Do you refer to your work team as a Family?

Do you have a photograph of your current work team?

When was the last time that you appeared in a photo with your work colleagues? Do you keep it on your desk, on your mantle at home or does the concept of a work team photo just seem totally foreign and strange?

While facilitating a team timeout team effectiveness workshop for a client, we engaged in a healthy conversation about the attributes of a high performing team.  The participants anchored on the usual set of attributes such as trust, open communication, clear goals, shared values, clear roles, sense of purpose, willingness to call out dysfunction and alignment.  One of the participants mentioned family.  This sparked a really interesting conversation. 

The question at hand,

Does the word family have a place in an organizational context? Is a work team a family?  Can it be a family?

While the team never built consensus around referring to a work team as a family, there were some interesting points raised.  You cannot choose your family, yet you do get to choose your work team.  Similarly you cannot be fired from your family, yet you can be fired from your job.

Chris Stewart, Chief Development Officer, Athletics at American University recently posted on LinkedIn.

Every sports team calls itself “family.”

But last I checked you aren’t “cut” from your family & insane Uncle Andy gets just as much turkey “playing time” on Thanksgiving as your stud brother Dutch.

Don’t undersell the TEAM. It’s a beautiful and sacred group.

In Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh’s book Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies the authors refer to five stages that companies encounter: Family, Tribe, Village, City and Nation.  An early stage startup is like a family, a dedicated small team of people put everything they have into launching the company with a shared vision for success.  As the company grows to the tribe stage, the founders hire people they are not already familiar with.  The founder’ values are tested much like when one marries into a family where one feels incompatible with one’s in-laws.  The village stage takes the organization to a point where the founders may no longer be involved in all hiring decisions and probably don’t know all of the employees by name. 

It is somewhere between village and city that an organization takes on a life of its own.  Group think can begin to occur more widely and people hide behind decisions referring to company policies and guidelines rather than being guided by their personal values.  This is a dangerous phase for many companies.  The larger the organization, the less of a soul that tends to exist.  The city and nation phase of an organization tend to no longer be driven by purpose, but instead by profits. 

While family as a term for a team has it’s downsides, I believe in leading from the heart.  Creating a family atmosphere on a team ties people together, it makes them accountable to one and other and provides a sense of community that can be lost in a large organization.  As leaders, it is important to make your employees feel “at home” on the team.  Many of the attributes of a family such as caring, sympathy, compassion, trust, open communication are equally important to a high performing team.  The key is to learn to create the family atmosphere within the team even if the organization no longer embodies the family concept. A team where the members feel accountable to one and other has higher engagement, better performance and higher retention rates. It really depends on what type of leader you are and what type of team you want to lead. Don’t let the organization dictate how you lead your team.

If you believe in the concept of your work team as a family, next time you get together as a team, take a team photo. Ask each person to caption the photo. Then print out copies of the photo for each team member with their captions at the bottom. Frame the picture, and give it to your team members. I have a hunch that this small gesture will have a lasting positive impact on the team.

Do you refer to your work team as a family?