Most workplaces run on two sets of rules.

The first is written down. The handbook, the job description, the appraisal form, the promotion criteria. Anyone can read it, and most organisations are quite proud of how clear it is.

The second isn’t written anywhere. It covers things like: how much you’re expected to push back in a meeting, whether it’s normal to email your director directly, whether people who get promoted here have quietly discussed it with someone first, and how much of the real decision-making happens in the ten minutes before a meeting starts.

Nobody hands you this rulebook. Some people are told it. Others work it out. And a lot of people spend years assuming everyone else was simply born knowing.

 

The research is unusually clear on this

The Social Mobility Commission ran one of the most detailed studies of career progression ever done in Britain, looking at over 300,000 civil servants alongside more than a hundred in-depth interviews. The report describes progression as a labyrinth rather than a ladder – and puts it plainly: “there is a formal set of guidelines around progression and an informal set of rules and norms.”

It found senior colleagues acting as informal guides, “imparting informal information and helping civil servants to navigate the hidden rules.” Those guiding relationships, the researchers noted, tended to form on the basis of shared interests, shared humour and cultural similarity – which meant they formed most easily for people who already resembled the people at the top.

The consequences show up in pay. Research for the Commission found that professionals from working-class backgrounds earn substantially less than colleagues from more advantaged ones – and crucially, even after accounting for the same education, the same role and the same experience, a gap of around £2,242 a year, or roughly 7%, remained.

 

This isn’t a piece about playing politics

It’s easy to read all this as an instruction to become more calculating, and that isn’t the point. Plenty of people find the whole idea distasteful – the same research found staff from less advantaged backgrounds often expressed “ethical or moral discomfort” about the informal tactics colleagues used to position themselves.

That discomfort is legitimate. But there’s a difference between playing a game you find distasteful and simply being able to see the board. You can decline to do the informal pre-meeting chat. It’s much worse not to know it’s happening.

 

Three things worth doing

Try this: Find someone a level or two above you who you trust and ask directly: “What do people who do well here actually do that isn’t in the job description?” Most answer honestly, and are slightly flattered to be asked.

Notice the decision-making venues. Where do things actually get agreed at your organisation? Sometimes it’s the meeting. Often it’s the conversation before it, the corridor, the message thread, the coffee. Being in the room where things get decided is a different skill from performing well once you’re there.

Be the person who tells someone else. If you’ve worked something out, pass it on – particularly to a new starter who arrived without connections. The Sutton Trust found that only 11% of internships were found by answering an open advert, with roughly three in ten coming through family, friends or colleagues. Networks aren’t going away. The most useful thing you can do about that is widen someone else’s.

The second rulebook exists whether or not anyone admits it. Reading it doesn’t oblige you to like it – but it does stop you competing with people who’ve already read it while assuming there’s only one set of rules.