Are Unwritten Workplace Rules Just Forcing You To Conform?

A YouTube subscriber asked me this recently, and it's one of the most common questions I get:

"Aren't you just teaching people to conform to a system that was never built for them?"

I love this question. Because it tells me the person asking it actually gets what's at stake. So let me answer it the way I would if you were sitting across from me.

No. And here's why.

For a video version of this article, click here.

First, Let's Talk About What We're Actually Conforming To

There's a riddle I use when I talk about leadership selection. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Most people say 10 cents. The correct answer is 5 cents. And here's the thing — most people don't even check. They confidently walk away with the wrong answer.

Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic uses this in his book Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? to make a point that maps directly onto what I find in my own research: we mistake confidence for competence. We promote charisma and overconfidence, and then wonder why so many organizations are poorly run. His research across thousands of managers in 40 countries found that psychopathy rates in senior management run anywhere between 4 and 20 percent — compared to 1 percent in the general population. Narcissism among CEOs sits at around 5 percent, versus 1 percent overall. That is not a coincidence. That is the selection criteria working exactly as designed.

And we've been teaching this as doctrine for decades. The 48 Laws of Power has been passed around in MBA programs like a bible — a how-to guide for getting ahead. I teach it to my clients too, but as a warning. Because what that book actually documents, if you read it with clear eyes, is a detailed manual for psychopathic behavior at work. The fact that we've handed it to aspiring leaders and said "study this" tells you everything you need to know about what we've been selecting for.

My research on the unwritten rules of work shows exactly where this plays out on the ground. I call one of them the unwritten rule of compliance — where leaders expect their way or the highway, shut down dissenting views even when presented respectfully, and surround themselves with yes-people. My book is full of case study examples of what this actually costs organizations: innovation that never happens, risk that nobody saw coming because nobody felt safe saying it, and talented people who walked out the door because they got tired of being ignored.

The unwritten rules aren't just a personal problem for the people navigating them. They are an organizational performance problem. And most leaders don't even know they're operating inside them.

So when someone asks me "are you just teaching people to conform?" — conform to what, exactly? A system that is actively selecting for traits that research shows drive organizations into the ground? That penalizes the people most likely to actually lead well?

That's worth sitting with.

What I'm Actually Doing Is Giving People the Ability to Choose

Here's where I have to be really clear about what my work is and isn't.

I don't want to tell people to conform. What I want is to give people the empowerment of choice — as much choice as you can have in a system that wasn't built for you. And you cannot make a real, informed choice about something you don't understand.

Here's a real example of what I mean. I had a client recently — a woman of color, high up in her organization. Someone below her on the org chart had a relationship with the senior leader and went to that leader with a concerned face and said: "Oh, I'm just worried about her. She seems really overwhelmed. She's doing things so much more slowly than I am."

The natural reaction for someone from a working-class background who was raised to prove yourself through output is to go to your boss and lay it all out. Here's everything I've done. Here's the timeline. Here's my list. You can clearly see that what they said isn't true.

And that is exactly the trap.

The moment you argue about your output at the operational level, you've demoted yourself in that executive's mind from "someone on a leadership track" to "someone who does the work." The unwritten rule at executive level isn't about how hard you work. It's about ideas and impact. The how — the grind, the implementation — is supposed to be invisible up there. Make it visible, and you've told the room you belong one rung lower.

Is that a fundamentally broken way to measure human contribution? Absolutely. And if you don't know that rule exists, you will walk straight into that trap every single time.

Once you can see it though, you get to decide what to do with that information. In my coaching I'll typically lay out options — here's the 95% safe route, here's the 80% safe route that might feel a lot better, and here's the riskier one that might actually be what you want, but here's what I'd want you to consider first. The choice is yours. My job is to make sure you're making it with your eyes open, not because you didn't know there was a trap.

That autonomy — that's what I'm actually teaching. Not conformity. Informed agency.

One of my clients, someone surviving workplace bullying from their boss, described it as: "Before, there were just feelings of fear. Suddenly I can name the patterns." That shift changes everything. It doesn't mean the system is fixed. It means you are no longer flying blind inside it. Now that client has support and a plan for justice.

What I won't do is tell you which choice to make. Because if we are rewarding psychopathic traits in our leadership pipelines, the last thing I want is to convince more women, more working-class people, more people of color to perform those same traits to survive it. That doesn't fix anything. It just adds more fuel to a fire that's already burning organizations and communities down.

Climbing Without Losing Yourself

My coaching program starts with a specific question: how do you climb the ladder without losing yourself?

I had a client come to me and say exactly that. "I want to get to the executive level, but I am not going to lose who I am. I take care of my people. I care about them. That is not going to change." And I said: "Queen behavior. Let's go."

Three months later she told me she felt like she'd upgraded her soft skills without losing herself. That is the entire point.

Because here's the thing — if you know what the rules are, you also know which ones are worth navigating and which ones are worth challenging. You can't change a system you can't navigate. And you can't navigate a system you don't understand. Both things have to be true at the same time.

The Difference Between Code-Switching and Cultural Competence

This question about conformity is really a question about identity. So I want to name something I write about in my book, because I think it's the clearest way to draw the line.

Code-switching and cultural competence are not the same thing, and the difference is power.

If only one party is expected to learn the other's culture — to change their speech, their presentation, their communication style, their entire way of being at work — that's code-switching. It's forced. It's one-directional. It's extractive.

What I advocate for is cultural agility. Because we are never going to meet people who are completely like us, and that's not the goal. The goal is to stop making one group carry all the weight of adaptation while the other group doesn't even know an adjustment is being asked for. When we're genuinely learning about each other, meeting each other where we're at, sharing the load — that's cultural competence. That's what actually moves organizations forward.

If you are forced to be like me, I'm just a pompous ass.

This Benefits Leaders Too — Not Just Staff

Knowing these traps isn't just useful for the person trying to navigate them. It's critical information for anyone who actually wants to lead well. If you're a leader who genuinely wants to make good decisions, you need to know that your organization's culture may be systematically filtering out the people most likely to challenge your blind spots — and keeping the people who will walk you straight off a cliff, confidently, without checking the math. Or who become your enemies, as I provide an example of in this TikTok.

If you actually select for competence — real competence, not the performance of confidence — you will naturally get more diverse and better leadership. Not because of quotas or programs, but because competence doesn't have a race, gender, class, ability status, age, etc. What distorts the pipeline is the selection criteria. The unwritten rules are a big part of what's doing the distorting.

For the Organizations Reading This

Your employees are navigating these rules every single day, mostly alone, mostly without knowing what they're navigating. The ones who figure it out — usually through proximity to power, privilege, sheer exhaustion, or unethical behavior — advance. The ones who don't either leave or stall, and you write it off as a performance issue or a culture fit problem.

That's not a culture fit problem. That's an invisible tax on the people your organization can least afford to lose — and a sign that your selection criteria are working against you.

I work with organizations to name the unwritten rules operating in their specific culture, identify who those rules are costing, and build leadership practices that don't require your best people to decode a system they were never handed the key to.

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If that's a conversation worth having: email me, or book 20 minutes with me →.

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