
Your Company Is Not a Family  - ghosh
http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/06/your-company-is-not-a-family/
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jordan0day
It's certainly not a family, but a "team" probably isn't right, either.

If you company wants to use a sports team metaphor, that's fine, but just
remember that many professional sports have _players unions_ and _guaranteed
contracts_.

Oh, what's that? Not such a big fan of the sports team metaphor now?

~~~
moron4hire
They also tend to make tradition-based rather than evidence-based decisions.
How many times have you heard, "hiring so-and-so just (made|didn't make) good
football-sense"? Superstition is extremely strong in sports franchises.

~~~
jordan0day
I think you could successfully make the argument that most hiring decisions
are probably done like that.

Of course, I would imagine there's a lot fewer metrics available for hiring
for most non-athlete positions, so "moneyball" might be a bit tougher for off-
the-field jobs.

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csbrooks
If you want every one of your employees to be a "superstar", just pay them
millions a year, and the sports metaphor is a great fit.

Otherwise, sometimes you gotta work with what you've got. In real life, you
can't just let everyone go who isn't a superstar, unless people are tripping
over themselves to get a spot at your company.

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adwf
Using sports metaphors is a particularly bad way to go about it in this
instance. The average young NFL player is only expecting a career lasting
about 5 years, maybe 10 for exceptional guys; The average young office worker
is looking for 40 years.

If you were fired as frequently as players get traded in NFL, we'd be living
hellish careers!

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arethuza
But isn't that the point they are trying to make - that sports teams can be
effective despite have very high rates of staff turnover because everyone has
realistic expectations of the employer-employee relationship?

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XorNot
In careers which last, at most, 5-10 years. Not 40.

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arethuza
I'd actually be interested to see the stats for developers and how long the
average career is. Now obviously some people make it to their 40s, 50s and
later but I suspect most don't.

~~~
michaelochurch
What do you think they do when they get to that age? Where do they go?

My observation is that age discrimination isn't a brick wall, so much as an
increased difficulty in doing things a person should be able to do. It's not
like you can't get a programming job after 40, because obviously people do.
It's just that job searches are no longer completed in 2 weeks; it's closer to
4 months.

What no one told us in school was that getting better at our jobs, past a
certain point, makes job searches harder and more complex, especially because
HR drones don't understand our specialties and tend to use them against us.
("Doesn't have 3 years of Swift experience? No hire.") Structuring a society
as a pyramid actually works when it is in transition from poverty to
industrial wealth, but it's a disaster in a stable state.

~~~
vkjv
In my experience, I've never seen people over 40 have any more issues than
younger folks getting programming jobs.

However, the reason you don't see many, is that most don't want that job by
the time they are that age. For most programmers, they will hit a glass
ceiling on salary somewhere in their 30s. If they want to make more money, and
most people do, they transition into management.

The answer to the question, "where did they go?" is pretty simple. Management.

~~~
JabavuAdams
Yeah, that's been my experience as well. I'm 38, and I get pinged for a job
about 2-3 times a week, but basically I don't want to work at any of them (ask
me again in 6 months).

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brudgers
A typical company is no more a professional sports team than it's Ward, Wally,
June, and the Beaver. More likely it's the sports team equivalent of a 2am
domestic dispute call to the trailer park on _Cops_ \- leadership is running a
win at all costs T-ball team.

The sports metaphor doesn't change the fact theyre cutting people for their
obsession with ponies.

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guard-of-terra
These comparsions are meaningless. Your real family might not be a family in
the rainbows and unicorns sense.

On the other hand, your company might be quite like a family in Lannister
sense.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
In general, your company should _not_ be a family in the sense that they have
the right to demand your help whenever and wherever. With a company, there is
a contract and limits.

Besides which, you're lucky if you have a tiny handful of people in the entire
world with whom things are "in the rainbows and unicorns sense". Rainbows and
unicorns actually takes a whole lot of hard work at making interpersonal
relations work well.

~~~
PavlovsCat
> With a company, there is a contract and limits.

To be fair, this is true for people, too, they're just unwritten. Family to me
is kinda like a very very close friend; I might expect more support, and give
more support, but there is still no outright demanding stuff, and there are
limits.

But I still don't think a company should be like a family, because I think the
whole human race should be like a family :P We can still rib on each other,
and compete, but to outright snatch up as much as we can to the detriment of
everybody else, results in a swift but friendly smack by grandma. I wish I
could coat it in academic enough words though so such a proposal might fly
here; I know it's not realistic in the short and medium term, but I would
consider it a worthwhile long term ideal.

