When it Comes to Your Employees, Think "Team", Not "Family"

Kyle Kirkland

Published on June 3, 2024

We often hear businesses of all sizes refer to their employees as “family.” It’s a feelgood notion but frankly has little connection with reality. First, you don’t get to pick your family, but you should recruit the best employees you can for your job openings and move on if they’re not meeting your standards. Second, if an employee violates the law or fires off an offensive tweet, you’re not going to stand by them and profess their innocence—leave that to their mom. Finally, if you stop inviting your crazy uncle to family events, he’s not going to lawyer up and force the issue. You don’t have to be cold and heartless with your staff, but families can have a high tolerance for aberrant or abhorrent behavior; you can’t.

We would argue that it’s a better idea to manage your staff like a sports team. Everyone on the team, including players, coaches and administrators, has individual talents and purpose and it’s your job as the general manager to direct those resources toward the collective objective. Track workplace-related data and issues, review employee performance against defined criteria, assign team members based on that performance and cut those that can’t or won’t add to the program. If you’re not empathetic and compassionate, team chemistry will suffer, but if you’re honest, candid and consistent in your assessments and assignments, you’ll have a proven, defensible approach to management.

In thinking about your workforce as a team, you need data. Head coaches have statistics, film, scouting and practice reports, injury reports, predictive indicators and observed tendencies to consider when building the game plan and making in-game adjustments. Even most in-game decisions can be assessed with probabilities and expected outcomes. Likewise, you should be documenting time and attendance, incidents, mistakes and successes, notes and meetings with the idea that over time, you’ll build a database of talents and tendencies that will help you make better decisions about how to assign players in roles. You should also review that data for strengths, weaknesses and trends and rethink your game plan for improvement based on that assessment.

If you start referring to your team as a team, you’ll find reinforcement throughout popular culture. Sports broadcasts include all sorts of stat lines, camera angles and assessments with breakdowns by former players with real game experience. Your workplace documentation should include critiques from those who know the job duties and have the confidence that your workforce is conditioned to receiving candid feedback in their daily life. They monitor the likes and shares they get on their social media posts, chase high scores in video games, track their fantasy team and binge watch reality competitions on TV. Empirical scoring, critiques and elimination from competition are common in our personal lives; there’s no reason to avoid them in the workplace.

A lawyer once told me, “It’s not against the law to be unpopular.” That’s not a preferred defense strategy in employment litigation, but sometimes you have to make hard decisions for the collective good. Be compassionate—you’re managing people not machines—and make fair, consistent, data-supported decisions, and you’ll gain the respect of your workforce, see improved performance over time and sleep better knowing that you can defend your decisions against third party challenges.