The Unspoken Rule: "You Should Know Your Place in the Org Structure"

There's a version of workplace clarity that didn't come from conversation at all. It came from the org chart.

For a lot of people who built their early career sense of work during a time when hierarchy was clearly defined and roles were tightly bounded, the structure itself did some explaining that nobody had to think about. You knew who you reported to. You knew what your job was and, just as importantly, what it wasn't. There was clear and sometimes rigid structure.

There was a specific function that clear hierarchy used to serve, this shows up in two ways:

1. There is a clear understanding of the leadership ladder.

2. When you had a concern, it was important that you didn't skip a step on the ladder.

This, of course, had pros and cons. If you had a manager that was supportive and willing to listen to your concerns, you felt like you were in a great working environment and were able to bring your best to work. However, if your immediate manager was difficult to work with, wouldn't listen to what you had to say, and was harsh or critical, there was no way for you to find resolution but to leave.

We also see this unspoken rule play out in the notion of "paying your dues", understanding "your place" as a rookie on the team, and getting the crappy jobs as a rite of passage to being a qualified tradesperson or leader is no longer an acceptable means of development, nor should it ever have been. This was often demeaning and mean-spirited and a way of ensuring compliance and solidifying power dynamics within the group (often despite the structure.)

This, of course, has contributed to many toxic work environments and the evolution in workplace dynamics is such that we are trying to reduce this toxicity.

It is more common now for the executives to have relationships with frontline staff in ways that were never heard of in decades before. In the same way our boomer generation would never have dreamed of calling their boss anything other than Mr. or Mrs., new companies in 2026 often go by first names and have an understanding that you can reach out to any level of leadership with your concerns.

Of course, we know that we have organizations that fall between these two extremes in every variation. However, it is this diversity in workplace hierarchy that creates the complexity we are discussing. We can no longer make the assumption that people know what the path of communication and concern raising is. In our desire to be human, flexible, and agreeable, and to create an environment that is welcoming and warm, we often fail to communicate these paths and structures to our new team members. We leave it to them to find out the hard way through embarrassing moments, observation, and unspoken cultural rules.

Some of what was dismantled was dismantled on purpose, because it genuinely wasn't serving people well. However, in our desire to be more flexible, we forget that this requires greater communication and increased context for the same understanding to take hold.

As we look at what we can practice, consider this. Where do you as a leader assume the hearer has all the same context that you do? A fun way to expose how easily we make this assumption is to ask AI to do something. We realize that we need to give way more info in our second go at an instruction simply to fill in context.

This is the second of four unspoken, invisible rules we're unpacking this month.