We Are [Not] Family
I’ve had this post sitting in the drafts for a while and was recently reminded of it when Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky went ahead and said it – work relationships are not family (except when they literally are)1.
The notion that we are “one big happy family” is problematic for a number of reasons. It’s not just that this idea is wildly inappropriate and makes tough decisions sometimes more challenging, but it’s the assumption that everyone has a positive family experience. (Before I continue: obviously, there are family businesses with generations of actual family members working there. That’s an entirely different post and not something I will brave today.)
I do have an overwhelmingly positive experience with the concept of family personally and I still have always had a hesitation and “hmmm, let’s go easy on that” reaction when this terminology is used. In my own experience, the emphasis on this concept most often comes from executive leaders who seem to be trying to either sell a message of a culture that does not exist or to shift culture towards viewing ourselves as family. I imagine this is more prevalent in nonprofits where we’re all pulling together to shoestring together a budget to support a mission we all care about. Add Jesus to the mix and we feel even more obligated to create a family dynamic.
There are a host of reasons this idea does not work well, but I am most struck by the disconnect in not understanding how the very dynamic we praise creates issues for the employees we claim to value so highly! We all come to work with our own lived experiences and frames of references for family relationships – some really positive and some not. If an employee has an unhealthy relationship with a parent, for example, having spent a lifetime being manipulated by them, how does that impact the request to work extra hours from a “family member” boss? Of course, even great relationship experiences run this risk – wouldn’t you do anything for your family?
The idea of family implies certain embedded promises and obligations – whether that’s our reality or not – to care for one another, to give each other a little more grace than we might others, and certainly not to layoff or fire each other. There is a sense of obligation to go above and beyond – of course, you should work less, take less salary than you are worth, or look the other way on a “family” member making a bad choice at work.
In my research and observation, I note that when we fail to create a clear boundary around work being work and family being family, there is not just a lack of work life balance but an impossibility of achieving it. To be fair, I’m not sure balance is a realistic goal for most of us. The more experience I gain and the more observing I do, I actually prefer the term integration over balance. No matter how I view that, though, as an employee, I should have some expectation that there are lines around what is work and what is family.
The vast majority of both my own lived experience and my research focuses on faith-based organizations. In fact, my own struggle to understand the positive and negative outcomes of faith-based work on the humans that do it is what largely inspired my research. Here’s a snippet from my dissertation:
“I grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, as the daughter of a preacher/theology professor father and a church organist/music professor/church secretary mother. I was surrounded by faith-based workplaces from the beginning. I remember, even as a young child, being fascinated by the ways in which this impacted our lives, and in particular, my parents’ lives. I do not intend to imply here that I was a child prodigy, applying organizational behavior and leadership theories to my parents’ lived experience. Rather, I have some conscious memory of things that I both liked and
disliked about the experience of my parents both working exclusively for faith-based
nonprofits until I was in high school.I liked that it felt like my parents worked for organizations that largely seemed to
care about them. I also liked that I felt like a part of a special, larger family, in that my
father worked as a senior minister of my home church until I was 20 years old, and I
liked that my parents both seemed largely satisfied that their work was meaningful and important. However, as I grew older, I found that I did not like that working for a faith-based nonprofit meant my parents were not earning salaries equal to their time and talent.In addition, I was troubled by needing to be careful about issuing any statement that made it seem like we might lean too far outside the expected, seemingly comfortable
conservative party line of the churches and organizations for which they worked. Finally, I did not like that, particularly for my father, it seemed like his own spiritual journey was the last thing many church members were concerned with. Inasmuch as the church members’ needs were met, he could (and did at times) run himself ragged.”2
Just seven years ago, I was still using that family language to indicate a positive experience so I get that it’s a hard habit to break. And for those of us embedded in a history of evangelical3 churches and nonprofits…well, that idea starts very early! But we can choose to be more cautious about language that comes with such heavily weighted expectations. Building a healthy team dynamic with language like team, group, colleagues, or community4 is a better choice. Sure, we’ve all worked in groups we hated and might roll our eyes at tropes like “there is no I in team…” but it’s still far less weighted than expecting family behavior from colleagues.5
As the ever-wise Alison Green at Ask a Manager points out, it’s not that this is an evil plan employers set out to implement, it’s just a dysfunctional side effect of…well, dysfunction. (More here). Despite all I’ve said here, I still wouldn’t go so far as to start Ron Swanson-ing your colleagues, but the bottom line is we can do better on this choice of language and the expectations we set and model.
Suggested reading:
The Myth of Workplace Family and What Leadership Can Do to Cultivate Authentic Engagement
Stop Calling Your Company a Family – And What to Say Instead
Disclosure worth disclosing: I work with two family members now at the university where I’m employed. We all have made this work and it’s not uncommon for family members to be employed at the same university! And at one time, my dad and I worked together very effectively. That’s not really what I’m focused on in this post!
Huxford Davis, B. (2017). Workplace faith integration in nonprofit Christian camp and retreat center organizations: A grounded theory (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Eastern University, St. Davids, PA.
I hesitate to use the term evangelical these days but it’s a reasonable term for historical context. Some reasons why I use caution here from Scot McKnight.
I should note here, that my own faith-based workplace has modeled taking care of each other well so powerfully to me over the last couple of decades. We surround each other in prayer, we are gentle in times of bereavement and grief, we take casseroles to each other, and I think model loving one another well most of the time. But the motivation for that is less “we are family” because we work together and more “we are family” in the sense of being one family in Christ.