When Edgar Schein was hired as a consultant by a Swiss chemical corporation to find ways of encouraging innovation, one of his tactics was to write up several memos containing his observations and recommendations. He then handed his memos directly to certain managers, asking them to pass them along to their colleagues who managed other departments. Although the managers he dealt with directly showed real engagement with his ideas, Schein soon learned that none of the other managers had received his memos. After a number of difficult months, Schein finally picked up on something that no one up till then had seen fit to mention: Within the corporation there was a strongly felt but completely unspoken idea that each manager’s “turf” was his or hers alone and that any suggestions from fellow managers about how to do things were considered intrusive and unwelcome. The managers to whom Schein had given the memos had declined to distribute them for fear of appearing to violate this norm. Once Schein was aware of this unspoken rule, he was able to tailor his approach in a much more effective way.

What Schein had stumbled across was an element of the corporation’s culture. Every organization contains certain hidden codes, unspoken modes of behavior, and tacit ways of getting things done. If you find yourself stymied by what feels like a mysterious force blocking your progress at work, you may well be confronting some aspect of your organization’s culture that you haven’t yet got a handle on. “If you don’t understand these unspoken rules, you’ll be uncomfortable and anxious at work, and thus ineffective,” says Schein, who today is professor emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management and one of the foremost experts on organizational culture.

Turning on your awareness of corporate culture is one way of overcoming career obstacles and navigating the workplace. The summer issue tells you how to decipher unwritten codes and accelerate your career advancement and improve career success.