IT'S A PRETTY COMMON CONCEPT:  OUR COMPANY IS LIKE A FAMILY.

I do not think this is the right foundation for a workplace. We do not advise hiring to bring people into your family. Families are intimate and have shared trauma and are largely dysfunctional. Families engage in groupthink and repetition of traditions that are never exposed to critical evaluation. When you hire into your family, you hire folk who look like you and think like you and are like you. Hiring to bring someone into your family is the commitment to your mindset and your biases. Family-based hiring shuns innovation. The realization that you don’t fit in or are unsatisfied with your position in a family generally results in distancing from the family. 

Hire to bring people into your village. Villages have multiple families and each family has pride in its distinct brand name or career. In a village, survival is a thoughtfully deliberate effort to unite the forces because of the mutual benefit. That is a healthy but strong connection. A village is a unit of mutual benefit. Enlargement of your village indicates intentional unification without the dysfunction that comes from boundaryless intimacy. Individuals can grow and mature and elevate themselves within the village. Conversely, a village creates a construct that allows for the involved individuals to take a step back, or sideways, or reduce the workload when that is what is best for an individual in a village. People stay within their village because of loyalty rather than non-functional obligation. And when it is time, people leave the village too. 
 
As you grow in 2022, let us know how the Lynch Law Firm can help you hire into your village.

Natalie Lynch