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moron4hire
How about we just stop saying a company is like-a-family or like-a-team or
like-a-band or like-an-anything-that-isn't-a-company? Companies are companies.
They are their own distinct thing.

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dingdingdang
While the article tries it really only manages to scratch the surface of the
iceberg when it comes to the, generally epic, failure of company structures to
provide a meaningful environment in which human beings can thrive as whole
beings.

The idea of the "sports team" is not functional - the limited human
interactions necessary within an artificially established playing field will
NEVER mirror the real world challenges a company, and the people within it,
faces. Sure that artificial playing field allows an easy "team" mentality but
this "team" will never work against real-life challenges.

~~~
cjf4
Limited human interaction?

Team sports primarily consists of human interaction. You practice with your
team, have meetings with the coaching staff, film sessions, team meals, travel
together, team training sessions, and that's before you even set foot on the
field or court.

And the leadership and communication skills are directly transferable and
valuable to a business setting. The business unit as a sports team idea is a
bit tired and cliche at this point because it's been a comparison made for at
least 50 years.

But that speaks to the cliche's validity. David Foster Wallace wrote in
Infinite Jest "cliches earned their status as cliches because they were so
obviously true."

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netcan
There are analogies and then there are analogies.

One very common type is of the talk is cheap variety. Management can declare
their company to be a team or a family or an enchanted kingdom. They read
about it in Harvard Review. Like a mission statement or a slogan , these thing
only mean something when you put your money (literally and figuratively) where
your mouth is. Most don't.

The second type is a half hearted analogy. The company really intends to be
like a team, a family or a special forces unit. But, the cost to really making
that mean a lot is high. You can make the business somewhat family like or
team like relatively cheaply and inform your company culture, but there are
going to be countess cases where the cost is high. FO employees to really buy
into it, they need to accept this costs. Most don't. What they have is
rhetoric and a certain amount of investment into team building. Fair enough,
but not what this article is decribing

The type of team like environment the article is describing doesn't come
cheap? You need to have good feedback & measurement mechanisms for performance
on the team level. You need success and failure to be very well compensated
for and it needs to be based on team performance. Are you compensating success
well enough that members of the team will want to see the poorest performers
periodically replaced?

A professional sports team is an exceptional environment. The people there are
high achievers and they are ambitious. They are the 1%, most hardworking _and_
talented. They get a lot of money and a lot of glory. They're in 'once in a
hundred lifetimes' state of mind. Can your company offer that? Is 5 years of
success on you "team" the pinnacle of a career? Are they making more now than
they ever will be? Will these be the glory years they relive?

Functions with very straightforward feedback, like sales tend to develop these
dynamics with the right compensation structure. A small startup with only a
handful of high equity employees can develop this culture naturally. Trying to
artificially create it elsewhere is hard. I also suspect it's near impossible
a group with over 50 or so people.

It's easy to say this stuff. Does Netflix really put this into practice? Does
anyone?

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smegmalife
Lots of companies are different. There are some that are more like sports
teams, and some that are like families, and heck, some actually are families.

This article does nothing but debate semantics. Every metaphor breaks down at
some point, so I don't see the need to debate which works the best.

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vkjv
#1 reason a company is not a family. You do (or don't do things) for your
family despite personal loss because it is good for the whole. That is
something most people do not do for their company, nor should they.

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Kiro
So just because it's not exactly 100% like a family you're not allowed to draw
a comparison?

~~~
mrestko
The problem is that the way family relationships are different from all other
relationships (namely that they are lifelong) is the exact way in which a
business is unlike a family.

~~~
afarrell
Familial relationships are also unchosen, unlike relationships in companies.

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Cthulhu_
Aaaaa full-screen popup! Can we start adding popup warnings to submissions
like this?

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Jdfmiller
The fact that they didn't include a quote or captioned photo from Michael
Scott is a missed opportunity.

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walshemj
I know business schools are looked down on by the "proper" parts of the Host
UNI but winningest FFS this is the HBR not the back page of the Sun.

Doesn't exactly show Harvard in a good light that one of their publications
uses such god awful English.

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coldtea
> _Your Company Is Not a Family_

Really? But I want to believe the paternalistic BS by my bosses (who'd fire me
at the first chance of reduced profit margins without a second thought), and
fill the empty whole in the center of my life with some purpose based on my
job.

