Your Company Is Not a Family
blogs.hbr.org
blogs.hbr.org
If you company wants to use a sports team metaphor, that's fine, but just remember that many professional sports have players unions and guaranteed contracts.
Oh, what's that? Not such a big fan of the sports team metaphor now?
Of course, I would imagine there's a lot fewer metrics available for hiring for most non-athlete positions, so "moneyball" might be a bit tougher for off-the-field jobs.
Otherwise, sometimes you gotta work with what you've got. In real life, you can't just let everyone go who isn't a superstar, unless people are tripping over themselves to get a spot at your company.
If you were fired as frequently as players get traded in NFL, we'd be living hellish careers!
It's even worse as a metaphor for American companies because the typical office worker isn't under contract let alone a union negotiated one.[2]
[1] Ok, maybe the 'no poach' collusion among tech industry titans makes it a little better for that sector.
[2] Where the American professional sports metaphor does fit a bit is in its tendency toward non-investment in youth development - i.e. on the job training - which in the American sports model is subsidized from the public till in the form of scholastic sports in local high schools and public universities. Elsewhere in the world, professional sports teams tend to provide elite training to children and teenagers under a model similar to that of Angel Investing. A few big winners pay for all the false positives.
It's not one-to-one but I think you're overemphasizing both career length as a fatal flaw to the metaphor and the strictness of the comparison the author is trying to draw.
It's a sensible metaphor for the limited points the author wants to make, then he hedges to prevent pushing the metaphor past breaking so I can't point out we don't have office cheerleaders.
In this sense, a business is far more like a sports team than a family.
Of course, a professional sports team isn’t a perfect analog to your business.
In business this isn't really the case. Of course, there are a few developers who will get embedded in their particular way of thinking and may end up antiquating themselves out of a job. But in general most people carry on learning, or promote into management or another aspect of business.
Essentially, there are a lot of good reasons to be treating employees like long term prospects.
Another one that springs to mind is the concept of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. We're constantly told that people are more motivated and do better work when they are intrinsincally motivated, rather than extrinsically. Yet, if you are treating your workers like disposable commodities; or if you as an employee are hopping from job to job every year; Where's the intrinsic motivation? If you're working at a job for 10 years or more, now I can believe that you will be motivated to see the company succeed. That your goals and the companies goals are aligned, because a significant proportion of your life and the companies life are intertwined.
Just like family.
N.B. Of course, if you don't expect your startup to be around in 3 years time - whether acquired or bust - then by all means go for the sports analogy. But I think in the wider business world, it'd be a mistake.
Does success at these team companies mean anything comparable to what it does fro an NFL player? Is it the pinnacle of their career? The players on a sports team get a lot of glory from their success. They're also in a naturally competitive environment. They want the team to win as much as management of the team does.
To your first sentence: I, also, would be very interested in a statistical analysis of where the 20-somethings of each decade ended up.
My observation is that age discrimination isn't a brick wall, so much as an increased difficulty in doing things a person should be able to do. It's not like you can't get a programming job after 40, because obviously people do. It's just that job searches are no longer completed in 2 weeks; it's closer to 4 months.
What no one told us in school was that getting better at our jobs, past a certain point, makes job searches harder and more complex, especially because HR drones don't understand our specialties and tend to use them against us. ("Doesn't have 3 years of Swift experience? No hire.") Structuring a society as a pyramid actually works when it is in transition from poverty to industrial wealth, but it's a disaster in a stable state.
However, the reason you don't see many, is that most don't want that job by the time they are that age. For most programmers, they will hit a glass ceiling on salary somewhere in their 30s. If they want to make more money, and most people do, they transition into management.
The answer to the question, "where did they go?" is pretty simple. Management.
A well regarded Quora answer and several HN discussions have yielded that the myth is not that people beyond 30/40/50 stop being engineers; the myth is the 25-year old creator/entrepreneur/engineer.
Your hunch is wrong.
The sports metaphor doesn't change the fact theyre cutting people for their obsession with ponies.
