Important organizations with Courtesy Rank for standard ranks

[Varyon]

I could readily see an Adventurer's Guild working this way. I've seen settings where licensed adventurers do have real authority / legal immunity (being able to carry weapons, some degree of law enforcement powers including a limited license to kill, etc), and there are often formal ranks for them, but the ranks themselves generally don't give them any real authority over those beneath them. They seem to instead just serve as prerequisites to take quests of certain difficulty levels. A similar example would be the Hero Association in One Punch Man - the heroes have law enforcement powers and formal ranks (a letter - C, B, A generally, with special exceptional individuals being ranked S - and a number - Mumen Rider is the top-ranked C-class hero, at C-1, for example), but one's rank generally just determines what their wages and responsibilities are, what sorts of situations they are expected to handle (C-class do things like rescuing kittens from trees or stopping mundane petty criminals, B-class handle more serious criminals and minor monsters, A-class handle particularly nasty monsters, and S-class handle more existential threats), etc.

In both cases, higher-ranked individuals are more likely to be listened to and followed, but I feel that's appropriate for Courtesy Rank anyway. Both are meritocracies, so someone reaching Silver rank as an adventurer or high-B or higher rank as a hero indicates someone worth listening to. But this isn't enforced - many other adventurers, even those of lower rank, tend to look down on Goblin Slayer and think he isn't worthy of his Sliver rank (as he got there by doing almost nothing other than killing goblins, which are generally considered amongst the lowest-level monsters); meanwhile, at least as of the last of it I read, many heroes think Saitama / Caped Baldy cheated to get his rank and thus look down on him... but at the same time there are also heroes who are ranked well above him who are perfectly willing to follow his lead, as they've seen how capable he is.