The Secret of Dress Codes
- David Creelman
- 13 時間前
- 読了時間: 3分
Dress codes start simple, perhaps just “Dress professionally based on the situation”. Sadly, they tend to grow into unwieldy, impractical, and unhelpful lists of detailed rules. Understanding why this happens provides a crucial insight into the nature of management.
Why dress codes grow out of control
You probably know why dress codes grow out of control. Someone wears something borderline, and the manager asks for clarification, such as “Are jeans unprofessional?” The answer ends up in the dress code, perhaps “Jeans are unprofessional for client-facing roles, but otherwise are acceptable.” Someone comes in with torn jeans, and that is deemed unprofessional for all roles, and yet another rule is added.
It’s easy to see where this is going. The dress code policy gets longer and longer; some parts seem to contradict each other. The desire for clarity has created a monster.
The nature of management reality
Our natural mental model is that the world can be divided into straightforward categories. We imagine “professional dress vs. not professional”, “jeans vs not jeans”, and “client-facing vs. not client-facing”. That simplification breaks down when we look closely. Rather than clear-cut categories, we find the situation is more like a fractal. The closer we look, the more distinctions we can see.
To put this in everyday language, there are an endless number of grey areas. We can never cover all those grey areas in a policy. Every rule spawns exceptions. Every exception triggers a clarification. Every clarification raises three more edge cases.
Our initial assumption of straightforward categories does not match reality, and so we need to correct that assumption.
What to do
Start by going back to broad principles such as “Dress professionally based on the situation.” That can be ambiguous; that is fine—it’s the best approach given the nature of reality. Humans are pretty good at understanding social norms, and it’s the manager’s job to help their team learn them.
Accept that a manager is paid to make judgement calls. Since we cannot boil a dress code into a set of rigid rules, someone, somewhere needs to make a judgement. That someone is the manager. If someone is wearing torn jeans, then that may be disallowed not because it’s specially mentioned in a rule book, but because the manager judges it’s inappropriate for the situation (all things considered).
It’s best to have a soft appeal process. One principle of perceived justice is that there is some sort of appeal process. You don’t want something overly formal; however, if an employee is aggrieved, then their manager is often wise to say, “Okay, I’ll get a second opinion.” That second opinion could come from HR or from one level up in the hierarchy. The point is to demonstrate that the dress code judgement is not an arbitrary decision of one manager but that it does reflect appropriate social norms. You never know, perhaps the manager can be convinced the employee is right.
Drawings may work better than words. A few sketches of appropriate and inappropriate dress may help give new employees a sense of the social norms. Note that we are talking about “sketches”, not “photos”. Sketches are more ambiguous than photos, and that’s what you want. The only drawback is that the old mental model of their being distinct categories can lead you to go down the path of wanting hundreds of sketches, when the optimal number is probably closer to eight.
The broader lesson
The point of this article isn’t to write better dress codes. It’s to illustrate that in management, our human tendency to address issues by creating more and more rules often fails. It might help if we had a commonly recognized word for this kind of issue. If we could say, “Hey, that’s a fractal issue, don’t create more and more rules, rely on principles, education, and judgement”. If we don’t like the math reference, then maybe dress codes become the exemplar: “Hey, this is a dress-code-like situation, more detailed rules won’t solve it.”
In the end, we need to trust our managers to make judgement calls. That’s not because trust is nice; it’s because the nature of management reality demands it.