“We’re a family here.”

How many times have you heard that in regards to a company culture? It is meant as a selling point. It is an offering of belonging, a warm place where people look out for each other. I am going to go through and explain how this is a trap and why you should be wary anytime you hear it.

Following on from my previous piece on imposter syndrome last week, I wrote about culture in my “Think Like a CTO” book and I think it bears highlighting again. This phrase physically makes me gag. It is such a toxic and telling phrase. I am going to explain why and layout a better way.

What the Family Language Actually Does

The family metaphor in hiring is one of the most effective manipulation tools in management. And it works because it sounds like the opposite of manipulation. It sounds like an invitation.

I want to unpack the psychology here because it matters. When a CEO says “we are a family,” they are activating something deep. They are not talking about your salary, your equity, or your role. They are offering identity. They are saying that work will give you meaning beyond your paycheck. They are implying that the people around you will care about you in a way that goes beyond professional courtesy.

That sounds good. Of course it sounds good. Everyone wants to be part of something meaningful. Everyone wants to be cared for. Another close cousin of this phrase is “act as a business owner.” This is equally toxic.

But here is the problem. The CEO does not actually mean it the way you hear it. They mean they want loyalty, sacrifice, and emotional investment. They want you to stay late without complaining. They want you to prioritize the company over your own life. They want you to feel guilty when you consider leaving. That is what “family” means in a corporate context. It means you owe them something they never explicitly asked for.

I have seen this play out dozens of times. A manager hires someone with all the warmth and family language. The employee works hard for two years. Then they get a better offer. They give notice. And the manager says something like “I am really hurt by this. I thought we meant something to you.” Not “I understand this is a good move for your career.” Hurt. Personal hurt. As if a professional decision is a personal betrayal. The manager is not being malicious. Most of them do not even realize they are doing it. They genuinely believe in the family metaphor. But genuine belief does not make it true. It just makes the manipulation sincere. And sincere manipulation is harder to spot.

The Problem With Unconditional Acceptance

The sports team metaphor is often criticized as cold. People hear professional sports team and they think of ruthless benching, contract disputes, and performance metrics without mercy.

That is not the right reading.

Netflix published its famous culture deck in 2009. It said this. We model ourselves on a professional sports team, not a family. Families are about unconditional love. They can also be dysfunctional, as anyone who has watched Ozark knows. Professional sports teams focus on performance and picking the right person for every position, even when that means swapping out someone they love for a better player.

They love the player. They still swap them out. That is the difference. The family model does not avoid tough decisions. It postpones them until they become corrosive. The sports team model does not avoid care. It separates care from the inability to make a call.

I want to dwell on this because it is the part people get wrong. The Netflix model is not about being cold. It is about being clear. It is about saying we value you as a person and we need you to perform at a certain level. Those are not contradictory statements. They are the basic ingredients of any honest relationship.

But when a company chooses the family model instead, it trades that honesty for something else. It trades clarity for forgiveness. And that is where the real damage begins.

The Accountability Void

The Carpenter’s Lament shows up everywhere in family culture companies. A new manager arrives. They look around. They see the mess. They say the previous person left things in a terrible state. The processes are broken. The team is demoralized. The codebase is a disaster. They say this loudly and often. It makes them look good by comparison. It also means they never actually fix anything. They just blame the last person who could not fix it either. In a family culture, this cycle repeats forever. Because no one is ever held accountable for the state they inherited. They just pass the blame to the next person while everyone pretends the dysfunction is a personality issue rather than a structural one.

Here is what the Carpenter’s Lament actually sounds like in a real meeting. The new VP stands up. They say the roadmap is unclear because the previous VP never documented anything. They say the team is not used to high standards because the previous VP was too nice. They say the engineering debt is staggering because the previous VP prioritized speed over quality. Then they lay out a six month plan to fix everything. Six months later they have the same problems. And they blame the previous VP again. Because the previous VP is still the most convenient explanation for everything that is not working.

Does this sound familiar? Does your company have a culture of speaking ill of the departed?

The family culture enables this because it does not have a mechanism for confronting problems directly. Family forgives. Family understands. Family gives people time. That sounds good until you realize it means no one is ever held to a standard. It means underperformance is treated as a temporary state that will resolve itself. It never does.

The research backs this up.

What HBR Actually Found

This is not hearsay, there is data that backs this up with Harvard Business Review finding something disturbing. When employees feel their workplace is like a family, they are significantly less likely to speak up about wrongdoing. They keep quiet. Not because they are afraid of retaliation. Because they do not want to betray the family. The thing that was supposed to create safety creates silence instead.

The family metaphor does not just fail. It is actively harmful. It creates a culture where the most important information never reaches the people who need it. Problems stay hidden. Bad behavior continues. And everyone smiles and says everything is fine because we take care of our own.

The same HBR research showed that the silence effect is stronger in companies where the family language is used by senior leadership. The CEO saying we are a family makes it harder for people to speak up, not easier. The warmth is a muzzle.

Another study from 2021 by Joshua Luna in HBR reinforced this. He found that employees in family-culture companies report higher emotional exhaustion. They burn out faster. Because they are not just doing their jobs. They are managing the emotional expectations of people who think they are entitled to a personal relationship with them.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said something important about this in 2024. He said he used to call Airbnb a family. Then they had to do layoffs. And he realized you cannot fire a family member. The word stopped meaning what he thought it meant. He had to change the language because the language was trapping him into bad decisions.

There is a better way. Frame the truth. I wrote about this in my book. Call it out.

