Some time ago, I accepted a turnaround assignment for a small business that had struggled under alternate phases of first, tyrannical management, and then, benign neglect. The group of young managers running the business were energetic, and had been encouraged to form a strong bond with each other while processing their disenchantment with their former tyrant-boss. I heard repeatedly of the family atmosphere, the collegiality, etc. I was more than a little incredulous.
“Business as family” has always been an uncomfortable metaphor for me; at their core, the logical implications are disturbing. It’s bad if it’s just a lie to comfort staff, to help them feel secure in a struggling business environment, and it’s worse if it’s true – just think of your eccentric Uncle Fred who gets drunk at holidays, and think how “stuck with him” you are no matter what he does or how he acts.
At my turnaround, the impact of the family atmosphere was corrosive; like many families, the members had no coping mechanisms for having truly frank conversations and holding each other accountable. Some of the team pulled more than their own weight, others rested on their laurels. They were superficially nice to each other, but secretly frustrated: truly, a “passive aggressive” family dynamic. There was difficulty in holding each other accountable that prevented any coherent strategy from taking root.
Within a week of joining the company, I brought everyone into the conference room to talk about the incredible potential of the business, and some high-level barriers to getting there. “I’ve heard this is a family,” I said to slight nods and expectant smiles. My next words “But, we’re NOT a family…” were greeted with puzzled looks and slight shock by most, bigger smiles by a few. What then followed was a discussion of the type of accountability we had to create and adhere to in order to reach our lofty objectives.
The words weren’t perfect, but the sentiment took root, and in our case, served to establish a new standard for performance. I and my newly-formed leadership team then got to work to truly fix the legacy dynamic:
- We assessed – in some brutally open conversations and using Patrick Lencioni’s excellent Organizational Health Survey – our leadership team’s level of trust and cohesiveness, the level of clarity of our mission and priorities, and our ability to create and communicate clarity for the entire organization. The scores were horrible, and as a result created a little insight, shared humor, and a fairly common understanding of the work ahead.
- We set up a culture of accountability, which included: regular team meetings; regular company conference calls in which we shared real results – both good and needing improvement; some staffing changes at the leadership team level to reflect a new mandate to fix chronic problems holding the company back.
- We reassessed trust, cohesion, and clarity through a periodic check-up on our health survey results to see how we were doing. We continued to refine/improve it.
Over the following weeks, we built a revised team that more wholly embodied this level of trust, teamwork, and open conversation. We met regularly, with members accountable to each other for updates and progress in their respective areas according to newly established KPIs.
Lest the non-family idea sound like all work and no play, we did some fun team-building things, too, including regular leadership team dinners, and a round-robin after-hours table tennis tournament in which our conference room table and an attached net served as the court.
In six months, the new team weathered some significant downsizing and restructuring while achieving new performance milestones in nearly every area – signing our largest-ever clients, vastly increasing recurring revenue as a percentage of total revenue, adding new products, and reversing declining growth to achieve highest YoY growth of any business in the portfolio. The organization no longer professed to be a family, but it certainly had made strides to becoming a high-performing team.
In my experience, while mutual care and humane concern for one another as individuals should be a core part of any working environment worth joining, the inherent business “contract” with all staff is performance-based, and as such, has little resemblance to “family.” Keeping the two separate can have profoundly beneficial results for your organization.