We Aren’t Family

These people look like they’re having WAY more fun than a typical office party.

You know who loves Christmas? My grandmother.

The inside AND outside of her house is decorated, including her garage. She has a special set of Christmas plates that comes out once a year that we fill with her mouth-watering peanut butter fudge. She owns a Santa suit (including sleigh bells) to ENSURE none of her grandkids ever missed a yearly Santa photo. I mean the woman truly loves Christmas. While Christmas is her favorite, she loves all of the other holidays as well. My small 17-person extended family all gladly gathers at her house for all the holidays to spend time together.

We come happily and willingly, albeit usually hungrily.

We unconditionally and voluntarily contribute our time, money, and precious weekend hours in order to create treasured memories together.

And this is why I always shied away from using the term “family” to describe my work team.

Don’t get me wrong- my team and I were tight. We walked through many wonderful and also awful seasons alongside each other. We cried at funerals together. We traveled extensively. We awaited cancer results together. We celebrated babies being born. We spent most of our waking hours together, and yet we still weren’t family.

While we personally choose to be friends years after working on the same team, our work relationship was conditional. The stark reality is that my team members invested their time in exchange for money.

I am pretty sure they would not have shown up to work if they hadn’t been getting paid. Heck- I wouldn’t have!

This really hit home when layoffs were announced. How do you emotionally reconcile watching your teammate make sacrifices to complete work, be flexible with constant change, and give 110% of their energy to a role, only to watch them be walked out the next day? Or, even worse, having to walk them out yourself?

That doesn’t sound like family.

You may have a better word for your team, but the label I was more comfortable with was community. We were a tightknit community who were chasing after a set of common goals. The personal friendships were a bonus layer of greatness at work that I will be forever grateful for.

As we strive to be great managers who use analogies, maybe think twice about using the “family” one in the future.

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