Your Team Is Not a Family

A family offers unconditional belonging. A community offers earned belonging.

You’ve heard the metaphor a thousand times. “We’re not just a team here. We’re a family.” It’s meant to convey closeness and unity, it’s meant to imply loyalty and support with no conditions. It’s warm, fuzzy, and it makes you feel good. There is no truth to this at all.

Family is unconditional. Work is not. You can be a family in the sense that there’s unconditional acceptance, but that’s not a team. Teams have conditional performance. It’s not the same. You can’t get fired in a family. On a team, you can. By holding up the family metaphor, you are setting your team up to have expectations of you that you simply can’t meet, you are setting them up to feel betrayed by the very business realities you are having to enforce.

Stop trying to build a family. A better model is a community.

A family is something you’re born into. A community is something you choose to be a part of. It’s a group of people who have chosen to bind themselves together by a shared commitment to a purpose and to each other’s success. Community is a place of belonging, but it’s a belonging that is, should and will always be, conditional.

Here are three principles to build a healthy work community.

Shared Purpose is the Foundation.

Community is not built on a series of social events or team building exercises. It’s forged in the fire of the work you do. The single strongest bond your team will ever have is the shared belief that the work matters. The leader’s job is to be the chief evangelist for that purpose, relentlessly connecting every task and every project to the mission that binds them all.

Belonging is Earned Through Contribution.

In a community, no one is set adrift. Everyone has a place, a role to play. Belonging is not passive. It is not simply a matter of showing up and turning up. It’s a matter of being needed, of being valuable to the group, of having your unique skills recognized and valued by the whole. A leader is an architect of contribution. They are the person responsible for ensuring that every person in the team has a clear understanding of how their specific work supports the success of everyone else.

Dynamics Reinforce the Bonds.

Communities are bound together by shared rhythms. Not the awkward icebreakers you try and do at the annual offsite. But the small, consistent habits that define your culture. The way you start every meeting with a customer story. The way you always recognize failures as learning opportunities. The way you welcome a new member to the team. Dynamics are the glue that holds a community together.

Your team doesn’t need you to be their parent. They need you to be the steward of their community.

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REMEMBER

A family offers unconditional belonging. A community offers earned belonging. Only one of those is sustainable in the workplace.

REFLECT

1. Have I ever used the family metaphor with my team? If so, what expectations might that have created?

2. What are the current dynamics on my team, and do they reinforce our shared purpose?

RESPOND

What is one new rhythm I can introduce this week to strengthen my team’s sense of shared purpose?