Almost every team has one, and hardly anyone says it out loud:
That’s how we do things here.
Nobody agreed on it, nobody minuted it, there’s no guideline. Yet you feel it straight away when you break one of these rules. Unwritten rules decide who speaks up in a meeting, what really happens to feedback, and whether people feel safe enough to try something new.
They are the undercurrent of your organisation’s culture. If you don’t make them visible, they run your team. Sometimes in the wrong direction.
What are unwritten rules?
Unwritten rules are informal agreements or norms of behaviour that have grown up over time in a team or organisation. They aren’t written down anywhere, and everyone follows them.
A few examples:
- “You don’t raise things with each other directly here. That goes through the team leader.”
- “Made a mistake? Better keep quiet than talk about it.”
- “Speak up and you’ll end up with more work.”
- “The decision was made before the meeting started.”
Most of them grew out of experience (“this works better here”), group dynamics or fear. Sometimes they protect the group. They can just as easily get in the way of innovation, openness and ownership.
Their strength is that nobody says them
Unwritten rules are quiet. Never discussed.
And that is exactly what makes them strong.
People have a finely tuned sense of which behaviour is valued and which isn’t. Unwritten rules work at the level of safety, trust and group behaviour. You pick them up from faces, silences and small corrections, never from a document.
They are stubborn: a presentation won’t change them. They are contagious: newcomers adopt them fast. And they often clash with what it says on paper.
On paper, for example:
“We encourage initiative.”
Meanwhile, anyone who takes initiative outside the plan gets labelled ‘impatient’.
Or:
“Open communication matters to us.”
Meanwhile, feedback is taken as criticism, and the response is defensive.
As long as nobody names these contradictions, what people actually do will keep falling short of what was intended.
How do you spot unwritten rules in your team?
You can’t see them directly, but you can notice them. Pay attention to these things:
- What gets said, and what doesn’t?
- Who does the talking, and who stays silent?
- How do people react to mistakes?
- When do people only say something after the meeting?
- Which initiatives always run aground before they get anywhere?
- When do you yourself feel hesitant or tense?
A useful trick: listen to the jokes and the sighs. That’s often where the truth is.
What unwritten rules do to collaboration
In many organisations, unwritten rules are the reason collaboration doesn’t quite work. There’s a vision, there’s a team, there’s a plan. And behaviour stays stuck. People play it safe, don’t hold each other to account, don’t take ownership or steer clear of conflict.
What you often see then: friction keeps simmering below the surface. People check out without you noticing. Managers get overloaded because the team stays passive. And change never gets off the ground.
That makes unspoken behaviour the biggest bottleneck in organisational development.
From undercurrent to on the table
It starts with being willing to see what’s there before you try to fix it. That takes room, slowing down and safety. And the courage to talk about what isn’t on paper and is very much alive anyway.
This is how we go about it at Leap Company:
- Slow down to speed up. We create a setting where people dare to say what normally stays unsaid.
- Ask questions that matter: about the dynamics, about who calls the shots, about how decisions really get made.
- Build shared awareness, so people feel jointly responsible for change.
- Link behaviour to the vision and values, and agree on what people want to do from now on.
We do this in workshops, team days and longer programmes, often with a touch of humour and always without judgement. One example is our workshop on ownership and psychological safety. What needs to shift are the invisible patterns that have formed over time. The team itself is never the problem.
Examples from practice
One team had “we hold each other to account” on its posters. Everyone also knew that whoever spoke up would get an email from their manager. After a session on psychological safety, the team agreed a new rule of behaviour: ‘if something bothers you, you go to the other person, not to the manager’.
Another organisation wanted to encourage open innovation, while everything had to be signed off by four layers. We brought the unwritten rule ‘you need permission’ out into the open and helped teams create their own room to make the call.
What you gain by talking about them
Teams that discuss their unwritten rules experience more psychological safety. You get more initiative and ownership, less undercurrent and more direction. People dare to hold each other to account, and vision and behaviour line up better. We keep track of new research on psychological safety on Leap Trends.
Perhaps most important of all: a team that learns to correct its own course, instead of waiting for everything to come from the top.
The real rules on the table
That takes a session in which the group learns to see what is already happening and how it could be different. Talking only about what ‘would be nice’ won’t get you there.
We help teams recognise their unwritten rules, discuss them and rewrite them, for example through team development and team coaching. So that your culture fits what you want to achieve again.