Why Your Team Is NOT Your Family (Challenge #106)

Your team is (still) NOT your Family. 

So back about 75 episodes ago, I released what might still be the most controversial episode of the Kind Leadership Challenge. The Premise was simple: YOUR TEAM IS NOT YOUR FAMILY.

I believed this was true then, and I believe it even more now with another year and a half of leadership reading, thinking, and experience. That’s why I’m revisiting this topic, because I think it’s easy for those of us in education, libraries, and other caring professions to accidentally get a little too enmeshed in our teams for our own good. And if you’re in a tight-knit, emotionally close team, and shaking your head at this topic, I just want to ask you one thing.  

How many functional families do you know of?

A school or library team is not like a family for one very simple reason. Your employer will never love you, and your team members should never love you. Trying to love them is a one way road to burnout and disaster.  Now, both a healthy team and a healthy family collaborate in a spirit of trust and psychological safety, and I think that’s where this confusion of work and family might have gotten started. 

However, The purpose of a work team and the purpose of a family are very different. In a school or library, you are attempting to meet performance goals and serve your students, patrons, and community. In a family, the goal is to protect the family and keep it safe and well. Both of these are important goals, but they have different implications, which lead to very different power dynamics, member turnover, and interpersonal challenges.

First up, Power Dynamics. Because the Goal of a family is to protect and love its members as they grow, power dynamics ideally become more balanced and shift around over time. Think of what happens when you wake up one day and your child has seemingly become a teenager overnight. Or when dealing with a parent who is aging. As those dynamics change things gradually shift and change to reflect what’s in the best interests of the people you love

In a workplace, however, power works differently. The goal is not primarily the wellness of individual members of the team, but rather the collective effectiveness of the team in doing work that’s designed to meet your goals. For that reason, in a team there are defined leaders and team members, and although people switch roles within a team, it’s all much more regimented, documented and precise. Assuming that all those power dynamics play out within a culture of clarity and trust, the differences in how power works between a team and a family aren’t inherently bad. But they mean that what happens in a healthy team is very different from what happens in a healthy family.   There are performance standards that have to be met, and behavioral expectations that have to be enforced. Budgets have to be balanced, even if it means cuts to services or staff, And although a kind leader will expect loyalty from their team, they don’t want so much loyalty that their team is scared to speak up or ask questions if their leader is making a mistake. More seriously, A leader also doesn’t have the right to ask a team to put the organization’s needs above their own health and rest. 

Second, there is, or at least should be, a heck of a lot more turnover in a healthy team versus a healthy family. A new arrival to your team should be welcomed as a valuable asset who brings new perspectives, not eyed with suspicion like a new baby sibling who was promised to be a fun playmate but really just smells funny and cries all the time. And a departure of a team member should be seen as a bittersweet farewell, not an act of exile or betrayal. Through no malice or intent, overly tight teams can be hard to break into, and at their worst can come with unspoken initiations and hazing rituals. And close-knit organizations sometimes struggle with departures of longtime members, both for those who move on, and the people who remain. That means teams can stagnate, and harden, and become brittle. And family though they may feel like they are, a too-solid team can crack into panic and toxicity at the first big unexpected change.

So why is it that people, leaders included, have such a tendency to mix up their teams with their families in the first place? My working theory is that all of us, myself included, bring our family baggage to work, and semi-consciously try to recreate those relationships if we’re not careful. I’m fortunate enough to have grown up in a pretty healthy family by the somewhat looser standards of the 1980s and 90s, but I still have some issues here and there because I was raised by fallible human beings. And as a leader I have to be especially careful not to bring those issues into the office. I’ve witnessed and coached in situations where people are creating office drama by playing out their past and present dynamics with spouses, parents, kids, often without realizing it. I am not a therapist, so I’m not about to suggest treatment for that sort of thing. And as a leader, neither should you. Here’s what you should do instead.

If the key difference between a work team and a family team is the power dynamic, then it’s time for you as a leader to take a deep breath, compartmentalize whatever family stuff YOU may have brought to the situation, and calm the waters by establishing clear boundaries and expectations. You can’t fix the fact that your front desk clerk’s uncle stole her slice of birthday cake when she was seven, but you can require her to speak to her manager with respect. And that manager might have to learn to take a breath and remember that her desk clerk isn’t her challenging toddler who’s been keeping her up nights all week.  

And as sad as some of you may find this, you will best be able to manage these inevitable dynamics by keeping yourself from getting too close to your team. In most cases, you should strive to be “friendly, but not friends”. You need to preserve your ability to step back onto the balcony, so you can observe your team, see how it works, and humanely but effectively steer them where they need to go to meet your shared goal. I realized from my first “management” role supervising student workers that I would never be able to be as close with my team as they were with each other. And with each time I moved up the ladder, the distance grew a little. I have had to grieve that. But it’s a sacrifice that’s required of a kind leader who wants their team to meet their full potential. 

So here’s your challenge for this week. Grab your journal, and go to a quiet space somewhere. And do an honest examination of whether or not your team has become a bit too much like a family. And if it has, what steps can you take to establish some distance? If you want to take this on by yourself, the next steps checklist at kindleadershipchallenge.com/next can provide a great structure for investigating the strengths and opportunities in your team culture. And if you need a sanity check from fellow leaders to make sure you’re seeing things clearly, head to kindleadershipguild.com to learn more about my private community of leaders committed to helping each other build a better world without burning out.