The Rules Nobody Wrote
A leader’s private standards can become other people’s working conditions before anyone agrees that they should.
A private-equity partner told researchers that if he failed to answer an email within an hour, people started wondering whether something was wrong. His previous responsiveness had become a reference point against which silence looked unusual.
The interview belonged to a study of 48 knowledge professionals using mobile email devices. They valued the freedom to work wherever they chose. Yet their accounts also revealed growing expectations of availability that made disconnecting harder. Melissa Mazmanian and her colleagues called this the autonomy paradox: individually convenient choices could help establish collectively restrictive norms. The qualitative study traced this process in particular professional settings; it did not establish that every connected workplace follows it (Mazmanian et al., 2013).
There is a difficulty here for anyone trying to improve their leadership through personal discipline. A habit has consequences beyond the person practising it. Others interpret what it signals and adjust their conduct accordingly. Becoming more consistent can therefore make an unintended expectation more convincing.
Your attention becomes part of the environment
James Allen’s image of the mind as a garden makes cultivation a deliberate activity. We encourage some thoughts and leave less room for others. Taken as a metaphor, it asks what receives repeated care, rather than treating every passing thought as a verdict on character (Allen, 1903).
The mental garden becomes more useful when cultivation has a specific purpose. Attention to operational details may be essential while building a small business; the same involvement may crowd out strategic work once capable managers own those decisions. Something worth cultivating in one role can become an obstruction in another. Identifying the “weeds” requires an account of what the work needs.
But the garden has an environment too. An employee’s recurring concern about appearing uncommitted may be fed by how work is organised. Asking that person to cultivate better thoughts leaves an important cause untouched.
William Ocasio’s attention-based view of the firm offers a way to examine that cause. His theoretical account explains organisational attention through the structures that direct it: what enters a meeting, who participates, and which issues receive resources. Attention is partly arranged by the organisation around the decision-maker (Ocasio, 1997).
Applied to leadership, this suggests a further responsibility. Your own routines help supply the conditions in which other people decide what deserves attention. A recurring evening message can make availability relevant even when its subject is unimportant.
One implication of this account is that expectations can spread through accommodation. If obtaining a decision seems to depend on catching a manager early, a colleague may start matching that schedule. Others can read the adjustment as evidence of what committed people do. The resulting pattern need not express anyone’s preferred way of working. It can reflect several people making individually reasonable adjustments to what they believe the situation requires.
The identity inside the routine
Beyond the Horizon’s identity alignment framework makes personal standards examinable. As a reflective exercise, it begins with the person you want to become and asks what that identity requires in practice. It distinguishes a daily habit from the manner in which you perform it, then considers the recurring thoughts accompanying both.
Consider a manager who wants to be dependable. Checking messages regularly might express that aspiration. Sending them immediately, without explaining when a reply is needed, is a particular way of performing the habit. Behind it may sit an assumption that dependable people never leave anything waiting.
The framework exposes a choice hidden inside the admirable word. Dependability could instead mean giving colleagues clear commitments and meeting them. Neither the identity nor the frequency of the habit settles how it should be enacted.
The exercise can also be read backwards. Starting with the habit, ask what sort of dependability it actually provides: predictable follow-through, or near-continuous access? Those arrangements ask different things of a team. The same admirable identity can conceal a disagreement about how work should be organised.
Research on email makes that distinction concrete. Across studies using recalled experiences and imagined exchanges, Laura Giurge and Vanessa Bohns found that recipients overestimated how quickly senders expected replies to non-urgent emails outside normal working hours. In one experiment, an explicit note saying that a quick response was unnecessary reduced the mismatch. Participants had already been told the email was non-urgent; hearing the expectation from the sender still mattered (Giurge & Bohns, 2021).https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2021.08.002
Those studies did not establish how differences in rank alter the effect. They do show why private intentions are an insufficient guide to what another person understands. In the manager’s case, alignment would need to include the expectation communicated to colleagues, alongside the identity expressed to oneself.
Consistency still needs a purpose
There is evidence that perceived consistency matters. Research calls the correspondence people perceive between a manager’s words and actions “behavioural integrity.” A meta-analysis associated it with trust and performance, although the underlying studies were predominantly cross-sectional. Crucially, the construct concerns whether conduct matches stated values; it does not establish that those values are good (Simons et al., 2015).https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2332-3
A manager can consistently demand permanent availability. Perfect alignment would make that demand predictable. It would leave its desirability unresolved.
The character heuristic, “Would I like this thought to be my character?”, therefore asks a necessary question about what deserves cultivation. For someone with authority, it also invites an organisational extension: would I want the conduct this thought encourages to become an expectation for the people around me?
That question cannot be answered from intentions alone. If quick evening replies influence who receives opportunities, reassurance about switching off competes with a more consequential signal. An employee who remains available may understand the organisation accurately. The practical examination must include what happens when someone declines to follow the apparent rule.
Nor can everything be traced to a leader’s example. Colleagues and clients help sustain expectations, and different roles have legitimate differences in urgency. A shared standard needs to specify those differences rather than turn one person’s preferred routine into a universal measure of commitment.
The private-equity partner’s missing reply had become noticeable because people had learnt what to expect from him. For a manager reconsidering a similar pattern, the revealing moment would arrive when a colleague waited until morning. What happened next would tell that colleague whether the freedom to wait was something the organisation actually allowed.
References
Allen, J. (1903). As a man thinketh. Project Gutenberg edition.
Giurge, L. M., & Bohns, V. K. (2021). You don’t need to answer right away! Receivers overestimate how quickly senders expect responses to non-urgent work emails. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 167, 114–128. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2021.08.002
Mazmanian, M., Orlikowski, W. J., & Yates, J. (2013). The autonomy paradox: The implications of mobile email devices for knowledge professionals. Organization Science, 24(5), 1337–1357. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1120.0806
Ocasio, W. (1997). Towards an attention-based view of the firm. Strategic Management Journal, 18(S1), 187–206.
Simons, T., Leroy, H., Collewaert, V., & Masschelein, S. (2015). How leader alignment of words and deeds affects followers: A meta-analysis of behavioral integrity research. Journal of Business Ethics, 132(4), 831–844. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2332-3
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