Robin Schooling

Go Along to Get Along

Go along to get along. It travels easily, this expression. It presents itself as wisdom rather than warning: a pragmatic acknowledgment that harmony requires some measure of personal concession, that belonging has a cost, and that the prudent professional learns quickly which battles are worth fighting and which are best left quietly unconsidered. It sounds almost reasonable – right up until you examine what it produces.

The phrase, with roots in political culture, often becomes the unspoken operating code of legislative bodies; the implicit understanding that influence is accumulated through cooperation, that cooperation requires deference, and that deference, practiced long enough, becomes indistinguishable from conviction. What’s remarkable is how seamlessly organizations also absorbed this logic, because it turns out the incentive structures governing most institutions – corporate, civic, nonprofit – are not so structurally different from those governing legislative bodies. In both environments, conformity circulates as social currency, and the people who learn to spend it wisely tend to accumulate more of it, while those who refuse the transaction find themselves, gradually and then suddenly, outside the room where decisions are made.

What this produces, over time, is a particular kind of organizational silence – not the silence of consensus, but the silence of calculation. People learn, usually early and often through direct experience, that a dissenting view offered in a room full of nodding heads is a professionally expensive gesture. So they stop offering it, nod along with the others, and then carry with them a low-grade ambient frustration, accumulating in perpetuity.

The Silent Surrender

I wrote some years ago about the dangers of keeping sweet at work – a particular form of performative agreeableness that is the deliberate cultivation of a pleasant surface as a substitute for genuine engagement. Going along to get along is a more sophisticated version of the same instinct, but with a sharper strategic logic. Keeping sweet is essentially aesthetic; it’s about maintaining a palatable presentation. Going along to get along is a calculated trade; a considered decision to suppress one’s actual opinion in exchange for belonging, access, or the kind of professional safety that passes, for a while, as both acceptance and forward motion.

What makes this pattern so durable is that, in the short term, it works. The organizational immune system has been trained, across industries and decades, to read friction as dysfunction but to welcome agreement as competence. The people who push back get coded as difficult while the people who fall into alignment get coded as collaborative. The incentive structure we’ve built doesn’t require anyone to articulate this; it simply operates, quietly and consistently, and people read it accurately. The result is what social psychologists have long described as groupthink: a collective drift toward consensus that is more social than rational, more protective than productive, and that has an impressively consistent track record of enabling serious institutional failures. The employees who privately understand the risks stay quiet; they’ve already weighed the personal cost of candor against the perceived likelihood that it will change anything and concluded the math will never work in their favor.

Conformity Doesn’t Require a Mandate

What deserves closer examination is how organizations create these conditions, because the mechanism is rarely punitive and almost never explicit. It’s structural.

When leadership responds to challenge with defensiveness, when the person who surfaces a problem becomes the person responsible for solving it, or when candor is inscribed in the values statement yet quietly penalized, you don’t need to mandate compliance because it self-generates. Organizational conformity, in most cases, is not imposed from above but rather emerges from below, as people develop an accurate read of where the risk lies and calibrate their own behavior accordingly. This is the sophisticated part of the dynamic that tends to get underappreciated in the usual conversations about psychological safety: most people who go along are not passive, unthinking, or unaware. They are, instead, making a rational decision within an irrational system.

For HR, this matters in at least two directions simultaneously. We are, in theory, the function charged with organizational integrity, which means we depend on people being willing to tell us the truth. We also depend on having the standing and gravitas to carry uncomfortable truths upward through the organizational hierarchy. Yet, neither condition will hold in a culture that systematically rewards silence.

And it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that HR is not exempt from this pattern itself; we are entirely capable of going along with leadership decisions we privately assess as misguided, because we’ve learned, often correctly, that our position is conditional on a particular kind of usefulness. And that usefulness? Often defined as acquiescence.

From Structural Fix to Personal Reckoning

What organizations that manage to disrupt this pattern have in common is rarely an unusually courageous workforce. Rather, they possess leadership behavior and structural design that makes dissent feel like a safe and viable option rather than a calculated risk. In practice, that looks like leaders who respond to challenge with genuine curiosity rather than subtle retaliation, who make their own course corrections visible enough to demonstrate that input does matter, and who create the conditions under which raising a concern is understood as contributing rather than complicating. It also looks like an HR Leader who is willing to name that which needs adjustment; to identify, specifically and with evidence, where the gap between stated values and actual organizational behavior is widest, and to treat that gap as the problem it is.

