Council Post: Are You A Family Or A Team? It’s Time To Figure It Out

By Haj Carr, president and CEO at Trueline, a full-service marketing firm in Portland, Maine.

In 2018, I made one of the toughest personnel decisions I’ve ever had to make. From a company culture standpoint, it turned out to be a crucial one — though I didn’t realize it at the time.

We’d just hired a new team of salespeople, one of whom seemed especially promising. She nailed her interview. She brought the kind of dynamic experience we look for in prospective employees. She was friendly, outgoing and quick to make friends in the office.

There was just one problem: She wasn’t hitting her benchmarks. After six months, and despite our best efforts — helping her identify areas for improvement and encouraging her when she did well — her performance continued to lag. So we had to let her go. 

A few days later, she called me. During our conversation (which was pretty intense), she said something I’ll never forget. “All that talk about Trueline being a family is a lie,” she said. “This isn’t a family. It’s just another business.”

And you know what? She was right.

Ever since then, we’ve tried to reframe how we see ourselves as a company — to rewrite our own narrative. For years, we’d been far too literal in how we approached the idea of family. In a family, you forgive people for their shortcomings and look past their flaws. You love them unconditionally.

To be sure, these are important values for an organization to have. It’s how you build trust. It’s how you create the kind of culture that can withstand big changes—both the good and the bad.

But you know what else is important to running a business (and being part of a healthy family, for that matter)? Setting clear expectations. Being honest. Holding people accountable. Without these values, you risk creating an environment that’s too accommodating and too unconditional. It’s a dynamic where people are held to different standards for things that have nothing to do with the actual work: their promise, their personality or whatever else drew you to hire them in the first place.

I get why companies like to see themselves as a family. It feels good. But when you have to let someone go because their expectations and your expectations weren’t aligned, it feels awful.

After a bit of internal soul-searching, we realized that for our company to reach its full potential, we needed to get away from the old narrative and embrace a different one.

So long, family. Now it’s all about team.

Unlike a family, in a profit-driven company, no one’s position is guaranteed. It has to be earned. This is why so many businesses (including ours) treat the first few months of a person’s tenure like a tryout. Either you figure it out, or you don’t.

In some ways, the chaos of 2020 has made it easier for companies to hold people accountable. When your boat tips over, you quickly figure out who can keep their head above water and who needs a lifejacket. Everyone is suddenly immersed in the same terrifying situation. There’s a strange kind of freedom in that — a willingness to try anything in order to survive. Different benchmarks? Absolutely. Growth strategies you wouldn’t have even considered a year ago? Hear them out. Letting people work from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. in their pajamas? As long as they get their work done, who cares?

At the same time, operating remotely isn’t without its pitfalls. With greater freedom comes greater responsibility for team members and management alike, and when you don’t have that office camaraderie (and accountability), it’s easy to take your foot off the gas. This is why it’s especially important that you set clear expectations and cheer people on when those expectations are met — just like a tight-knit team should do.

In previous articles, I outlined the challenges of maintaining company culture in a time of historic change and upheaval. Some things you’ll do well; other things, not so much. The important thing is to learn. To evolve. And part of that evolution involves recognizing when your narrative — the story that captures who you are as an organization — needs to be rewritten.

Making the pivot from family to team has changed the way we hire, work and communicate. It’s a lesson I wish we’d learned sooner, but now that we’ve learned it, it’s critical that we follow through — while recognizing that as circumstances change, we can’t be afraid to rewrite the narrative again.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned over 10-plus years of creating top-notch content, it’s that the best stories are the ones where every word matters.

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