We Are Not Family

Upending a fashionable mental model

There is a narrative from the US Air Force these days about the need to get ready for a big war with a major adversary like China. Trouble is, the Air Force perpetually chants this narrative, because it drives spending and enlarges the budget, which is critical to acquisition of weapons the service sees as strategically essential.

One way we'll know the discussion has moved from routine propaganda to serious defense talk is when the Air Force deals with its pilot shortage. For a decade, the service has been roughly 10% understrength in its most central and fundamental role.

There is a darkly interesting story about how the coolest job in the world became a staffing challenge risking national security.

I had the misfortunate of participating in one particular subplot in this tale. In fact it was one of the path stones leading me to depart, many years earlier than planned, the organization to which I had committed my adult life.

Early in my squadron command tour, my colleagues and I were given the dubious task of performance ranking each of our captains from 1 through n.

We then engaged in a second process to combine the five separate stack rankings into one master file. This will sound familiar to those who have participated in similar "talent management" processes in private enterprise (scare quotes used deliberately).

The end result of our work was a ranked list of about 250 C-17 pilots, virtually all of whom had come of age as seasoned combat aviators during the post-9/11 wars. All of whom represented years of time and millions of dollars of investment to build and develop their skills as military practitioners.

The purpose of the exercise was not to manage our talent. We weren't plotting next steps for each pilot to maximize their development.

The purpose was to give our headquarters staff the information it needed to chop the bottom 5% of the list out of the service as part of a Reduction In Force (RIF), which is mil-speak for downsizing. Someone had decided that to fit within our budget, we needed to put some of our people out of their jobs. And further decided that despite a crushing operational tempo, already stretched staffing at the core of our combat capability, and a looming pilot shortage, we must make perfectly capable pilots part of these highly debatable cuts.

Standing in my office a few months later was one of my own, a solid and strong aviator with a deep combat record and nary a whiff of misconduct in his nine years of service. He was a great character in the squadron, popular with his teammates. He was a family man with a wife and kids who had sacrificed massively in the prior years to enable his service, marked by a steady string of long deployments.

But on that day, my task was to inform him he'd been selected by the RIF board and would be out of the Air Force within 120 days.

As his career crumbled and his dreams for the future slid from his slumping shoulders and onto the floor, I watched this officer transition through stages of coping right before my eyes.

First he was shocked. Then hurt, damaged. Then hopelessly aggrieved. Then indignant, followed by angry and finally downright enraged.

My duty was to stand there, do my best to empathize without patronizing, and absorb whatever boiled out of him. What he said at the close of the conversation, as he simmered back down into a state of sorrowful fragility, has never left me.

"So much for us being a family. Families don't cut people loose."

Those words left me utterly breathless with their merciless, stinging truth.

This officer had been made to feel a familial bond in our squadron. We, and indeed I, had encouraged that feeling. Now we were kicking him out of the family home. He'd committed no great sin to deserve such a severe rejection. So this was more than just a professional setback; he was, from his perspective, being unjustly culled out of his very clan, and now had cause to question his entire identity. It was beyond cruel.

And in the weeks that followed, as word of the decision filtered to the squadron, that cruelty was felt by everyone. What would have been a deeply unpopular decision anyway felt more like betrayal. It was an open wound for the entire organization.

On reflection, I realized I had been doing something incorrect. I had followed a bad example. In the years since, I've heard the "family" lexicon applied to team environments in both public and private organizations, and I always have two reactions: first, cringe, then, challenge.

There is an important leadership lesson to be seized here.

A professional organization is not a family.

Employees are not family members. To style interactions and relationships in such a way can be tempting for the leader, who may perceive enough aspects of clan interaction to feel the label justified. The magic of people seeming to develop deep, familial loyalty to one another can beguile, charming the hardest of hearts.

But at best, to go down this path is misguided. The analogy doesn't hold.

Families don't sever relationships with members in anything but the most acute and insufferable circumstances, and sometimes not even then. Organizations sometimes do so for any reason or no reason at all.

Families don't periodically excise a percentage of their membership to be more efficient. Organizations sometimes do.

In a family, mistakes are forgiven by default and can almost always be forgotten with time. In a business, mistakes are etched into an enduring record and can be both reputation-damaging and career-limiting. They are used against individuals if it's in the organization's interest, whereas in a family it would be thought shameful to dig up old bones.

You wouldn't give a family member less year-over-year after they rendered loyal, committed, and effective support. But it's not uncommon in a business for share price to drop and pull compensation down with it, regardless of individual performance.

In a family, you're safe and accepted, even in the hard times.

In a family, you can be your unguarded self.

In general, family members don't shop around for better families to join. They don't hop into new identities because it serves their interests.

Maybe most profound: in a family, loyalty is granted automatically and need not be earned. So when a manager invokes family as a device, they're appealing, sometimes unwittingly, for a free grant of loyalty without having to earn it.

Which means at worst, appeals to family in an organization are emotionally manipulative. Families will expend and exhaust themselves unreasonably for one another. Sometimes, they'll give their lives for one another. Leaders should not wield the power of clan bond to earn such levels of discretionary effort. This is coming about it the wrong way.

Beyond the potential for abuse of this powerful idea, the business reasons and risks are made clear by the story related earlier.

The time will inevitably come when someone has to be cut from an organization. When that happens, the relationship will instantly be exposed for what it always was -- one of mutual business interest rather than unquestioned blood oath.

Because organizational life, and therefore the strategy to conduct it, are indefinite prospects with countless actions and reactions on a continuous timeline, what happens today isn't isolated. It knocks on and triggers impacts tomorrow and beyond. Everyone will see how easily the organization can crumple up and discard an individual when it's in the organizational interest to do so. And with that realization, a feeling of general dishonesty can quickly follow.

In the years following waves of RIF actions, airmen lost trust and confidence in their senior leaders, in part because the relationship of individuals with the larger organization had been exposed as totally interest-driven, at odds with the value propositions being advanced in command rhetoric. This was part of what triggered an exodus of pilots from the service. Their voices weren't being heard, and they were employed at the whim and convenience of a deaf and dumb bureaucracy whose actions were misaligned from its words, sowing distrust.

Families will often act contrary to their own interests to preserve their relationships and unity, but public and private organizations will not. Interest will always win.

Leaders who get this will find a better balance, achieving strong mutual support and belonging without resorting to the cheap and ultimately dishonest appeal to family.

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