By Leah Patterson, Rooted Resilience Strategies

“We’re a family here.”

“We’re all in this together.”

“This isn’t just a job.”

I have heard all three said with real feeling, by people who meant them. I’ve also watched some of those same people defend their workplace to anyone who criticized it from the outside, and then spend the weekend updating a résumé. They love the culture and they are trying to leave.

That usually gets read as a contradiction, or as a kind of ingratitude. But it’s neither. Culture and working conditions are two separate things, and they can move in opposite directions for years without anybody saying so out loud.

What a certain kind of culture does is make the second one very hard to say. You can tell the truth about what the job is costing you, or you can stay in good standing. Most of us, most of the time, choose good standing.

That choice is what I want to talk about, because I don’t believe it’s free and I don’t think we’ve been counting it.

When an organization calls itself a family, something happens to criticism. It stops being information about the work and instead becomes information about the person offering it. A concern about workload turns into a question about attitude. A request for a clearer boundary becomes evidence of how invested somebody really is.

There’s no comfortable place to stand and say you care about this work and that this particular thing is hurting you. And whether intentional or by default, the family framing doesn’t hold both at once. You’re either in it or you’re on your way out of it.

And what gets read as on the way out is usually not disloyalty. It’s just an ordinary life.

The person who stops answering messages after eight, because that hour is the only stretch of the day her child gets her full attention. The one who turns down the move because his mother is sick and he’s the closest child. The one building something of her own alongside the job who doesn’t treat it as a secret.

None of that is an absence of commitment. It’s the presence of other commitments, which is more or less what having a life consists of, and this framing has nowhere to put that.

What happens next is subtle enough to be almost deniable. 

Nobody says outright that you aren’t committed. The message arrives in a tone, in who gets included in the conversation that matters, in the phrase “we all pitch in around here” said to one person and not to another.

Most people work out the rule within a month or two of arriving, and after that they can’t help but manage themselves against it. And that’s the insidious part. Once everyone understands the rule, no one even has to enforce it.

But what’s the real cost? It’s critical thinking. In a room where disagreement carries a palpable social penalty, people flock to agreement much faster than they can ever truly evaluate anything – and nobody wants to be the one asking the second, probing question. So that second question stops getting asked and after a while, the danger of it never occurring to anyone at all becomes realer.

From the outside, that looks like alignment and from the inside, it can even feel like alignment. What it usually is though is a group of people who have each separately done the math on what it would cost to be the only one in the room with a different viewpoint.

To be fair, I don’t think most people who build cultures like this set out to do harm. A good deal of it comes from fear, and it’s often a fear that makes sense on its own terms. Somebody built something and it feels fragile. The possibility that other people won’t hold it or care about it as intently is genuinely frightening.

But fear with authority attached to it doesn’t announce itself as fear. It comes out sounding like standards, like values, like just the way things are done here. And from where the other person is sitting, there’s no clean way to tell the difference.

Most of what’s been written about this concerns very large organizations, and that case has been made by people with better data than mine. What interests me even more, is the smaller version, which is far less examined and, I suspect, harder on the individual person.

And this isn’t only a corporate phenomenon. It turns up in nonprofits and congregations, in family businesses, in volunteer boards and small shops, in any group small enough that everyone knows everyone.

When an organization is small there are fewer places to go. No other department to move into, no distance to put between yourself and someone’s disappointment in you. What the person at the center thinks of you becomes most of your daily experience of the work.

That is a large part of what people are walking away from. And the ones walking away aren’t mostly moving into another version of the same thing. They’re starting their own. 

The people arriving at entrepreneurship and leadership now are not the people these models were designed around. They’re caregivers. They’re on second and third careers. They’re starting at fifty. They’re building around a constraint that isn’t temporary and doesn’t need to be resolved before they’re allowed to lead. Most of them have been holding several commitments at once for their whole working lives and being measured as though they weren’t, and we have never once built a leadership model out of what that teaches a person. 

Which means the people building the next round of small organizations in Arkansas are arriving with a very specific kind of information. They know how it feels to be told they were family right up until they asked for something. They know what good standing costs, because they paid it for years. 

The worry underneath all this is a fair one, and anybody who has built something will recognize it. If everyone in the room is allowed an agenda of their own, does anything actually move? Can a shared vision survive a group of people who are each also building something for themselves? 

I don’t think we know yet. It hasn’t been tried very often, and it has almost never been tried by people who arrived at leadership the way this group is arriving at it. 

What I notice is that the shared vision is nearly always one person’s vision to begin with, and everyone else is asked to carry it as though it were their own. There’s a version where that isn’t the only arrangement on offer – where a person moves the collective work forward and her own work forward at the same time, and neither one is treated as theft from the other. The people who just walked out of the last version have the clearest reason of anyone to go build it.  

It would be a waste of what it cost them to build the same room over again and call it a family.