Because going along to get along is, at its foundation, a rational response to irrational incentives. The behavior will persist as long as the incentives do, and the incentives will persist as long as we treat the silence as a feature of the culture rather than a signal about it. The hidden conversations – the real ones, the candid ones, the ones that contain truthful organizational intelligence – are already happening. We just need to be willing to listen.

In our organizations, the first question belongs to leadership: not simply whether dissent is technically permitted, but whether the organization is structurally and emotionally prepared to be challenged and changed by what it hears. That’s a hard ask, and one that requires some soul-searching.

The second question is yours, and it travels with you everywhere – into your workplace, your community, and into the civic and volunteer spaces where you give your time and carry your personal beliefs and values. Those are the places where you need to raise your concerns. To name the things others are avoiding. To share your opinions, ask the pointed questions, and push for discussion.

The case for going along to get along is, in the end, a case for other people’s comfort at the expense of your own integrity – and that’s a trade-off that will never look as reasonable in hindsight as it might in the moment.

******

Low-Hanging Fruit. Reach May Vary.

At some point in the annals of corporate history, we decided that “low-hanging fruit” was the perfect metaphor for easy wins, quick fixes, and tasks so obvious that any reasonable person could dispatch them before their second cup of coffee. And now, decades later, we’re all stuck with it – tossing the phrase around in meetings as though we’re all working in the same orchard while standing at the same height, with the same reach and/or the same ladder.

But who decides what scrumptious pieces of fruit are, in fact, hanging “low?

Because the fruit that’s dangling right at eye level for you might be somewhere around my kneecaps, or, depending on a dozen other variables I don’t have visibility into, it might require a cherry picker, three bucket trucks, and a cross-functional task force just to locate the tree. “Just grab the low-hanging fruit,” someone says, breezing into the room with the confidence of someone who has never once, or so they like to pretend, misjudged the distance between a concept and its execution.

What if I make the wrong call? What if I look at the situation, assess the orchard, and confidently pick something that turns out to be neither low-hanging nor particularly ripe and everyone else in the room knew it was the wrong choice, but no one said so, because the metaphor made the whole thing sound so obvious? There’s something slightly terrifying about that possibility … especially in workplaces where “just handle the easy stuff first” is code for a WHOLE set of unspoken assumptions that nobody has ever bothered to define.

A Question of Altitude

The existential problem with the low-hanging fruit directive is that it presupposes shared context, shared perspective, and roughly equivalent fruit-reaching capability across all parties. None of which can be assumed. The person issuing the directive may be working from a completely different vantage point – organizationally, politically, informationally – and the thing that looks effortless from where they’re standing might look, from where you’re standing, like it involves a significant amount of untangling, stakeholder navigation, and at least one uncomfortable conversation with someone in Finance.

This isn’t a complaint about the phrase itself – though I do have feelings – so much as it’s an observation about how casually we deploy it … as though “low” is a fixed point in space rather than a deeply relative one. Low compared to what? Low according to whom? The orchard looks different depending on where you enter it, and two people standing in the same grove will walk away with very different assessments of what was reachable and what wasn’t.

Which means, of course, that the directive itself is the problem – not because the fruit doesn’t exist, but because “low” is a relative term masquerading as an obvious one. So before anyone starts reaching, the more useful conversation is probably about the orchard itself: what we’re looking at, from whose vantage point, and whether we’re all even standing in the same grove.

Because perspective, it turns out, is the whole thing. The fruit just hangs there.

*****

Setting Your Status to “Leave Me Alone”: In Defense of Being Unreachable at Work

There was a time – and I know you remember it, if only dimly – when you could wander down to the break room, pour yourself a cup of terrible coffee, and exist, unbothered, for twelve glorious minutes. No one knew where you were, nor did anyone need to know. You were simply… between things. Thinking, maybe. Or staring at the walls. Maybe reading a 5-year-old copy of Martha Stewart Living from the pile of periodicals strewn on the end table next to the couch. It really didn’t matter because you were gloriously off the grid.

Sadly, that era is gone and, in its place, we have the Status Field.

Whether your workplace runs on Slack, Teams, Google Chat, or Facebook Messenger, the expectation is the same: your digital presence must be accounted for, at all times, during all working hours, with the precision of Artemis II mission control. The little colored dot beside your name – green, yellow, red, that ambiguous grey – has become the modern-day equivalent of clocking in, and lord help you if that dot goes grey for longer than it takes to use the bathroom, because somewhere, someone is watching.

