You know how every company has two rulebooks? There's the one HR hands you on your first day, all values and policies and a nice photo of the leadership team, and then there's the real one. Nobody ever writes the real one down, but give it about a month, and you've got it memorized, mostly from watching who gets promoted and who gets quietly moved off to the side.

Back in 2018, a group of researchers from places like Harvard and Stanford gave that second rulebook a name, and the name they landed on was a masculinity contest culture. A psychologist named Peter Glick and his colleagues even built a survey to measure how much a workplace lives by it, and not one question on that survey mentions men or gender. It doesn't need to, because these rules never announce themselves. They just show up as "well, that's how we do things around here," which is exactly why they're so hard to see when you're standing inside them.

So what's in this rulebook? Four things, and I'd bet you'll recognize every one of them.

• Show no weakness. Don't admit doubt, don't ask for advice, and whatever you do, don't let a softer feeling show on your face.
• Strength and stamina. In an office, that looks like quietly admiring whoever can outlast everybody else.
• Put work first. The long hours are a badge, and family had better not get in the way.
• Dog eat dog. The people down the hall aren't really your teammates, they're your competition, so keep one eye open.

When workplaces scored high on those four, the researchers found more toxic leaders, less psychological safety, more bullying and harassment, and people who were more burned out, less committed, less healthy, and already halfway out the door. And it hurt the women and the men alike. Even the folks who looked like they were winning the game were paying for it.

This is exactly the conversation I bring into rooms with my keynote, Switch On Your Light, so if any of these four rules sound a little too familiar for your team, take a peek at karabundedunn.com/speaker.

I spent 25 years in corporate leadership and finished as a Chief Sales Officer, and the first rule, show no weakness, is the one I remember living the hardest.

I will never forget the first time I sat in a financial review with an SVP title next to my name. Around the table, we were going through EBITDA, cash flow, net sales, profit margins, cost of capital, all of it, and I had no idea what most of those terms meant. I knew profit and loss, I knew revenue and expenses, but nobody had ever taught me finance at that level, and I was in over my head. Do you think I asked? I certainly did not. It was a room full of men, and the last thing I wanted was to be called out for not knowing and have someone decide I wasn't qualified to be sitting there.

So instead I quietly wrote every term I didn't understand in the back of a notebook, and every night I went home and studied them, one by one, until I could follow every line of that conversation. And somewhere in those late nights I made myself a promise that my VPs and directors would never feel unqualified to be in a room. I started teaching them everything I was learning, as fast as I was learning it, because somebody has to break the cycle of gatekeeping information, and I decided it was going to be me.

Looking back now, what gets me is how much energy a whole room of people can burn just performing these rules for each other, everybody masking for everybody else, while the actual work sits there waiting. I'd bet I wasn't the only person at that table who didn't know what cost of capital meant.

So this week, take those four rules and be honest with yourself about which one your workplace rewards the most. And then, if you're feeling brave, ask the harder one, which is which rule you've been enforcing without meaning to. Maybe it was the email you sent at eleven at night, or the time you nodded along when somebody got praised for never taking a vacation day. Cultures change one noticing at a time, and somebody has to go first.

Kara

P.S. If you're planning a leadership retreat, an all-company meeting, or a conference and want a speaker who has actually lived inside this rulebook, I'd love to be on your stage. Everything you need is at karabundedunn.com/speaker.