Your Work is Not Your Family
Don't Drink the Kool-Aid!
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This week, we will discuss one of the cocktails they love to serve up at work. Your work is not your family. But they try to make you think that, and for good reason - it benefits them immensely.
Does any of this sound familiar to you?
“We are a family.”
“Welcome to the family.”
“We are a family that breathes and lives the mission of the company”
The ultimate achievement for Human Resources and related facilities in companies is to make you believe that your coworkers, and even the organization itself is your family.
Let me be very clear here: they are not. Your work is not your family.
First of all, there is a biological attachment between family members, and even in cases of adopted siblings and parents, the bond is life long. Even in the case of divorce or disownment and name change, your DNA is what it is. Nobody can get “fired” out of the family, and separation is an extremely long and drawn out process. This is why even in countries with very high divorce rates of ~50%, that is still an unfathomable figure in the corporate world: can you imagine half of all employees never ever switching companies?
Then, there is the fact that there is no hierarchical pay structure and ladder for family members. Nobody is getting paid to be a sister, brother, father, or mother. There is no incentive to earn more by working harder at being a family member - that would be nonsense. However, it is a company’s life and blood.
Family members command complete loyalty, no matter how large the commitment. There is no thinking twice once a sibling needs help. This mentality in a workplace is dangerous as it would mutate loyalty into a green light to go above and beyond and do anything to get the job done. Numerous examples and research have shown that overly loyal people are more likely to participate in unethical acts to keep their jobs and are also more likely to be exploited by their employer. In fact, we have no further to look than what happened at Theranos, run by the disgraced and imprisoned Elizabeth Holmes. Employees there were thrust into a workplace environment where absolute loyalty was demanded, and any deviation from compliance resulted in appalling consequences.
We may spend more of our waking hours with our colleagues at work, but your work is not your family. Those who have fallen for this belief is the Human Resources and Corporate Development departments’ success story.
Companies are machines. In fact, they are machines of machines - there are many different departments and groups that have their own processes and procedures, that when combined, make up the larger overall machine. And as with all machines, there must be operators of the machines - people, who design, control, and run the machines. This was a very fundamental concept I learned during my tenure at Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest and most successful hedge fund run by Ray Dalio. He taught us that problems are a set of outcomes produced by machines and the people operating them. In order to practice higher-level thinking, one must look down on our machine, think about how we are operating it, and see how it can be changed to produce better outcomes. Nowhere was the concept of family introduced there, and for that I appreciated the raw truth that company stood by.
Mistaking co-workers and colleagues in a corporate environment as your family and treating them as family members is an incongruent pact benefiting the company. You can get laid off at any moment in time, and expecting anything more than streams of earned income is a risky proposition. That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t have meaningful and enriching relationships with mentors, colleagues and subordinates - these people can have deep influences in your life, but at different levels.
There are rare occasions when a company’s revenue and profit directives can align with what may seem like familial gestures, but in the vast majority of cases, devotees who have given up their entire lives at a company only have a plaque of appreciation to show for their decades of service. Unlike true families, there are expiration dates to your participation in their machinery.
Don’t be fooled - your work is not your family. Not by a long-shot.
➡️ Watch the accompanying YouTube video here: