Your Business Is Not a Family –– Here’s Why This is a Good Thing
Saying your business is like a family might feel warm and delightful to you but to your employees, it could bring up memories that are not so rosy. Families are complicated. Workplaces should be much more straightforward, based on agreed-upon practices, and hopefully less emotionally intertwined.
The truth is, you don’t really want your business to be a family. Here’s why:
-- It leads to messy relationships and undefined responsibilities, and can be used to undermine equity and fairness.
In a family, people come together to support each other when they’re having a hard time, and issues of fairness don’t really come into it. But in the workplace, trying to overlay the family feeling onto every situation can lead to some very inequitable, unfair situations. If during meetings we talk over each other, like a family at a dinner table, then introverts or people who are more polite in those circumstances never get their voices heard.
Policies and systems are put in place for a reason in the workplace, without them, things get very messy very fast. Of course, in a family, it doesn’t make sense to have that kind of structure, because the overall goals are different. But if you don’t have them in a business, people are going to get taken advantage of, overlooked, and possibly even hurt to the point of leaving.
-- It’s good to have psychological distance from work.
People need space from their work life, and assigning the role of “family” to your work life can blur boundaries and make it difficult to get the psychological distance you need. If your work and personal life are intertwined roles get blurry, am I your manager, workout partner, or drinking buddy?
-- The most professional version of you should show up at work.
Not every version of you needs to show up at work. In a family, all the yous are there: you when you were a child, when you were 13, when you were 18. At work, that’s where the adult you shows up with professionalism, patience, and a fully developed executive functioning pre-frontal cortex! . If 13 year old you is showing up at work, all self-absorbed, win at all costs, loud in meetings, and defaults to blaming others, we’re probably going to have a problem.
-- It makes feedback and separation so much more complicated.
It’s hard enough to give constructive feedback or part ways with someone when they’re your close colleague, but if you consider yourselves to be family? That’s devastating. What’s more, having a commitment to the “we’re all a family” narrative can make it harder for people to speak out when they’re uncomfortable with something, because there’s a stronger incentive to belong.
-- We excuse poor behavior in a family.
Right or wrong, we excuse the poor behavior of our family members. “Oh, that’s just Chad,” we say. In the workplace we say things like, “you’ll get used to Chad, he’ll grow on you.’ Meanwhile, you’re uncomfortable with his close-talking, sexist, conversation-dominating behavior but can’t say anything because “that’s just Chad”.
-- Finally, it leads to some weird contortions with roles.
In a family you are who you are, and you can’t change that. You’ll always be the older sister, or the aunt, or the younger brother, because that’s the role you were born into. In the workplace though, roles should change to meet the needs of the workplace. Good managers place the right people in the right roles, and help them develop into different roles. If you get locked into the idea of family though, it becomes easier and easier for people to get stuck.
I understand that most of the time when managers talk about how their department is a family, it’s well-intentioned.
But what I’d invite you to think about instead is this:
What does that actually mean? And what values are you trying to express by saying that your workplace is like a family?
A lot of times people fall back on this saying as shorthand, when what they’re really trying to express is closeness, levity, and a sense of community –– all of which are fantastic. But not a family.
