You can be perfectly capable of doing your job and still spend an extraordinary amount of energy figuring out how you're allowed to do it.

You're accountable for results. You're encouraged to take ownership, be proactive, and make decisions. Yet before you act, there's an invisible checklist running through your head.

Can I make this decision? Should I check with my boss? Will another director feel bypassed? Am I stepping on someone's toes? Am I supposed to challenge this, or has the decision already been made?

So you navigate. You read the room. You have conversations before the conversations. You seek informal approvals, manage relationships, and carefully choose your words.

All while trying to do the job you were hired to do.

I've become increasingly interested in this invisible second job: navigating the unwritten rules of an organization.

And I wonder how much workplace stress we could prevent by making those rules explicit.

When ambiguity at work becomes exhausting

I don't believe all ambiguity is bad. Uncertainty is essential to creativity, innovation, and learning. We need room to experiment, explore, and figure things out.

But there's an important distinction between ambiguity in the work itself and ambiguity about how work gets done.

Not knowing the answer to a complex problem is one thing. Not knowing whether you're allowed to make a decision about that problem is another.

Consider a manager who is accountable for performance but has little clarity about their decision-making authority.

They're told to take initiative, yet their decisions are frequently questioned or reversed. They're encouraged to collaborate, but nobody has agreed on what collaboration means.

Does everyone need to be consulted? Does everyone need to agree? Who ultimately decides?

Over time, that manager learns to be careful. To check before acting. To avoid unnecessary friction.

What looks like hesitation, disengagement, or a lack of ownership may actually be a rational response to the environment.

People adapt their behavior to the systems they operate within.

The hidden connection between role ambiguity and mental health

This isn't simply a productivity problem.

The World Health Organization identifies unclear job roles and limited control over work among the psychosocial risks to mental health at work.

And the research goes further. A meta-analysis published in the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, combining 33 studies involving 19,926 participants, found significant positive associations between depression and both role ambiguity (r = 0.279) and role conflict (r = 0.318).

More recently, a 2026 meta-analysis in the Journal of Vocational Behavior synthesized 515 studies and found that role ambiguity was generally the most detrimental of three examined role stressors across a range of employee and organizational outcomes.

These findings don't establish that unclear decision rights directly cause depression or burnout. But they reinforce something important: how work is organized matters to employee wellbeing.

The constant second-guessing. The fear of overstepping. The frustration of being responsible for an outcome without having the authority to influence it.

And perhaps most exhausting of all, the feeling that doing a good job isn't enough. You also have to be good at navigating the politics of getting it done.

Organizational debt: Who is paying the interest?

I've written before about organizational debt: the friction that accumulates as organizations grow, change, and postpone decisions about how they operate.

Unclear responsibilities, inefficient meetings, ambiguous decision rights, and unwritten communication norms accumulate. People develop workarounds to keep things moving.

But there's another dimension to this debt that interests me.

Who is quietly paying the interest?

Often, it's the people compensating for the system.

The manager who spends hours securing alignment before making a simple decision. The employee who learns which topics are safe to raise in meetings. The team member who absorbs extra responsibilities because confronting unclear ownership feels riskier than doing the work.

From a leadership perspective, everything may appear to be functioning.

Results are delivered. Deadlines are met. Nobody is complaining.

But the absence of complaints doesn't necessarily mean the absence of friction.

Sometimes it means people have learned to live with it.

How making ways of working explicit can support employee wellbeing

When I talk about making ways of working explicit, I'm not advocating for more bureaucracy, lengthy policies, or rigid procedures.

I'm talking about shared agreements that remove unnecessary guesswork from everyday work.

Agreements that answer questions such as:

  • Decision-making: Who has the authority to decide? Who needs to be consulted, and who simply needs to be informed?
  • Autonomy: What can people act on independently, without seeking permission?
  • Priorities: What takes precedence when competing demands collide?
  • Meetings: Why are we meeting, who needs to participate, and what should happen afterward?
  • Disagreement: How do we challenge ideas, raise concerns, or escalate issues without damaging relationships?

These may seem like operational details. But they're also part of the conditions under which people experience their working lives.

When expectations are explicit, employees have less need to interpret unwritten rules, anticipate reactions, or seek approval unnecessarily.

And importantly, explicit agreements become discussable. Teams can challenge them, experiment with alternatives, and improve them as their work evolves.

Clarity doesn't have to mean rigidity. It can create the confidence to act.

Workplace wellbeing starts with how work actually works

We invest in resilience training, mindfulness programs, wellness days, and employee assistance initiatives. Many have value.

But I wonder whether we're overlooking something more fundamental.

The WHO recommends organizational interventions that address working conditions and environments as part of preventing mental health risks at work. That matters because responsibility for wellbeing cannot rest solely with individuals.

What if, alongside helping people cope with workplace stress, we examined the working conditions creating some of that stress in the first place?

What if employees didn't have to walk on eggshells just to do their jobs?

Making the implicit explicit won't eliminate uncertainty, interpersonal tension, or every source of workplace stress.

But it can reduce some of the unnecessary ambiguity we've normalized as part of organizational life.

Perhaps one of the most meaningful things we can do for workplace wellbeing is to make work itself less exhausting to navigate.

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How clear are your team's ways of working?

You might be surprised by the gap between how you think work gets done and how your team actually experiences it.

I've created the How We Work Check, a short assessment to help managers and team members reflect on the everyday practices that shape their work, from decision-making and autonomy to meetings, collaboration, and clarity.

Take the Ways Of Working assessment >> The WOW.

Because making work better starts with understanding how it actually works.