It’s accountability theater, really: the performance of availability in a world that has conflated being reachable with being productive.

A Taxonomy of What Your Status Actually Means

Let’s be honest now: the status you post, and the reality of your afternoon are not always the same. Here’s a more accurate field guide, from out here in the real world, of what your workplace “status” really means:

“In a meeting” might signify you are in an actual meeting, It might also mean you’re staring at the middle distance after having endured forty-seven meetings this week alone (and it’s only Wednesday) and you simply need people to stop making demands of you for twenty minutes. You’re present, technically, but your soul has left the building.
“Focusing” – a personal favorite, particularly on platforms that let you schedule a “Focus Block” – means you have erected a small digital velvet rope around yourself. “Focusing” communicates that you are “in the zone” where deep, important work is underway. It does not, however, specify that the work involves watching all of Britney Spears’ official music videos in strict chronological order, from “…Baby One More Time” through the Blackout era and onward, because someone mentioned “Toxic” in a meeting and now you’re three decades deep into a YouTube spiral that started as research and has become spiritual.
“Away” means you stepped away from your desk and forgot to change it back two hours ago. Or you changed it on purpose and are currently assembling a charcuterie board with items procured entirely from the vending machine (Gardetto’s, a bag of M&Ms, a sleeve of Animal Crackers) arranged with more care and architectural precision than anything you’ve accomplished at work this quarter. You’ve got the pretzels doing the heavy lifting in the corner, the M&Ms are the accent color, and you’re quite proud of it.
“On a call” can, of course, mean you are on a call. It can also mean you are avoiding a call you were supposed to make an hour ago and are using this status pre-emptively. It’s aspirational really; just like your organizational culture.
“BRB” means you are either returning shortly, or you just typed “BRB” and then walked directly into another meeting, started a new task, or went to go put out another fire. You will eventually surface again sometime before the end of the day. Maybe.

The Myth of the Open Door (Digital Edition)

What we’ve built here, collectively, is a culture in which the expectation of instant availability has been woven so deeply into how we work that we now police our own downtime. We’ve become workers droids who pre-emptively justify our absence and change our status before we take a walk around the block to clear our head because, apparently, a fifteen-minute absence requires documentation. And oh boy…do we feel guilty about the grey dot and the unanswered message that sits there (read but not yet responded to!) while we do something as audacious as eat lunch.

But what are we gaining from all this? The illusion of connectedness? Maybe. For those managers and organizations that aren’t sure they trust their people, they have the comfort, I guess, of knowing (for a moment) that everyone is accounted for. It’s a new version of the old-school time clock for the knowledge-worker/desk-bound class.

What we’re not gaining is the kind of creative thinking that happens precisely when people are not staring at a screen waiting for the next message to land.

A Modest Proposal

I do wonder what would happen if everyone, for a designated stretch of time, simply didn’t have a status? No dot, no label, no “focusing” or “away” or the dreaded “Do Not Disturb” that, perversely, seems to invite more disturbance. What if being unreachable for an hour were treated not as a crisis or an anomaly, but as a normal, healthy, expected part of a working human’s day?

Here’s my guess: most of the things that seemed urgent would resolve themselves, because they always do. We would discover that the questions that feel like they need an answer right now rarely do. We would find that the people you’re surround by every day – your team, your colleagues, yourself – might emerge from that hour with a thought they hadn’t had before or an idea that simply needed some peace and quiet to take shape.

We’ve normalized the expectation of perpetual availability as a baseline condition of employment, but maybe it’s time to normalize the opposite. And no; not as an exception or a perk or a “wellness initiative” (please, not another wellness initiative), but as a simple acknowledgment that people who are allowed to be unreachable – occasionally, on purpose, and without explanation – come back better.

The break room is still there, metaphorically speaking, so go wander. And when you do, set your status to whatever you like.

Or don’t set it at all.

The Corporate Polo Shirt: A Uniform Built for No One

At some point in the evolution of the workplace, someone decided that the polo shirt was the ideal canvas for a company logo. That decision has never really been questioned since.

The “company polo” became a mainstay of corporate life; as immutable as mandatory fun and the phrase “circling back.” If your organization has ever launched an employee recognition program, onboarded a new team member, had employees attend a conference together, or celebrated a milestone of any kind, there’s a near-certainty that polo shirts were involved. Piled into boxes and handed out by enthusiastic Marketing and HR staffers with genuine enthusiasm, they were accepted by employees with the kind of polite smile that doesn’t quite reach the eyes.

