Your family is none of your business

Could a family culture be bad for your organisation and your leadership?

When you think about your aspirations for your company’s culture, a natural reaction might be to cast around for examples of the kind of ‘feel’ you are seeking. What very often comes to mind is the analogy of ‘family’.

What we usually mean by ‘family’ is close, cooperative relationships between people who have strong bonds with each other, mostly enjoy each other’s company and always work in harmony with each other. What could possibly be wrong with this picture?

Well, stop and think for a moment. Is your family always like that? What about other families you can think of? Does loving each other mean that you never fall out, and that you always get along well enough to produce high quality work? And on the other hand, do you deeply ‘love’ the people you work with? Some maybe, but all of them, always?

It’s a starting point, certainly, but it’s a shorthand for a picture which may be very different from one person to another – your ‘close bonds’ may feel to me like claustrophobic interference. My ‘enjoying your company’ may feel to you like distracting triviality.

How a ‘family’ culture could be detrimental to your business

• You tend to choose only people who fit your picture. This may have the effect of ensuring they all get along, at least at first, but it can mean you lose the benefit of diversity of skills, opinions, and working styles. You drastically reduce the pool of potential recruits from which you can choose.
• You will expect professionalism and high performance from your co-workers. Have you ever tried to call your spouse to account for a shoddy job? Or your teenage son or daughter? How did that go? My point exactly!
• ‘Family’-minded co-owners tend to expect people to participate in ‘family’ activities – social events, coffee machine chats and so on. Some people, especially those not sharing your expectations or from different family backgrounds, will hate the pressure to do this and find it intrusive.
• People can become emotionally attached to each other in a way that becomes detrimental to the health of the business. You may spend hours of unproductive time trying fruitlessly to motivate and encourage employees who simply lack the skills or motivation to do the job. Your employees may hold back on suggesting new ways of working or reporting things that don’t work for fear of offending you. The culture easily devolves into a parent:child relationship which can limit transparency, stifle innovation and prevent a healthy influx of new blood to the organisation.
• As reported recently in The Harvard Business Review, a ‘family’ culture can promote an exaggerated sense of loyalty: ‘numerous examples and research show that overly loyal people are more likely to participate in unethical acts to keep their jobs and are also more likely to be exploited by their employer. These could manifest as being asked to work unreasonable hours or on projects or assignments unrelated to your role, or keeping things under wraps because it is in the company’s (read: family’s) best interest’.
• Any or all of the above can lead to stress, burnout, lost productivity and loss of good people.

How to capture the best of ‘being a family’

To promote a healthy ‘adult’ culture, avoid using the word ‘family’. Instead, give careful thought to the exact values, and even more importantly, the specific behaviours you are keen to foster. Put in place actions, platforms and structures that enable and encourage these behaviours. Make sure that individuals you employ are aware of and generally buy into the company values, and ask them to demonstrate by way of clear provable examples that they have behaved in ways that are consistent with the values.

The HBR again: ‘Let your employees know what is expected of them to succeed at work and that there is a clear line between work and their personal lives. Define these work expectations during an employees’ onboarding period and follow-up through check-ins and 1:1’s’.

Seven steps to promoting a healthy culture

• Paint a picture – a Vision of what you want your business to achieve and the organisation to provide for people. A shared purpose will promote the values and behaviours you are looking for.
• Identify the Values you want your organisation and the people in it to embody.
• Draw up a set of Groundrules and Behaviours that express the values and become the DNA in every cell of your organisation.
• Define clear Roles and Accountabilities for every part of the organisation and every individual, showing how they contribute to your shared purpose.
• Agree SMART Objectives, so everyone knows what to do, and Behaviour Standards, so everyone knows how they are expected to behave, in line with your Values.
• Create a Performance Planning and Review process to include what to work on, how to behave, and a chance to express any ideas or concerns.
• Build a Meetings Infrastructure not just for work-in-progress meetings. Make room also for 121 meetings with individuals, and group meetings with teams, and treat these as sacrosanct – they are the platform for building your culture and keeping lines of communication open.

Finally, be realistic. In a healthy organisation, people accept that relationships are professional and may be temporary Most won’t work in the same organisation for all their working lives – and that’s OK. In a healthy organisation, the business and the people in it have the freedom to grow – and this means that you may part company. It should be mutually understood that if organisation and individual cease to be able to meet each other’s needs, then there is no shame in moving on, and nobody needs to take offence.

At their best, families are wonderful structures within which to flourish and grow. But they can be cloying and binding too, and definitely not the best environment for developing professional excellence. Give yourself and your employees the freedom to develop the very best of adult relationships, and if these don’t work any more, when the time is right, to fly the nest.

Call now on 01865 881056, or email me on km@leaderslab.co.uk to set up a conversation.

(Ref. The Harvard Business Review: The Toxic Effects of Branding Your Workplace a “Family”, by Joshua A. Luna October 27, 2021)