52 Weeks, 52 Words: Week 46 - Family

I went into the blackhole of the internet this week as I spent time reflecting on the word family and as I pondered an appropriate framework for capturing my thoughts. It’s not a commonly used word in medical communications circles per se but it is one that dominates the lexicon of agencies, med comm or otherwise.

Amongst the many business articles, blogs, opinion pieces, manifestos and other writings that I came across it seemed like there has been an ebb and flow to the trendiness of calling your work colleagues a “family” and using a vernacular that is veiled in that construct of familial relationships. The high point was in the late 1990s/early 2000s for when that mentality was en vogue. There seemed to be a heightened focus at that time for recognizing the ways we were connected and in the figurative car heading down the road together at the time that we were all first logging onto the information superhighway and collaborating with one another across great distances and with increasing use of technology. The concept of “family” consisted of ways to show support, encouragement, camaraderie and fun.

But, of late, the many pieces I read that are more current paint that phrasing with a far more sinister brush and consider all of the ways we should, no pun intended, divorce ourselves from that idea.

Pervasive amongst the naysayers was this idea that “family” has been conflated with work-place culture and that our connections to our actual families are a false syllogism for the experience(s) we have with our colleagues during our workday. Many even suggested it was dangerous to use that vocabulary as if the suggestion would either 1) erode the notion of our family at home, disrupting the balance of our relationships with our parents, siblings, spouses, or children, or 2) it would present a fallacy to the nature of our relationships with co-workers, managers, colleagues, and teams. The doomsday mentality that was portrayed hinged on the idea that happy hours and care packages were insufficient as a proxy for a family because unlike in an actual family you cannot leave or be fired and asked to leave.

I find myself flummoxed, torn between both ideas and wrestling with the complexities of each. As a result, was tuned into a much higher frequency with greater awareness to this divergence as the week unfolded and passing interactions caused me to vacillate between these two poles. Even now, I am still not 100% certain. For someone who generally doesn’t have any problem finding words, and despite the fact that I am very nearly 500 words into this essay without having landed on a central idea (hardly a first for me), I find that I am lost in a cul-de-sac of indecision about whether or not the

This much, though, I do know: words matter. They matter a great deal. And they inform both our sensibilities and our interactions with one another. I also know that we don’t always get them right. That we stumble sometimes. That we say the wrong things. That we grow and we learn. And that we apologize when our words hurt. That we strive to make our words match our actions and use our words to try and lead us to a shared outlook. That even when we disagree and get entrenched in our own agendas and wants, it is our words that can extend to someone else as a sort of tether to lift us up or to lift them up. Words matter a great deal. Which means we want to try and use the right words; and if words fail us, we attempt to find new words.

Much as I thought I didn’t know where I landed in this polarity of definitions and the appropriateness for using the term “family” in our business sense, by this point in my drafting of this essay, it occurred to me that my meandering stream of consciousness solidified my feelings.

Family is every bit of what we strive for and should strive for in our interactions with our teams and with our clients.

Certainly, family is a consideration for any with whom we share a collective experience. The good and the bad – all of it – inform being in a family and coming together. Sharing in these moment bonds us so that, moving forward we have a recorded and shared memory to recall for future situations that call for either a rejection of or an acceptance of the same course of action.

Family is the assemblage of people with whom you are most authentically yourself and allowed to be vulnerable. Spend enough time with your colleagues in the trenches and you’ll be unable to conceal your true self, nor will they. And, over time, those peculiarities and idiosyncrasies that make us who we are become woven into the fabric of who we are.

The naysayers describe family in biological terms, noting that you don’t pick your family (at least the one you are born into) and that family is a particularly slippery slope in the workplace because, when performance slips for an individual within the ranks or for the company within economic terms, we part ways with people – either terminating a member of our family or allowing a downturn to push an unfortunate departure.

The potential for a transient relationship status, though, in my opinion shouldn’t alone negate the aspiration to family as a priority in our approach.

Within the values we cement into our culture, earnestly and intentionally or as things evolve organically, we typically find candor, honesty or integrity nearly universally among the values we prioritize. Similarly, so in families. Those values force us to be decent to one another, to choose truth and carry on with a similar integrity. When we cannot (or choose not) to in our families we may find ourselves on the outs. We will certainly find that, before too long, if the values we proclaim aren’t shared by everyone discord will emerge and, in the strife, we may dissolve our family.

Beyond that, I would advocate that our non-work families expand and contract all the time – through marriage, birth, adoption, and other choices, including divorce. And yet, our modern formulation of a family must also include non-traditional families with separated parents, gay parents, one parent or even no parents where a grandparent is serving in the role of caregiver. The image emblazoned in our minds by Norman Rockwell of a “family” seated around a table where the paternal figure expertly carves a turkey for Thanksgiving is quaint and amazing anachronistic in these modern times.

So, next week as our families must continue social distancing and choose to celebrate the holiday with a Zoom call instead of a banquet table, our families at home can learn a bit from our work families who have been congregating now for almost 10 months of pandemic lockdown. It will surely be a celebration we will never forget – after all, family is forged in the fire of a shared experience.

?