What I learnt from my first warning

Early in my legal career, a supervisor pulled me aside to talk to me about something I had done.

The issue was not my work, my hours or my legal knowledge.

It was that I had asked the postman how his weekend had been.

At the time, large firms employed internal messengers whose job was to move correspondence around the building. Ours made regular rounds through the office and knew everyone. He was friendly, engaging and always willing to exchange a few words.

After a few days of working together, my supervisor made it clear that they had observed these pleasantries and they needed to stop.

"It's OK to talk to support staff, Graham," they told me. "But you should always remember you're a lawyer and they're non-lawyers. Don't be too friendly."

My supervisor barely acknowledged him. The message I took was that I should do the same.

More than twenty-five years later, I remember how that conversation felt.

I learned something important about how culture is transmitted inside organisations.

The unwritten rules

Most firms devote significant effort to defining their values. They articulate what they stand for, what behaviours they expect and what sort of culture they want to create.

Yet much of what determines what happens to you at work does not come from sticking to the organisation’s standards. It comes from what researchers sometimes call the hidden curriculum: the unwritten rules communicated indirectly through everyday interactions.

The hidden curriculum teaches people how success works. It signals who is valued, what matters and what the firm considers success to be.

It is communicated through countless small moments: how people are talked about, who gets listened to, which behaviours are rewarded, whose time is respected, how mistakes are handled, who is in the know and what you question at your peril.

Looking back, I do not think my supervisor was primarily trying to teach me how to behave.

It was about who I was expected to be.

That distinction matters.

A job is not simply about what we do. It shapes how we see ourselves, how we see others and who we become.

When people join firms, they are not merely learning how to do their job. They are trying to understand how to be valued, to be secure, to be respected and to progress. They are asking themselves questions such as:

• What type of person succeeds here?

• What behaviours are admired?

• Which relationships matter?

• What do I need to do to fit in?

The answers are conveyed much more through blink-and-you-miss-them interactions than through presentations, statements or training that can bear little relation to reality.

Belonging and the pressure to conform

What struck me about the incident was less the instruction itself than who it concerned.

The postman was one of the few people in the team who had made me feel welcome.

At the time, I was working in a department that was difficult to navigate. The atmosphere was tense and subdued. Distrust was the legacy of some hard changes made years before. People were in self-defence mode. Much of the energy appeared directed towards self-preservation rather than collaborative support.

The postman was different. He treated me like a person.

Looking back, I think what I valued was not the content of the exchanges themselves. It was the recognition.

In a department where I often felt like a commodity, somebody treated me like normal people do.

Recognition is a powerful force. So is its absence.

That is why the warning landed so strongly. The person who made me feel I belonged was the very person I was being told to keep at arm's length.

Looking back, I suspect the conversation went deep for another reason too.

I had entered a professional world that often felt unfamiliar. Many of the conversational reference points around me — money, prestige cars and holidays, expensive clothes and fancy restaurants — were far removed from my own upbringing.

I wasn't uncomfortable in that world, but I was not entirely part of it.

The postman felt closer to the world I was from than the world I had recently entered.

As a result, the instruction felt less like a lesson in workplace etiquette and more like a lesson about class, status and equality.

The lesson I received was not that hierarchy existed: I knew that.

It was that belonging involved reinforcing it at the level of authentic human interaction.

The path to acceptance seemed to require me to distance myself from someone who had treated me in the way I treated others and wanted to be treated myself.

How many cultures does your firm have?

Looking back, the most important lesson was about the culture, not the postman.

Firms tend to talk about culture as though it is consistent. In reality, people's experience is mostly shaped by their supervisor, their team and the behaviour that is tolerated around them.

For example, at the same time as my warning, my housemate was working about ten metres down the corridor.

Same firm.

Same role.

Different supervisor.

Different partner.

Opposite experience.

Two people can join the same firm, at the same time, under the same values statement, and experience completely different working environments. That is what makes culture so complex and so important.

Recruitment processes show us a version of a firm. Day-to-day interactions show us another. The latter is the real one.

Inclusion beyond categorisation

Conversations about inclusion understandably focus on characteristics such as gender, race, disability and sexual orientation, and these issues matter profoundly.

Yet firms can create insiders and outsiders in more subtle ways.

One of the least discussed fault lines is often the distinction between lawyers and 'non-lawyers', fee-earners and business services, those perceived to generate value and those perceived to support it.

Most firms would never articulate these distinctions explicitly. Nevertheless, they often appear in language, assumptions and behaviour.

In my career, I moved from fee-earning into business services. Although I never stopped practising as an employment lawyer, over time that detail receded into the background.

From those different vantage points, I heard language that revealed how easily status hierarchies can become normalised. Paralegals, business services professionals and others outside the centre of power were sometimes described in dismissive or dehumanising ways.

Comments like these are not everyday occurrences. That is partly why they stay with you, but they matter because they reveal assumptions about status, value and who is regarded as deserving of respect.

Beyond respect, the issue is whether people are seen as fully human and fully part of the firm. People pay close attention to who is regarded as important and who is treated as peripheral.

Status can change surprisingly quickly. A change of supervisor, role or leadership can move someone from one category to another overnight.

Want to understand a firm's real culture?

Watch how it treats people who cannot easily answer back.

The service desk analyst facing a frustrated high performer.

The business acceptance executive delaying approval for legitimate reasons.

The individual labelled as underperforming.

The person who is very different.

Culture is often most visible where power is most uneven.

Is it easier to speak truth to power now?

Looking back, I wonder what I would do differently if I was starting out today and the same thing happened.

I was junior, dependent on those around me and trying to find my feet professionally in a complex situation.

There was no mechanism for providing feedback to my supervisor. Nobody asked for my perspective. Even if they had, I would not have felt safe sharing it. I didn’t read my supervisor as being particularly receptive to feedback. It offended my values, but how big a deal was it in the grand scheme of things anyway?

So I did what many people do.

I said nothing, though my face probably betrayed me.

Firms often assume that if there is an issue, people will say so. Experience suggests otherwise.

Most people perform a rapid calculation:

• Who will believe me?

• What will happen next?

• Is it worth it?

If the perceived cost is too high, they stay silent like I did.

Silence is not evidence that there isn’t a problem. Sometimes it is evidence that people have concluded it is not wise to say something.

That raises an important question for leaders. If the same comment were made in your firm today, what would you want the recipient to do?

Ignore it?

Challenge it?

Discuss it with someone? If so, who?

Would they feel able to do so?

Many firms invest significant effort in defining their values. Far fewer have really got to grips with what happens when a junior employee experiences behaviour that is fundamentally at odds with them.

The importance of sweating the small stuff

The conversation did not make me leave, but it had consequences. It became one of many data points that shaped how I felt about the department and my future within it. That is one reason leaders would do well to pay attention to seemingly small moments.

People rarely leave organisations because of a single interaction. More often, they accumulate evidence.

• Evidence about whether they are respected.

• Whether they belong.

• Whether they can succeed without compromising something important about themselves.

Culture influences retention long before people speak to a recruiter.

People often leave psychologically before they leave physically. They stop seeing a future in the firm. They begin to question whether they can succeed without becoming someone they do not wish to be.

Because of their professionalism and personal standards, they may continue to perform exceptionally well even while they are quietly looking forward to their last day.

The challenge for leaders is that these decisions are often invisible until they are irreversible.

Taking action

Whether we intend it or not, every firm has a hidden curriculum that it likes people to stick to.

People are studying it all the time.

We have put together a short practical guide for firms and individuals about this topic. You can access it here:

PS In case you were wondering, I didn’t stop talking to the postman.