The problem with ‘family’ cultures

When I’m asked to work with a culture that is ‘like a family’ I know exactly what challenges or dysfunction I'm about to find. The intent is often good, but it almost always generates negativity and leads to a loss in performance or standards.

As an example, I worked with an organisation who used the 'family' framing, yet one of the senior leaders had been actively sabotaging projects for two years, but nobody would address it because - as I was told in staff interviews - 'we don't turn on our own. They’ll have their reasons.’

Most families that I know:

- Lack the ability to be honest (except when they get together during ‘family’ events when it flows faster than the wine being poured!)

- Go through stages where they don’t speak to each other for weeks or months on end

- Tolerate the toxic behaviour of one - or more - individuals because it’s easier not to have to deal with it

- Are happy to achieve a period of harmony, where nobody falls out and the status quo is maintained

- Would love to remove one or more family members but are unable to do so, because, you know, they’re family

- Avoid real intimacy

The irony is - of course - that these are exactly the challenges that the organisations I work with face. I have to tell people that workplace culture is not family. To achieve anything, we cannot afford any dysfunction.

Then there’s the weaponisation of the term, which leaders often use as emotional manipulation. Phrases you may hear include:

- ‘families don’t abandon each other’

- ‘families make sacrifices’ and 

- ‘families always stick together’

As well-meaning as it sounds this is not what we need our workplace cultures to look like. In their culture deck, Netflix made this clear that this is not what they were, saying:

We’re a team, not a family.

Teams work hard to build connections with each other and then remain disciplined and engaged in their work, in order to achieve the targets they have been set. Teams don’t want to be told what the culture is, they want agency over it themselves; and teams don’t tolerate brilliant jerks that seek to hold them back. They're managed out, cleanly, professionally, without guilt. 

There’s lots of good intent when it comes to talking about a ‘family’ culture, however, it almost always backfires on leaders. It inevitably leads to a pleasant or combatant culture where good work stalls or poor behaviours dominate.

Work is work and when you concentrate on building a great environment for people to flourish, it generates happiness, which is almost always good for family life!