Whenever anybody uses the F Word in a corporate setting, I cringe. The people who use it usually think it makes them seem more sincere, more inspiring and more passionate. But it is never appropriate and should never be used in a business setting. That word is “family.”
In its most innocent misuse, it’s meant to describe an environment that is supportive and inclusive. In its more sinister application, it’s used to create an artificial sense of commitment and loyalty in order to extract disproportionate value from employees. In either case, it misrepresents the honest and healthy relationship that should exist in a successful business organization. A successful company can’t be operated in the same way as a family. Framing a culture around family values ultimately harms the organization.
The model for a successful company culture is not a loving family, but that of a high-functioning team. That difference can sometimes blur because of a few shared characteristics between a strong family and a strong team. Both require a high degree of trust. And there are times when both call for an individual to put the group’s goals ahead of their personal goals. But at their best, families and teams are designed to serve quite different objectives. Teams exist to pursue tangible achievements: win a game, make a scientific advancement, discover a new part of the world. Philosophers can define the purpose of family, but I think most would agree it is not to secure a particular achievement, but to provide a place of mutual support and security independent of outcomes. Teams are all about outcomes. On a team, the members are in service to the mission. In a family, the members are the mission. Ideally, the support of a family is unconditional. The support of an effective team is, by definition, entirely conditional on success.
The following scenarios illustrate how family and team values fundamentally differ:
- Parents of three loving well-adjusted adult children are drawing up a Will for their estate. They decide to allocate the estate based on how each child’s career and other activities have contributed to the public stature of the family.
- A sales team had a very strong year in which they earned record growth. Most of the sales team had the same sales as last year, but two salespeople were each able to secure several new customers that drove all the growth for the company. The sales manager gives each salesperson an equal bonus.
- A woman has dreamed all her life about visiting Japan but never had the financial means to afford the trip. A group of close friends chips in to buy her a trip to Tokyo for her birthday.
- It’s the deciding game of the baseball World Series. With the scored tied in the last inning, the manager decides to start a veteran near the end of his career because he probably won’t get the chance to pitch in a World Series again.
The different ways we respond to what’s right or what’s fair in those scenarios reveal the incongruence in values. While invoking family values generally triggers positive feelings, most of us would characterize a business that truly ran as a family as dysfunctional. We want our good work to lead to expanded roles and compensation; we don’t want to put up with consistently underperforming co-workers; we want to see management looking for ways to constantly improve the company; we want to beat the competition. Those aren’t consistent with a family dynamic. We don’t expect parents to favor one child over another for example. What often happens in companies that proclaim a family culture is that they want the employees to behave as if it’s a family while they manage the company as if it’s a team. That kind of company reserves the right to reorganize for efficiency or separate from underperformers. But employees exploring competitive offers or asking for higher compensation are labelled as self-centered or a “poor fit”.
The problem for these companies and the people who work for them is that events inevitably occur that bring reality to light. A merger may call for eliminating duplicate roles, a promotion may elevate a better performer over a more tenured colleague, a new product may be scrapped because it’s not meeting market projections. When these team decisions are made, the family illusion is broken. This can cause resentment even from those who aren’t affected. It can shatter the foundations of a corporate culture that has taken years to build. Start-ups are especially prone to a moment of truth when business imperatives force them to make a decision that violates the family ideal they organized around at their creation. The effect can be devasting. In my experience, companies recover far better from business setbacks than they do from disillusionment.
A pseudo family culture can hurt a company in less drastic but equally damaging ways. It can lead to poor employee management and bad management decisions. A family culture resists investing more in high-performers. It can discourage tracking and monitoring the timeliness and quality of deliverables. It can create a misguided “we’re all in this together” mantra that overlooks the need for corective feedback for employees falling short of standards . It can also lead to lazy management. A team leader should be constantly looking for opportunities to improve the team. A family mindset tends to accept the status quo, and not look as aggressively for opportunities to improve. If a basketball team drafts a new player who is better than a current player, that current player would see her playing time reduced or a lower salary offer come contract renewal time. We wouldn’t expect the arrival of a new family member to push out an existing one. Managers working with a family mindset may unintentionally undermine the team’s success by not fulfilling their obligation to make the team as strong as it can be.
If you’re considering working for a company that claims to be a family, exercise due caution. They are either naive or disingenuous, and neither of those is a point of strength. At the very least, you should understand that any company that describes itself in familial terms is misguided. If you’re a leader, avoid falling into the trap of using family language and metaphors to shape your culture. You can still bring out the positive human values you want for your organization without falling into dishonest tropes. Think of what you’re really trying to instill in your culture and find the ways to articulate them with more honesty, accuracy and mutuality. Consider these examples of framing a culture with a team mentality:
| Family Value Fallacy | Clarifying the Intent | Team Value Framing |
| Loyalty | This often devolves into a one-way street that only applies to the employee. The right intention is to foster an employer-employee relationship based on more than short-term exchange: a payment for a fixed set of deliverables. In an ideal relationship, the company will provide resources and opportunities that expand their employees’ skillsets. This increases their value to the company and the company’s value in the marketplace. If employees share in that value creation, they won’t stay out of familial duty, but because the opportunity to grow and benefit from that growth increases with their tenure. | Shared growth |
| Support | Family also appeals to our sense of security. We don’t have to be at our best at every moment to keep our place. A company should never claim that their support of an employee is unconditional, because it isn’t. But growth depends on taking risks that don’t always pay off so it’s important that companies create comfort around responsible risk-taking. Strong companies embrace failure that isn’t due to lack of effort or incompetence by channeling its lessons into future efforts. | Learning organization |
| Dedication | Dedication in corporate jargon is often a euphemism for the willingness to work harder or longer. The fallacy of that perspective has been borne out in the hand-wringing over” “quiet quitting” and “the great resignation.” As a business leader, what you should really want isn’t more hours, but people who care about their work. Organizations instill caring by sharing the mission of the company and helping employees recognize their role in it. | Clarity of mission |
One of the reasons otherwise thoughtful leaders default to language around family is because they’re reaching for an emotional connection. They rightfully know that we are influenced more by emotions than rational thoughts when making decisions or forming opinions. Family-like language provides a shortcut to creating an emotional appeal. Leaders should resist that shortcut for two reasons. One is that people are also inherently drawn to truth over falsehood. The truth of an organizational culture will always come out, and a promise of family is one that can never be fulfilled. The second is that there is plenty of emotion to be tapped into from teams as well. As any casual observer of sports could see, overcoming defeats and celebrating wins creates emotional connections as powerful as any human experience. There’s no need to use the F Word.
The Ryan Report 