The Tour of Duty Model

Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, wrote about this in his book “The Alliance”. He proposed a different model. Instead of pretending employment is a lifelong kinship, he said, treat it as a tour of duty. A two to four year commitment where both sides invest in each other. You help the company achieve a specific mission. The company helps you build your career. Then you move on. No one is abandoned. No one is betrayed. The relationship is explicit.

I think about this model constantly because it solves so many of the problems family culture creates. It removes the ambiguity. The employee knows what is expected of them. The manager knows when to plan for the transition. Both sides can invest fully without pretending it is forever.

The tour of duty is not a contract. It is a shared understanding. It says this. We have a finite time together. Let us make it count. Let us be honest about what we want. And let us part as allies, not as family members who are breaking up.

One of my interview questions is “when will you leave this role?”. It is not meant as a trap, it is an honest question. That is the standard we should be aiming for. Honesty about impermanence. Not warmth about permanence.

What the Data Says

The median job seeker on Indeed has been with their current employer for two years and three months. Sixteen percent of new hires apply for another job within their first three months. The average person changes jobs twelve times in their lifetime. And yet companies keep hiring people under a model that assumes permanence. They invest in a fiction.

Bain in a 2022 study, found that people are not leaving work. They are leaving cultures (or as the old saying goes, you leave the boss not a company). Specifically, they are leaving cultures that demand personal sacrifice without offering personal growth. The family metaphor is a demand for personal sacrifice disguised as belonging.

Let me be blunt about what this means for hiring. When you use family language in an interview, you are not attracting better candidates. You are attracting candidates who are more susceptible to emotional manipulation. You are filtering for people who want to feel needed rather than people who want to do great work. That is not a hiring strategy. That is a vulnerability you are building into your team from day one.

The Kinship Trap in Action

This creates a phenomenon I call “The Kinship Trap”. It works like this. A manager hires someone using family language. The new employee buys in. They work hard, stay late, and integrate deeply. Two years pass. The employee gets a better offer. They give notice. And the manager reacts with genuine hurt. Not professional disappointment. Personal hurt. How could you leave the family? The employee feels guilty. Maybe they stay. Maybe they resent it. Either way the relationship is poisoned.

The Carpenter’s Lament is what comes next.

The Interview Question That Exposes Everything

Here is a simple test. Next time you are in an interview and the CEO uses the word family, ask them this:

What happens when someone leaves?

Watch them pause. Watch them reach for an answer. The good ones will say something about alumni networks and staying in touch. The honest ones will admit they handle it badly. And the ones who just say “we stay in touch” without being able to name how are the ones you should walk away from.

The answer to that question tells you everything about whether the company actually believes what it says or whether it is just repeating a line it heard at a leadership offsite.

The Antidote

The antidote is simple but it requires honesty that most leaders cannot stomach. When you are hiring, name the expiration date. Not literally. But honestly. Say this. We expect you to be here for a few years. We expect you to do great work. We expect you to leave. And when you do, we will cheer you on. I am proud of some of the people I have lost from my team over the years. They have gone on to do great things at great companies and I have a sense of pride that I was a small part of their journey.

Do it. Do it in next interview you give.

The Campfire Model

There is a better way to think about this. It is the Campfire.

Imagine a group of people gathered around a fire. They share stories. They cook food. They stay warm. Over time, people get up and leave. Some walk into the dark. Others take their place. The fire does not go out when someone leaves. It keeps burning because the people who remain tend it. And the people who leave carry warmth with them. They start their own fires somewhere else.

That is what a healthy company should look like. Not a family where departure is betrayal. Not a transactional machine where people are interchangeable parts. A campfire. People gather, contribute, and move on. The fire endures. The relationships survive the departure.

The Campfire model is honest about the one thing family culture refuses to admit. People will leave. They will leave for better pay, better roles, different cities, or different lives. Some will leave on great terms. Some will leave because they could not stand it anymore. But they will leave.

When you accept this, the entire relationship changes.

The Alumni Network as Strategy

Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh also argued that the strongest companies maintain lifelong relationships with former employees. Not out of sentiment. Out of strategy. Former employees are your best recruiters. They are your best sales channel. They are your early warning system for market shifts. And they are the people who will build the companies you will compete with, partner with, or acquire.

Every person who leaves your company is a potential future customer, partner, or advocate. If you treat them badly, they become a detractor. If you treat them well, they become a force multiplier. The cost of treating people well on the way out is essentially zero. A generous email. A reference call when they need it. An invitation to the company party. The return on that investment is enormous.

The data shows the median tenure is just over two years. Most people will not be at your company long enough to see a product through three major releases. That is not a failure of retention. It is the new normal. And the companies that refuse to accept it are the ones that lose.

Being Part of the Journey

The deepest truth about the Campfire model is this. You do not need to keep people forever to be part of their lives. You do not need permanence to matter. The two years someone spends at your company can be a defining period in their career. They will carry what they learned with them. They will carry the relationships with them. They will tell stories about their time with you for the rest of their professional lives.

That is the thing the family culture misses. It demands permanence because it cannot handle the idea that something meaningful can be temporary. But most of the meaningful things in life are temporary. A great meal. A conversation. A season. A job that changed how you think.

The question is not whether people will stay. The question is whether the time they spent with you was worth it. And that depends entirely on how you treat them on the way out.

The choice is simple. You can be a family that disavows people when they leave. Or you can be a campfire where people gather, contribute, and carry the warmth with them.

The fire does not go out when someone walks away. Only bad firekeepers believe that.

Stop pretending otherwise.

AI Disclaimer: Gemini Nano Banana Pro was used to generate the photo – Star Trek V (1989)