The polo shirt is, in theory, business casual. In practice, it is neither business nor casual, but rather a garment suspended in an uncomfortable liminal zone where formality and leisure cancel each other out and produce something that flatters essentially no one. Not the tall person whose torso it skims in all the wrong places, not the shorter person swimming in a size that was probably the only one left, and, let’s be honest, not even the tennis player or golfer, for whom the polo was ostensibly designed.

And yet, here we are. Every fiscal year, organizations spend real money – budget that could theoretically fund professional development, or better coffee, or at minimum a modestly improved onboarding experience – on polo shirts. Stiff, heavy polo shirts in colors selected by committee, embroidered with a logo that will be permanently affixed to the left breast, which is, without exception, the exact wrong location for approximately every human body it encounters.

The Fabric Problem

Let’s start with construction, because the fabric deserves its own reckoning. The traditional corporate polo tends toward a heavy pique cotton that’s designed to hold its shape and project a certain… seriousness of purpose, I suppose. It is also, in practice, quite warm; particularly delightful in the summer months when your organization decides to send everyone to an outdoor event in matching polos, and they all spend the afternoon wilting in unison. And if the organization has moved toward the more “modern” moisture-wicking performance fabric – the kind that’s marketed as breathable and athletic – the experience is not meaningfully better, because that fabric will cling in ways that feel deeply personal. (And is rarely flattering to anyone who is not actively competing in a triathlon).

The Neckline Problem

Then there’s the neckline, which is to say: the placket. That two-to-three-inch strip of buttons sitting at the collar, rubbing against your neck with the persistence of a minor grievance. For anyone who has worn a polo for more than two hours, that placket becomes impossible to ignore; a low-grade irritant that you keep trying to adjust, unconsciously, approximately every eighteen minutes throughout the event. It’s the kind of design detail that makes you understand, at a visceral level, why turtlenecks need to have a revival.

Women, in particular, have reached a kind of collective, unspoken consensus on the polo neckline, and that consensus is not favorable. The collar sits at an awkward height, neither open enough to be comfortable nor structured enough to look deliberate, and the buttons suggest a formality that the rest of the shirt doesn’t quite support. It’s a highly unflattering neckline that commits to nothing while simultaneously managing to irritate everyone.

The Logo Problem

And then we arrive at the logo; the whole reason we’re here and the very point of the shirt’s existence. The logo is embroidered with careful precision onto the left breast and placed, through some alchemy of garment sizing and human biology, in a location that is uniquely – and reliably! – wrong for women across the full spectrum of body types, ages, and sizes. It’s too high on one person, too low on another, and occasionally landing in a spot so anatomically nipple-specific that it becomes a conversation starter in itself.

The logo, to be clear, is not the problem; it merely has the reasonable ambition to represent the company brand. It’s the placement of the logo that raises the question of whether anyone involved in this process has ever worn one of these shirts, or whether the decision-making happened entirely as an abstract exercise.

Safe, Not Strategic

Now the impulse behind giving people corporate branded apparel – shirts, bags, mugs, whatever – is a fundamentally nice human gesture. There’s warmth in it and organizations that invest in belonging and shared identity are doing something meaningful. The intent behind the polo is not the problem.

The problem is that the polo has become the default because it feels “safe”. Oh, it’s undoubtedly the “best practice” of corporate swag; no one gets fired for ordering polo shirts, no one raises an eyebrow, and no one challenges the assumption that this is simply what you do. So, the purchase requisition gets approved, the shirts are ordered in bulk, they arrive 14-17 business days later, and they’re distributed by already-overworked department supervisors. Each employee takes the shirt home and shoves it in the bottom drawer of a dresser where it is destined to reside for eternity with an occasional appearance for either yard work or the casual Friday when every other wardrobe option is in the laundry.

But if organizations are willing to think critically about engagement strategy and employee experience and about whether their systems and processes meet the needs of the people using them (and most organizations will tell you they are), then perhaps it’s not too radical to extend that thinking to the corporate polo shirt. To ask before placing the default order:

Does this represent ALL of us?
Does anyone even want to wear this style/color/fabric?
Does this shirt make the people wearing it feel good?
Does it fit and/or flatter the range of bodies on our team … or just the theoretical average (male) body someone was imagining?

The Corporate Polo Shirt endures because no one has asked, for 50+ years, whether it should continue to do so. And that, if you’ll forgive my pointing it out, is a very HR thing to do.