discussable, and helps employees feel that they can truly help shape the path of a company.

From Unspoken to Actionable

To help you find out what may be left unspoken, a few guiding questions to ask your employees are:

• What unwritten expectations do new joiners tend to quickly absorb?

• What practices are you seeing that don’t align with our handbook and/or strategy?

• Which topic, process or individual is seen as untouchable?

Important note – you should seek to do this without judgement, and you’ll need to consider the type of forum you ask some of these questions (e.g. in private or in a group setting). The tricky bit is that the right forum will vary across companies, environments and the questions being asked.

Once you have a sense of what your workforce perceives to be the unspoken rules and habits, you need to be brave and start tackling them. Start by saying them out loud. Then decide which rules serve the company and make them explicit. Align your policies to match. Finally, these new explicit rules need testing – do they deliver the outcomes you need?

Many leaders think that their direct, considered actions are what create culture. While these do help build a culture, the real building work is largely done in the dark.

So, how to move forward? Turn on the lights, say it loud, and act.

Need help understanding your company’s culture? Get in touch for an initial chat.