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Revealing the Rules
Courtesy Gorick Ng
A first-generation college student and professional, Gorick Ng became a self-taught master of trial and error from an early age. When he was 14, his mother—a single parent—lost her job at a sewing-machine factory and Ng, as the person with the most computer skills in the house, spent his after-school hours submitting hundreds of job applications on her behalf. But even after following all the advice he could mine from Google and the public library, they didn’t get any call-backs. It was Ng’s first glimpse into the fact that hard work and following the conventional rules for success aren’t enough. There is another set of expectations that determine who gets ahead and who doesn’t. Top performers follow these patterns without realizing it—and managers expect them from employees but often don’t think to explain as much. These unspoken rules are handed down from mentors or parents and, in the process, create a dividing line between those who inherently know how to navigate a workplace environment and everyone else.
After working as a career advisor for first-generation and low-income students at Harvard and as a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group, Ng wrote The Unspoken Rules: Secrets to Starting Your Career off Right as a guide for early career professionals—and particularly to help level the playing field for the outsiders. But it’s equally important, he says, for leaders to better understand the hidden factors that can undermine the success of employees once they arrive.
In your book you describe a dawning realization that you didn’t know what you didn’t know about how to succeed in the workplace. That’s true for everyone, of course, but there are additional layers of complexity for a first-generation professional. What was your experience?
I remember sitting beside a colleague in the office one day, early on in my career. Both of us were minding our own business when a higher-up from the company walked by and said to my colleague, “Are you so-and-so? It’s nice to meet you, let’s grab coffee.” At the time I figured they must know each other, and I didn’t think much of the situation. But over time I’d notice that people were pairing up. This colleague was having lunch with that higher-up and coffee with this one. It was as if I was at a middle-school dance, seeing everyone out on the dance floor, while I was off to the side, wondering if there’s something I’m just not getting about the party. When I looked left and right, I realized so many of these interactions that unlock opportunity are a function of factors like where you’d grown up, what school you went to, who your parents know, what social groups you were a part of—and certainly race and gender have a role to play as well.
I eventually came to the rude awakening that in the workplace, there are two sets of people: One is waiting patiently for the next staffing assignment to be given out; the other—those who know how to navigate the unspoken rules—is reaching out through various channels and learning about opportunities before they’re even announced. The truth is that many of those opportunities may never be advertised because they wind up being assigned behind closed doors.
Why should leaders be aware of the way these unspoken rules affect some people?
We can look at the numbers: A study by the Ascend Foundation found that in Silicon Valley, Asians are the racial group most likely to be hired but the least likely to be promoted from individual contributor to manager. A McKinsey study found that entry level women are 28 percent less likely to be promoted to management than men. And Hispanic, Latino, and Black employees make up 11 and 12 percent of entry-level hires but only three to five percent of corporate vice presidents.
Corporate America is investing in hiring talent from diverse backgrounds, but it’s losing these driven people as quickly as it’s hiring them. The diversity discussion has so far mostly been centered on how to get diverse talent in the door. This is a start, but we also need to talk about how to set this talent up for success once they get in the door. Companies are spending billions of dollars on this, so to have so much of that investment lost along the way is inefficient, in corporate speak. In non-corporate speak, existing efforts are simply not doing enough to ensure that those who have the ability and drive to make it to the top have the tools and level playing field to do so.
In the context of the unspoken rules, how can leaders improve outcomes for all employees?
Leaders should have a frank discussion about the unspoken rules in their organizations and how they might be the cause of employees failing to get promoted or quitting entirely. Is it true, for example, that you need to relentlessly humble-brag about your work to get noticed? Is it true that what gets someone promoted isn’t their contributions to corporate citizenship activities but their ability to position themselves for high-profile projects? Is it true that you need someone banging on the table on your behalf in that promotion committee in order to be even considered? I would encourage managers to think about the extent to which what they’re preaching is in alignment with what they’re actually valuing in the workplace—and to what extent it’s misaligned. And if there are any unspoken rules that leaders feel uncomfortable speaking about, that may be a sign that you’ve got an unspoken rule that’s worth questioning.
And when I think about what individual managers can do, it’s to make no assumptions about what’s common sense or not. What’s obvious to one person may be a silent or invisible obstacle to another—not because that person can’t do the job but because they don’t know what they don’t know about how decisions are made in that organization.
You also point out in your book that career success is a two-way street. A person can do all the things you outline in the book—but without someone there to pull you up, there are limits to individual effort. How do you wrestle with those limitations?
My book is aimed at setting up early career professionals for success, but as I was writing I found myself thinking that it isn’t enough. It’s incumbent upon leaders to create the conditions where everyone—not just the few—can thrive. As such, I hope my book can also be a playbook to help managers create more productive and inclusive teams. Akin to the management maxim, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” you can’t fix what you can’t articulate. Creating a more inclusive workplace begins with speaking the unspoken rules.
This is all analogous to some interesting research that I read about the color blue. Linguists found that words to describe that color were introduced to our vernacular later than other colors like red. In the Odyssey, for example, Homer describes the ocean as wine-dark. Ancient languages didn’t have a word for blue—a realization that prompted linguists to ask whether humans could even see the color if they don’t have a word for it. So a researcher went to Namibia to study a tribe that has no word for the color blue. Members of the tribe were given a test: When they were shown a series of green squares, with a blue one tucked in, they had difficulty identifying the one blue square. They also had more words to describe shades of green, so they could spot differences in greens that English speakers couldn’t even see.
The unspoken rules of the workplace are like the color blue. Could insiders to corporate America not even recognize the invisible obstacles that outsiders face? What would happen if we named the unspoken rules and gave everyone the tools to play the game and play it well?
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