On the other hand, your company might be quite like a family in Lannister sense.
No, but we use metaphors for their common sense interpretation (the average normal/loving family in this case).
Besides which, you're lucky if you have a tiny handful of people in the entire world with whom things are "in the rainbows and unicorns sense". Rainbows and unicorns actually takes a whole lot of hard work at making interpersonal relations work well.
To be fair, this is true for people, too, they're just unwritten. Family to me is kinda like a very very close friend; I might expect more support, and give more support, but there is still no outright demanding stuff, and there are limits.
But I still don't think a company should be like a family, because I think the whole human race should be like a family :P We can still rib on each other, and compete, but to outright snatch up as much as we can to the detriment of everybody else, results in a swift but friendly smack by grandma. I wish I could coat it in academic enough words though so such a proposal might fly here; I know it's not realistic in the short and medium term, but I would consider it a worthwhile long term ideal.
This is an important point, which I'm surprised that it's necessary to emphasize. I have plenty of rainbows and unicorns in my life, but they will evaporate in a couple of years if I start doing 60-hour workweeks and prioritize my career above everything else.
The idea of the "sports team" is not functional - the limited human interactions necessary within an artificially established playing field will NEVER mirror the real world challenges a company, and the people within it, faces. Sure that artificial playing field allows an easy "team" mentality but this "team" will never work against real-life challenges.
Team sports primarily consists of human interaction. You practice with your team, have meetings with the coaching staff, film sessions, team meals, travel together, team training sessions, and that's before you even set foot on the field or court.
And the leadership and communication skills are directly transferable and valuable to a business setting. The business unit as a sports team idea is a bit tired and cliche at this point because it's been a comparison made for at least 50 years.
But that speaks to the cliche's validity. David Foster Wallace wrote in Infinite Jest "cliches earned their status as cliches because they were so obviously true."
Where the comparison breaks down, I think, is that the activity of individual employees in a company (especially a big one) isn't nearly as visible as the activity of an athlete. Therefore, there's less incentive to be a "team player", since it won't necessarily help you get a better job at a different company.
One very common type is of the talk is cheap variety. Management can declare their company to be a team or a family or an enchanted kingdom. They read about it in Harvard Review. Like a mission statement or a slogan , these thing only mean something when you put your money (literally and figuratively) where your mouth is. Most don't.
The second type is a half hearted analogy. The company really intends to be like a team, a family or a special forces unit. But, the cost to really making that mean a lot is high. You can make the business somewhat family like or team like relatively cheaply and inform your company culture, but there are going to be countess cases where the cost is high. FO employees to really buy into it, they need to accept this costs. Most don't. What they have is rhetoric and a certain amount of investment into team building. Fair enough, but not what this article is decribing
The type of team like environment the article is describing doesn't come cheap? You need to have good feedback & measurement mechanisms for performance on the team level. You need success and failure to be very well compensated for and it needs to be based on team performance. Are you compensating success well enough that members of the team will want to see the poorest performers periodically replaced?
A professional sports team is an exceptional environment. The people there are high achievers and they are ambitious. They are the 1%, most hardworking and talented. They get a lot of money and a lot of glory. They're in 'once in a hundred lifetimes' state of mind. Can your company offer that? Is 5 years of success on you "team" the pinnacle of a career? Are they making more now than they ever will be? Will these be the glory years they relive?
Functions with very straightforward feedback, like sales tend to develop these dynamics with the right compensation structure. A small startup with only a handful of high equity employees can develop this culture naturally. Trying to artificially create it elsewhere is hard. I also suspect it's near impossible a group with over 50 or so people.
It's easy to say this stuff. Does Netflix really put this into practice? Does anyone?
This article does nothing but debate semantics. Every metaphor breaks down at some point, so I don't see the need to debate which works the best.
Doesn't exactly show Harvard in a good light that one of their publications uses such god awful English.
Really? But I want to believe the paternalistic BS by my bosses (who'd fire me at the first chance of reduced profit margins without a second thought), and fill the empty whole in the center of my life with some purpose based on my job.