You figure out pretty early in your career that work has a whole set of rules nobody actually explains to you.
Nobody tells you exactly how much you can push back before you're labeled "difficult." Or when you're being asked for an honest opinion as in what do you really think? versus an "honest" opinion as in tell me you agree with what I just said. Or how many times you can ask for more responsibility before you're ambitious in the good way versus impatient in the bad way.
We tend to call these the hidden rules of work. Or the unspoken rules.
But "hidden" makes it sound as though the rules have been written down somewhere and someone forgot to give you the password. "Unspoken" isn't right either, because sometimes people say, well, too much: They tell you they want you to challenge ideas. They tell you to take initiative. They tell you they value different perspectives.
I don't think the problem is that we don't know the rules. It's that a lot of what we call rules aren't really rules.
Take "challenge ideas." Your organization may genuinely want you to do that. But whether pushing back is interpreted as good judgment or being difficult can depend on who’s doing the pushing, who they're pushing, what they're pushing against, when they're doing it, and what happened the last three times they spoke up.
There isn't necessarily a rule hidden somewhere that would tell you exactly how this works. But there's evidence.
You see who at your company seems to be able to disagree without consequence. You notice whose objections change the conversation and whose are ignored. You watch what happens after someone takes a risk, asks for more, makes a mistake, or says the thing everyone else was thinking.
The temptation is to turn those observations into rules.
Don't disagree with her in a meeting.
This company doesn't promote people who work remotely.
You have to threaten to leave if you want a raise.
Except none of these are really rules. They're interpretations. And interpretations are tricky because there’s almost never just one thing happening at a time.
Say you ask your manager for a raise and she says no.
You could interpret that as my manager doesn't think I'm worth more. And maybe that's what it means.
But maybe the market is terrible. Maybe budgets have been frozen. Maybe your company has had a lousy quarter. Maybe you're asking three months after compensation decisions were made. Maybe your manager thinks you deserve more and has absolutely no ability to give it to you right now.
None of those possibilities makes the "no" less disappointing. They do, however, change what the "no" tells you.
There's a big difference.
Because what happens next depends, at least in part, on what you decide that "no" means.
If you decide it means this company doesn't reward people like me, you may start looking for another job. If you decide it means there's no money right now, you may ask when the conversation makes sense to revisit. If you decide it means I'm not ready yet, you may ask what would change that answer.
Same no" Different interpretation. Different next move.
And maybe that's why the idea of hidden rules is so appealing. A rule skips the interpretation part. Don't ask for a raise here. Don't challenge that manager. Don't stick your neck out. There's something comforting about thinking: Okay, now I know what to do.
Except every time we turn one experience, or even several experiences, into a rule, we risk treating our interpretation as fact and making our next decision based on it.
Maybe that's the real skill we're learning over the course of a career:Not how to uncover the hidden rules, but how to read the evidence well enough to decide what to do next.
