American View: How should you explain office rules to people with no office experience?

Human Resources14 Jan 2025

Security awareness is the art and science of changing human behaviour. Our core function is to improve how people perceive their world, thereby improving their ability to recognize, evade, and report threats. If this function could be accomplished solely by writing and reciting rules then run-of-the-mill managers could handle the work. Since we’re dealing with people, that approach ain’t gonna work. What does work are stories: just like the ones our ancestors told around the campfire to explain how their world “worked” in terms that their tribe members could understand. These illustrative stories became our modern “leadership lessons” but they’re still our primary tool for conveying meaning.

A good leadership lesson can come from anywhere, but the best – I believe – are stories that are (a) true, (b) personal, and (c) emotionally familiar to your audience. A relevant personal story can help illustrate an idea better than a lorry full of metrics. An emotionally resonant anecdote will resonate and take up residence in a student’s amalgamated worldview.

By way of explanation, here’s a story I like share with my interns and younger new hires. Why? Because it doesn’t require any corporate environment experience to understand. It’s ostensibly about recognisable home life, so every student can imagine themselves in the main character’s role. It speaks their lived experience. That it also teaches something important about corpo leadership is a both a welcome side effect and, obviously, the reason for telling the tale.

Here’s the short form: When I was growing up, I frequently got into rows with my mother. No surprise there; most every kid experiences domestic tension like this. Generational cultural differences, etc. Misaligned worldviews, conflicting priorities, etc. Some things never change.

Anyway. My mother was distant; she’d get home from her teaching job and go right back to work at the kitchen table. Grading papers, writing tests, researching projects, etc. Meanwhile I’d be in the basement watching television or up in my room slogging through homework. Since we didn’t eat together as a family, we often wouldn’t have much interaction until the weekend. That arrangement worked well when I was in elementary school as we had little to discuss. ^[1]

That phase was great while it lasted.

Things got tense once I transitioned to junior high. ^[2] My mother taught at my new school which meant we were bound to run into one another … far too frequently. At one point I was randomly assigned to her history class. I chose to complete the course via summer school instead (it was that or join the Foreign Legion; either worked for me). We knew that being in the same class was going to be disruptive for everyone.

Unfortunately, avoiding one another at the school wasn’t enough to prevent us getting into arguments. My mother has always had a controlling personality. She wasn’t a “wicked witch” or anything. To be fair, she came by it honest since that’s how her mother was when she was a girl. She was raised in a very strict German-American household and – like people inevitably do – became her mother over time.

This most often manifested at our house in fights over clothing. Seriously: the classic movie trope of “you’re not leaving my house dressed like that!” For example, my mother insisted that she was the only person who would buy the kids’ clothes for each new school year. My father didn’t have a say in it. Mom insisted that we dress “above our station” (so to speak) because our appearance in public supposedly reflected badly on her … and her social reputation was more important than our comfort, practicality, or ability to “fit in” with our peers. No matter how many times I argued that all the other students wore T-shirts and jeans; mom didn’t care.

Needlessly complicating matters, mom also insisted that she was the only person in our home allowed to operate the clothes washer. None of the “do your own laundry” pressure under her roof! She and only she would wash everything … when she got ‘round to it. Then she’d gripe about being so put upon. I repeatedly volunteered to take care of my own laundry and was soundly told off every time.  

Finally, after my mother transferred to teach at my high school, she insisted that all the family’s clothing must be ironed before it was worn out of the house. She hated ironing, though, so once I got into high school that became my primary weekend chore as the oldest kid. Everything including the jeans and T-shirts had to be pressed and hung up before Monday morning. I argued that no one else in our school including the teachers bothered pressing their daily wear. Mom didn’t care; a wrinkled shirt, she insisted, made people think less of her.

Along those lines, my mother had a devoted army of my classmates who would spy on my and report back everything I did and said at school. Irritating suck-ups ...

To this day, I despise ironing and will go to extreme lengths to avoid it. That’s one of the reasons my students will usually see me wearing blue-collar clothes like heavy T-shirts and workman’s jeans rather than suits and ties. This always gets a laugh.

The point of this story isn’t about justifying my unusual wardrobe choices. It’s really a way to illustrate and explain a personality type that’s commonly manifested by insecure leaders. Understanding why people act the way they do in a corporate environment – a crucial factor in understanding how to survive and proser in corpo life – allows my students to recognize a potential threat, evade it, and perhaps mitigate the risk of getting crosswise with such a leader.

Seriously. consider the bosses you’ve had. How many can you remember that:

Set arbitrary standards for you that completely ignored (or even interfered with) your needs and the organizational culture?
Would not listen to your feedback and ignored all evidence that they needed to change?
Kept a death grip on crucial process steps when delegation was obviously needed?
Demanded performance standards that were ludicrously stricter and more time consuming to achieve solely because of how your extra work benefitted their reputation?
Berated you for your errors but never praised you for your successes?

If this sort of “bad boss” story amuses you, you’ll probably enjoy my book Office Cowboys.

These leaders are effectively stock characters in the universal office park drama. I know I’ve endured a bunch of bosses who acted just like this and many of them have made appearances in my books under pseudonyms. I had to learn how best to work around these leader’s paranoid suspicions and control issues.

My interns and new hires, however, probably haven’t. Ours is usually their first real experience in the white-collar world so they can’t directly relate. That said my students have had parents who were at least an occasional pain in the rump … which means they can relate to my story. Once I’ve secured that common ground, it’s much easier to prepare my students for what’s in store for them. Swap out the idea of an overly-controlling parent for an overly-controlling supervisor. Easy.

Sure, it helps if your personal backstory was as tragic as a Lemony Snicket book, but that’s not required. You can still craft relevant personal anecdotes from your personal life. Funny stories work best, but any story will serve so long as it helps frame and explain an aspect of working life.

I find pointless to simply read new employees a list of rules and then demand that they follow them “because I said so.” That approach doesn’t fly with a five-year-old; it won’t fly with thinking, reasoning adults either. When you want to change an adult’s behaviour, you must frame your explanation such that your students gets a solid understanding of the stakes, the context, and the logic behind your argument. Explaining yourself through a personal story makes you far more likely to succeed in getting your point across in such a way that your student will both understand your message and remember it. 

^[1] Grades 1-6 in our district. 

^[2] Grades 7-9. I hear that approach has fallen out of favour.

Human Resources