Leading a team can be tricky. Although I do maintain that the fundamentals really aren’t that complicated and doing the basics well will put you ahead of most managers.
The trickier parts can sometimes be less obvious than the fundamentals. For example, the language that you use around your team and how you describe your team.
Remember that as a leader, you’re always on stage. This means that everything you say and do will be seen and heard by your team and these things will set standards and expectations.
One easy mistake to make as a leader is to describe your team as “family”.
I get it. I may have even done it myself early in my career. But in the vast majority of cases, it’s not a good idea and can actually make your life more difficult in the long run.
Let’s explore why this is the case and more importantly, what to do instead.
The problems with describing your team as a family
There are a bunch of issues, but we’ll explore a few of the biggest ones that apply to most teams.
Family is subjective and personal
The word “family” means different things to all of us. For some, we associate the word with positive, supportive environments where we enjoy being. For others, we associate it with tension, arguments and difficulty. The rest of us, it may just be something that doesn’t mean much at all.
Either way, we shouldn’t assume that all of your team will resonate positively with you describing them as a family. It’s far too subjective for us.
Instead, we need something more objective, which we’ll come to shortly.
It implies a commitment that some may not want to make
Leading on from this, saying that your team is like a family can imply that certain behaviours or mindsets are required in order to be successful. For example, relationships between family members are usually grounded in love and a bond that runs deep. It’s an “emotion first” relationship with family and whilst emotions aren’t a bad thing in the workplace, it shouldn’t be the thing that bonds your team together.
You don’t need your team to have a commitment that resembles this and it’s not a good idea to expect all of them to make it. Some team members (I’d argue that it’s actually most, particularly younger team members) simply want to do their job and go home.
Asking for commitment and pushing your team to be close with each other isn’t a bad thing at all. But setting the expectation that this resembles the relationship between family members isn’t the way to do it.
It makes boundaries difficult to draw
It’s important for everyone to be able to draw boundaries between work and personal life. For some people, they don’t want any crossover at all between their work lives and their home lives. For example, they don’t have work email on their personal phone or they don’t attend work social events over a weekend.
This is 100% their prerogative and right. At the very least, even if the boundaries aren’t as hard as this, all of us do need some form of boundary. If you don’t, the lines between the two can be blurred, meaning that if times get difficult at work, it negatively affects your personal life as well.
(I’ve been there and done this, it’s not fun).
Describing your team as a family makes it harder for someone to draw these boundaries, whether they are hard or soft. The implication of being a family is that you’re always there for each other and go above and beyond because, well, you’re a family.
What to do instead of calling your team a family
When we distil this problem down, we’re really talking about culture.
I like this definition of culture:
“Culture is the way we do things around here”.
If you describe your team as a family, you’re strongly implying that the way you do things is how a family does things. And we’ve described a few of the problems with this above.
Instead, the question becomes – how do you want your team to do things? This relates to:
- How they talk to each other.
- How they give and receive feedback.
- How they measure performance.
- How they respond to difficult situations.
If we keep this principle in mind, it’s easier to define how you want your team to think of themselves.
Ultimately, we’ve used the correct word throughout this discussion – team.
A team is created to work together, to perform to a high standard and to win.
It comes down to high performance and instilling a culture within your team that cares about high performance.
Now, I’m definitely not describing “hustle culture” here!
Let’s explore what I am describing and how you can use this to drive your own team culture in the right direction.
Define what high performance means
If we continue to think of the purpose of a team, it’s to win whatever game they are playing. In most corporate environments, it’s not so much about winning a single “game” and more about consistently moving forward, hitting objectives and then hitting them again.
Whatever it is for your team, you need to be clear on what really matters.
When it comes to leading a team, I’d argue that the most important thing is to win the game that you’re playing and that this requires everyone to commit to a high level of performance.
If a team doesn’t achieve what it’s set out to achieve, it’s not going to be a team for very long.
The key action here – be clear on what winning means and communicate this to your team.
Define how you expect your team to hit high performance
This is where you can be more specific about your expectations of your team and importantly, be clear on what you don’t expect. For example, you can say that high performance isn’t about working crazy hours every single day or that they need to compromise their health in order to commit to high performance at work.
(Unfortunately, a lot of cultures encourage this in the pursuit of high performance).
Instead, we’re talking about defining standards of performance and being clear on which standards, when achieved, are likely to lead to high performance.
For example:
- Completing work on time and not missing deadlines.
- Communicating as soon as possible if a deadline is likely to be missed.
- Taking accountability for work that you said you were going to do.
- Ensuring that all work meets the brief and is delivered free of errors.
There are more, but hopefully you get the idea.
Define how you support each other to perform
You should be clear on how you expect your team to work together day-to-day in their roles and what truly makes them a team. This is the intangible, but super important side of team culture and relates to things such as:
- How they collaborate and communicate with each other when working on deliverables.
- How they give constructive feedback to each other.
- How they share knowledge and experience with each other.
This really helps you build a team of people who are there for each other and avoids building a team of lone rangers.
Define how you respond when things go wrong
This is a really important one for me.
I truly believe that a team culture really shows itself when things are going wrong, not when they’re going well. It’s pretty easy to do all of the above when everything is going well and your team members will be the best version of themselves when they are winning all of the games that they’re playing..
But how do they respond when they lose? What happens if they lose a bunch of them one after the other?
This is when you see who your team really are.
Whilst you can’t really predict how they’ll respond, you should take the lead when challenging situations present themselves and be clear on how you expect them to respond.
For example, when something goes wrong, you may well accept that your team will have a little wobble and perhaps their confidence will take a hit. But then you need them to shake this off and focus on what they can do to improve and fix the situation.
Celebrate the wins
Finally, in the same way that a family would celebrate a birthday or holiday together, you should take time to think about the best way to celebrate your team wins together.
This is where bonding can truly happen and you don’t need to be a family in order to forge meaningful connections with each other.
Don’t overthink this – it can be as simple as going for a long lunch together or finishing early on a Friday to go and get some food. Whatever it is, make it something that is away from your usual place of work and is very clearly about celebrating a win together.
After all, this is what high performing teams always do.
The one exception to the rule
I mentioned that there is one exception to this rule. For me, the only time that I could accept (although still not completely be okay with) a team being described as a family is when a whole company is in the very, very early stage of growth. When a team is less than five or maybe even ten people, the goal is simply survival – most companies fail within 12 months. So encouraging the feeling of “we’re all in this together” or “it’s us against the world” and using the word family to frame this makes more sense.
Having said that, I still don’t love it! But it’s one exception that I think can work.
Oh and I guess if you actually are family and run a family business – I guess that you get a free pass for that as well 🙂
