What Organisations Teach Without Realising

Schools think carefully about what they teach.

That statement is so obvious it barely deserves making. Curriculum is intentional. Learning is designed. We establish what matters, consider how people will encounter it and look for evidence that something has been understood.

But I am not thinking here about what schools teach students. I am interested in what organisations teach the people who belong to them.

Because organisations teach too, whether they intend to or not.

Schools invest considerable energy in the learning they deliberately create for adults through professional learning, leadership development, induction, policies, strategic priorities and shared expectations. Much of this is carefully considered.

I am increasingly interested in everything an organisation teaches without intending to teach at all.

I have worked in schools where relationships were so important that people simply knew to come to the staff room at recess. However busy the day became, there was a quiet expectation that people would appear, make coffee, sit for a while and be together. Nobody needed a strategic initiative to explain why. The routine itself communicated something about what mattered.

I have known other environments where sitting in the staff room over lunch could somehow feel like a bad look. Nobody had written that down either, yet people knew.

That interests me because both organisations were teaching. One was quietly teaching that stopping to be with colleagues was part of the work. Another might have been teaching that visible productivity carried greater professional value than pause. Neither lesson required a presentation, a policy or even a sentence. People learned by paying attention to what happened around them.

Edgar Schein's work on organisational culture is particularly useful here because he describes culture as the accumulated shared learning of a group. His account distinguishes between visible artefacts, espoused beliefs and values, and the deeper assumptions that become taken for granted over time. Those assumptions influence what people notice, how they interpret situations and how they behave, often without needing to be made explicit.

There is something profoundly educational about that process. Join an organisation and you begin learning almost immediately. You learn whether arriving early matters and whether leaving early is noticed. You learn whether asking for help is regarded as sensible or slightly worrying, whether disagreement is genuinely welcome, whether the person who questions everything is respected, tolerated or gradually excluded. You learn who can change their mind without losing credibility and who appears unable to. You learn whether a mistake becomes a source of learning or a story people remember for years.

Over time, you learn which people matter, what counts and what belonging here seems to require.

This is why I have started thinking about organisations as having an informal curriculum. Not a hidden curriculum deliberately designed by leadership. Almost the opposite. It is the collection of lessons produced through repeated experience: what is noticed, rewarded, protected, challenged, ignored, celebrated and quietly permitted to continue.

Some of those lessons are wonderful. A teacher needs to leave unexpectedly because their child is sick and the first response is, “Go. We've got this.” Someone tries something ambitious and it fails, and instead of embarrassment the conversation becomes genuinely curious about what was learned. A new teacher challenges a long established practice and people lean towards the question rather than away from the person. A colleague is struggling and asking for help increases rather than diminishes other people's confidence in them.

Nobody needed to announce the lesson.

That distinction becomes particularly important when the informal curriculum contradicts the curriculum an organisation says it is teaching.

A school says it values wellbeing. Nobody doubts the sincerity of the statement. Then people notice who receives admiration. The colleague answering emails late at night is extraordinarily dedicated. The person still at school long after everybody else has left is described as someone who always goes above and beyond. The leader sending messages at 10.30 pm may genuinely have no expectation that anybody responds until morning, but over time the organisation begins learning something about what commitment looks like. No policy required.

Or a school says family comes first. Again, it may genuinely mean it. The interesting moment arrives not when the value is announced, but when somebody needs it. A child's appointment. A family crisis. A period in somebody's life when work simply cannot receive what it usually receives.

What happens then?

That is when people discover whether family comes first is a value, an aspiration, or a value with conditions attached.

A value is not really taught when it is stated. It is taught when keeping it becomes inconvenient.

The same is true of innovation. A school can say that it wants people to take risks, but the more revealing lesson comes after the risk does not work. It can say that people should speak honestly, but staff learn what honesty really means after somebody says something leadership would rather not hear. It can say that it trusts professional judgement, but the test comes when that judgement produces a decision leadership would not have made.

Those moments carry disproportionate instructional power because people are watching not only what leaders say, but what the organisation does when saying and doing become difficult to reconcile.

Tony Simons calls the perceived alignment between managers' words and deeds behavioural integrity. His work distinguishes this from moral judgements about whether a value itself is right or wrong. The issue is whether people perceive that promises are kept and espoused values are enacted. Subsequent research has linked perceived behavioural integrity with outcomes including trust and commitment, and a meta analysis found substantial relationships between leaders' word and action alignment and follower attitudes and behaviours.

That helps explain why contradictions can become so corrosive. It is tempting to think that if an organisation has communicated its values clearly enough, people know what it stands for. The words are there. The policy is there. The strategic plan is unambiguous. Black and white.

But organisational life happens overwhelmingly in the grey.

The grey is Tuesday afternoon when two legitimate priorities collide. It is the deadline that arrives at exactly the wrong time, the staff member whose circumstances make the normal expectation impossible, the ambitious initiative that fails publicly, the person who disagrees with someone senior. It is the moment when acting consistently with the stated value carries an actual cost.

People remember those moments. Because they remember them, those moments become examples. Examples become expectations. Expectations begin shaping behaviour.

Eventually, nobody needs to say, Don't challenge that person. Nobody needs to say, If you want to be considered committed, stay late. Nobody needs to say, We encourage experimentation, but make sure yours works.

