The Rules Nobody Wrote Down

Every team runs on rules that were never agreed. Most of them came from you.

Somewhere in the first few weeks of joining a team, everybody works out the rules.Not the written ones. Nobody needs long to read a policy. I mean the other set. Whether it is safe to say I have not done that yet. How late is too late to reply to a message. What counts as finished. Whether disagreeing in a meeting is a contribution or a risk.None of it is written down anywhere. All of it is known. And most of it came from you. Not from anything you said. From something you did once, possibly without thinking about it at all.

You answered a message late one night because you happened to be awake and wanted it off your list. Somebody saw the timestamp. Then somebody else did. Nobody concluded that you expect replies at that hour. They concluded something subtler and more durable, which is that this is what commitment looks like here.

You sent a piece of work back for a small change, kindly and with good reason. The person who received it adjusted. So did the three people who heard about it.

Somebody brought you a problem before they had a solution, and you were busy, and your face did something for about half a second before you caught it. They noticed. They will bring you the next one fully solved.

This is the part of leadership that runs whether or not you are paying attention to it, and I find it the most humbling thing about the job.

I spent two years telling a team of mine to protect their evenings. I meant it. I said it in one to ones and in team meetings, and I would have told you honestly that I had been clear about it.

Then one of them mentioned, in passing and with no accusation in it at all, that they had started drafting replies at night so they would not look slow in the morning.

Nobody had asked them to. They had simply watched what I did and worked out what was actually expected.

What you say is the policy. What you do is the culture. Only one of them is being followed.

I do not think the answer is to become self-conscious about every small action. That way lies a kind of paralysis, and people can tell when you are performing consistency at them.

But there is something useful in asking, every so often, what has been learned from me lately.

Not what have I taught. What has been learned. Those are different questions and they often have different answers.

The people around you are not judging you. They are doing what anybody does in a new room, which is working out what is allowed here. And whatever they concluded is still running.

Which rules have you set without noticing? And would you have chosen them, if you had?