It is all too common for a leader to tell a room full of employees that the company is a family.
They always mean it kindly, but what they are picturing is the Hallmark version: people who show up for each other, who forgive the bad quarter, and who stay through the hard part because that is what families do. Belonging. Loyalty. Care.
I think the metaphor of company as family can be accurate, but not for those Waltons-esque, Leave It to Beaver reasons.
Families are also where you find the parent who cannot be corrected, the sibling rivalry over a finite supply of approval, the guilt deployed as a management tool, and the one person who does most of the work and is thanked for none of it. Families are where people tolerate treatment they would never accept anywhere else because leaving costs so much.
If you look at things that way, “Our company is a family” doesn’t seem so inaccurate after all.
The same thing happens with the other favorite comparison. A certain type of leader also loves to say that the company is a team, referring to a championship roster. They aren’t talking about the type of team I grew up watching in Ohio…the 0-16 Cleveland Browns were also a team. The Bundys from “Married… with Children” were a family.
But these aren’t the types of families and teams they are referring to, even if they are the more accurate comparisons.
The metaphor alone tells you nothing. A company can be a good family or a bad one, a good team or the Browns. And calling the company a family or a team doesn’t move it any closer to being the kind of family or team that leaders want it to be.
Families and teams both have a culture that bonds them or breaks them. When a leader reaches for one of these metaphors, they are describing the culture they wish they had.
The trouble is that culture is not something you describe. It is defined by what gets rewarded.
What does your organization reward?
Not what it says it rewards. Not the values on the wall, the laminated card, the slide in the onboarding deck. What behavior, when someone exhibits it, results in that person getting promoted?
That is your culture. All of it. Everything else is decoration.
I spent seven and a half years at a company with genuinely good leadership principles. I am not being sarcastic; I embraced them. They were clear, memorable, and unusually well written, and thousands of people could recite them from memory, which is more than most companies achieve.
But when it came time to evaluate someone, or to promote them, one principle dominated everything: deliver results.
The others were honored. You had to demonstrate no obvious weakness in any of them. But deliver results is what the room actually argued about, what the documents were built around, and what carried a candidate over the line. I know this because I wrote those documents. When I put someone up for promotion, I led with their results, because that is what the system could read. I was describing my people in the language that would get them what they had earned.
Here is the part that should bother you, and something that still bothers me.
I watched more than one leader get promoted while running over forty percent annual turnover on their team.
Forty percent. Meaning that in a year, four out of ten people decided that whatever was happening there was not worth staying for. That is not ambiguous. It is one of the few things in a large organization that is unambiguously measurable, and it sat right there in the data while the promotion went through, all because results were being delivered.
This practice obviously went against the stated principle to hire and develop the best people. The issue is that hiring is easily measurable, while development is not.
Those leaders hired constantly. They had to; they were replacing four out of ten people every year. So they had hiring volume, hiring bar raiser participation, requisitions closed, headcount grown. All of it visible, countable, and defensible in a document.
Develop is the other half of that principle, and it is nearly invisible. It happens in one-on-ones nobody records. It shows up two years later in someone else’s promotion, usually credited to that person’s current manager. It has no metric attached to it that survives contact with a review committee.
So the principle was satisfiable by half of itself. Hire enough people and the sentence is technically true, and the turnover you generated becomes evidence of your hiring prowess rather than evidence of your failing leadership.
A company can print “develop the best” on the wall in forty-point type, but if the promotion committee cannot measure it, it is not a value. It is a wish.
When you see this in action, it is pretty hard to believe that the company is similar to a family in any positive regard.
There is a sharper version of this, and it is the one that convinced me the problem is structural rather than personal.
I watched capable senior managers sit on the bubble for promotion, get told they looked light on hiring and developing the best, and suddenly conjure up a cohort of mentees. Suddenly there were promotions being pushed forward for people on the team, multiple all at once, from someone who had not promoted anyone in two years.
Right as the promotion document was being assembled… this is not a coincidence.
I am not saying that these people were acting cynically. I do not believe they were. They had spent two years all-in on delivering results, because that is what the organization had shown them would determine their trajectory. When they learned that a second thing would be checked, they addressed it. Efficiently.
That is not a character failure. That is a competent person responding accurately to a measurement system.
And it reveals the actual rule of organizational culture: whatever is rewarded at the core gets the majority of your time, every day, for years. Everything else can be caught up on in the few months before your document goes forward.
The mentees were real. The promotions were real, and I expect the three people who got promoted were happy about it. But four mentees acquired in a quarter is not a leader who develops people. It is a leader who has been given a new rubric.
I should tell you what this system taught me personally.
One year, I broke my arm. Badly enough for real painkillers. Within days, I was back in the office, still on oxycodone, because I believed I needed to be there to make sure my team delivered.
Think about that decision. Nobody ordered me in. I drove myself there, medicated, because somewhere along the way I had absorbed exactly what the system valued, and the calculation felt obvious rather than insane.
My manager said nothing at the time. No conversation, no question about whether I should be there, no suggestion that I go home.
It came up months later, in my annual review, as an observation. Something about seeming out of sorts, and sometimes slurring my speech.
I have thought about that for years. People saw that something wasn’t right and retained it, but it didn’t serve them to acknowledge it in the moment. It would have cost them something and helped me, so they saved it for later, for the forum designed for judgment rather than help.
That is not a failure of leadership principles. Every principle on our wall would have told him to send me home. It is an incentives failure. Nothing in the system paid him to intervene, and the review document had a box for his observation.
So what do you do with this if you lead people?
Stop auditing what your culture says. Audit what it pays.
Look at your last several promotions and ask what those people actually had in common. Not what the promotion document claimed, but what was actually true about them and their work. If it is one thing, that thing is your culture, and every value you list alongside it is a preference at best.
Then look at the values you claim that nobody can measure. Developing people is almost always on that list, along with judgment, long-term thinking, and integrity under pressure. If you cannot describe what evidence of that value would look like in a promotion decision, you have not committed to it. You have decorated with it.
When you do look at the evidence, look at the dates. A leader who has developed people has been doing it for years, quietly, in ways that are hard to assemble into a list. A leader who discovered the requirement in March will have a very tidy list, all of it from this year.
You do not have to make everything measurable. Some of the most important things a leader does will never be legible to a committee, and pretending otherwise produces worse metrics rather than better cultures. But you should at least be honest with your people about which of your stated values will actually carry them, and which ones are aspirations you have not yet built a way to see.
That honesty is rarer than it sounds, and people can handle it. What they cannot handle is being told that development matters, doing the development, and then watching the person with forty percent turnover get the promotion.
The question I would leave with you:
Think about the last person your organization promoted.
What did they actually do to earn it?
Now compare that to what your organization says it values.
If those two answers match, congratulations. You have a real culture.
If they do not, then you already know what your people know, and you have known it longer than you have admitted:
Your company is not a family, and it is not a team. It is a system that pays for certain behaviors and tolerates the rest.
The good news is that this makes it changeable in a way families and teams are not. You cannot lecture a culture into existence, and you cannot name it into existence either. But you can decide, deliberately, what the next promotion says about what matters in your organization.
That decision is the only culture statement that matters.