People know.

That is why the informal curriculum can be so powerful. It does not depend upon anybody consciously accepting it. People adapt because belonging to organisations requires continual interpretation. They watch what happens and make sensible decisions about how to operate within the conditions they encounter.

Research on organisational socialisation has long treated learning as central to how people become functioning organisational members. Newcomers acquire knowledge about their jobs and roles, but also about their work groups and the organisation itself, including expected behaviours and cultural knowledge.

But this learning does not stop once somebody is no longer new. The organisation keeps teaching, and people keep learning. Sometimes they learn to become more courageous. Sometimes they learn to become quieter. Sometimes they learn that their family genuinely matters. Sometimes they learn that saying their family matters is acceptable, provided their work never reveals that it does.

This is where trust can begin to unravel even when nobody intended to break it.

A leader may be completely sincere when articulating a value. That matters. But sincerity does not determine the lesson other people ultimately receive. Experience does.

This raises a difficult question for leadership. How do you discover what your organisation is teaching when you did not consciously design the curriculum?

The obvious answers are not necessarily bad ones. Ask people. Run a survey. Keep an open door. Spend time in classrooms. Have lunch with teams. Teach occasionally. Attend meetings. Walk around the school. All of these may tell a leader something. None automatically provides access to the organisation as everybody else experiences it.

An open door, for example, sounds unequivocally positive. A leader means it sincerely: Come and talk to me. I want to know what's happening. But the interesting evidence is not the door. It is whether people walk through it.

Perhaps somebody did once. Perhaps they raised a difficult concern and the leader listened beautifully. Other people noticed. Perhaps somebody else raised something and nothing changed. Or the conversation remained confidential, but their relationship with somebody subtly shifted afterwards. Other people noticed that too.

The curriculum continues.

This is also why simply spending more time “on the ground” does not solve the problem completely. It helps. Leaders who become disconnected from the everyday experience of teaching can begin making decisions based upon an increasingly partial view of the organisation. Being present matters.

But there is a complication. A principal entering a staff room is not simply another staff member entering a staff room. Their role travels with them. People may genuinely like and trust the principal and still become slightly more careful about how they describe something. A conversation may change. A frustration becomes more measured. Context gets added. Someone waits until later to say what they were about to say.

Nobody is necessarily being dishonest. The situation has changed because the leader is there.

That means the more senior a person's position becomes, the more deliberate they may need to be about understanding experiences they cannot simply reproduce for themselves. Not because senior leaders inevitably lose touch, but because position changes perspective.

This is where humility becomes much more than a desirable personality trait. Research on leader humility commonly describes behaviours such as acknowledging limitations, recognising others' strengths and remaining open to new information. Studies have connected leader humility with psychological safety and employee voice, while also showing something particularly relevant here: humility works differently when people interpret it as performative or manipulative rather than sincere.

That matters because leaders cannot simply perform curiosity as another leadership technique. “Tell me what you really think” is not enough. Neither is a baguette lunch with Year 5.

The deeper requirement is a willingness to discover something about the organisation that contradicts the leader's own understanding of it. That takes a particular kind of security. Not confidence in the sense of always appearing certain. Almost the reverse. Enough confidence to tolerate information that makes certainty impossible.

Perhaps the difficult leadership question is not, How do I know what is happening in my school?

It is this:

What might people who experience this organisation differently from me know that I cannot easily see from where I sit?

That question cannot be answered once. Nor can it be answered entirely through anonymous surveys. Surveys can reveal patterns worth understanding, but a score cannot always tell us how the pattern was produced. “I do not feel safe to challenge decisions” tells us something important. It does not necessarily reveal the accumulated experiences through which people learned that challenging decisions was unwise.

To understand the curriculum, leaders may need to become students of their own organisation. That means paying attention to what happens after somebody speaks, what gets praised, what creates guilt, whose workload becomes normalised because they appear able to carry it, which values survive pressure, which stories people tell new colleagues, what people apologise for and what nobody seems to need explained.

Most importantly, it means becoming curious about the gap between what you intended people to learn and what experience may actually have taught them.

That gap does not automatically make leadership hypocritical. This matters. Organisational contradictions are often created without dishonesty. A leader can genuinely value wellbeing and inadvertently reward overwork. A school can sincerely encourage innovation while responding defensively to failure. A principal can believe deeply in openness while unknowingly teaching people that certain truths are expensive to tell.

Intent matters, but intent does not erase impact.

Perhaps leadership becomes more interesting when we stop asking only whether leaders meant what they said and begin asking what people learned from what happened next.

Every organisation has stories about itself. We are relational. We trust our people. We put students first. Family matters. We are innovative. We learn from mistakes. Some of those stories are profoundly true. Some are partly true. Some may be true until they become difficult.

The only way to know is to look at the curriculum people are actually experiencing. What are people learning here about asking for help, success, rest, failure and disagreement? What are they learning about whose knowledge matters? What do they learn when organisational need and human need collide? And, eventually, what are they learning about what they need to become in order to belong?

Every organisation has two curricula: the one it designs, and the one people learn by belonging to it.

The first can be written.

The second has to be noticed.

And perhaps some of the most important leadership learning begins when we become willing to discover that they are not teaching the same thing.