When you accepted your current role, you received an inheritance. Nobody mentioned it in the interview. It wasn’t in the contract. But it was waiting for you on day one, along with the laptop and the lanyard.
You inherited a complete set of rules about how people relate to each other in this place. Who can challenge whom. What emotions are acceptable and what gets you labelled “difficult.” How conflict gets handled — or more likely, how it gets avoided. Whose opinions carry weight before they’ve even spoken, and whose get politely noted and never mentioned again.
These rules were written by people you’ve never met. They were solving problems you may never have heard of, in circumstances that may have completely changed. But the rules survived. Rules always do.
You learned your inheritance not by reading it but by bumping into its edges. The raised eyebrow when you suggested something. The careful pause before someone said “that’s an interesting idea” — meaning it wasn’t. The stories people told about what happened the last time someone tried to change things. Nobody sat you down and explained the rules. You absorbed them the way children absorb the rules of their family — not through instruction, but through reaction.
And that’s not a casual comparison. Families work exactly this way. Your family’s rules about anger, about vulnerability, about who gets to be right and who learns to keep the peace — you didn’t write those. You inherited them from people who inherited them from people who inherited them. Nobody chose them. They just accumulated, one Christmas dinner at a time, until they felt like the natural order of things rather than a set of decisions someone made decades ago.
Organisations are families in this specific sense: they pass down patterns of relating that outlive the people who created them. A founder who couldn’t tolerate disagreement creates a culture of consensus. That culture hires for consensus. Thirty years later, everyone agrees with everyone and nobody can explain why decisions take so long. The founder retired in 2011. Their inheritance is still running the place.
Manfred Kets de Vries calls this the shadow of the leader — the way a senior leader’s psychology imprints on an organisation and persists long after they’ve gone. But it’s not just founders. Every crisis, every badly handled departure, every unresolved conflict adds a clause to the will. The inheritance keeps growing. And every new person who arrives receives the full bequest whether they want it or not.
The part that should make you uncomfortable: you’re no longer just an heir. You’ve become an executor. That raised eyebrow? It’s yours now. That careful pause before “interesting idea”? You’ve started doing it. The stories about what happened last time? You’re telling them. You went from inheriting the rules to enforcing them without noticing the transition.
So: what exactly did you inherit when you joined this organisation? What rules are you living by that you never chose? And which of them would you genuinely keep — by choice — if someone read you the will and asked?
Because an inheritance you can see is an inheritance you can contest. And a pattern you’ve been passing on unconsciously is, for the first time, something you can decide to break.