Your team are NOT your family & here's why!

The only relationship which truly matters is the one you have with your business but not in the way you might think. So today, I want to talk about the complex and often confusing relationships founders build with their teams, businesses and themselves.

And how you can work on the most critical relationship first, yours.

The Beating Heart

The heartbeat of your business are the relationships you foster and how well you develop them over time. They become the pulse of your business, which is what keeps people bringing you up in a room filled with strangers. specially, when you start a business, these relationships are the most crucial thing you need to establish if you’re going to succeed.

Because if you’re just building a business for the results, then you're missing the whole point. These relationships will also keep you going through the dark times (and you’re likely to encounter a few dark times). Your ability to pick up the phone when things are falling apart and there being someone whose asking you 'how can I help?' on the other end, indicates you’re more likely to survive.

A leader also needs to want to invest in their employee relationships. And more than just the results of what the staff can do, but asking how often are you investing in these leader-employee relationship in the sense of a coaching relationship? How often are you coaching or elevating the people around you? This becomes even more important once you're a leader to grow these relationships in healthily.

Relationships as a Leader

When you look at anything that has team success to it, you can see that they have a strong fundamental of openness and trust between everybody in that team. An ability to lean into each other, and they're not afraid to say what they feel.

It's similar to the clean-house mentality. The people who only want to invite others over when their house is tidy and when things are organized, they use that mentality when building a business. They build their teams up and everything's great, but they build those relationships based on an image or a perception versus the true reality of themselves.

This particular affects women because although they don't have as hard of a time building relationships with others, when it overlaps with work they struggle to show all of themselves. They need to learn how to transform a relationship of caring about someone to one of supporting someone to accomplish an action together. It’s an important difference and it's not just women who do it, it's also new business owners who are focusing more on being liked and cared about versus being respected.

Additionally, women have been taught to build co-dependency in their business, which ends up eroding over time as the women need to step into their power, whereas when men build businesses they tend to build it with complete command from the start, never co-depending.

My advice is it’s time for you to look at your relationships in and outside your business organization. Are you really getting the most out of them? Because your egocentric mind may be in charge, and you're leaning into being liked versus respected. It's important to learn what emotions or relationships propel you in business.

Being intentional in what kind of relationships you are investing in at work versus which emotions and relationships are sabotaging you.

We’re Not a Family

This whole bullsh*t about ‘we're a family here’, that you should build a family in the workplace feels predatorial to me. It’s very manipulative. It's important to not fall under those kind of patterns of relationships, especially where you're trying to manipulate people into doing something underneath a nice outer coating. When you could just say the words clearly, instead of saying something like ‘family’ with a hidden meaning to it.

“We have such a great family, everything is so great here” versus “Because of all of our hard work we did X results in x amount of days.” Focusing on the achievements of the team and the collective wins. Don’t use the idea of family to foster some kind of idea of unwavering loyalty.

Tie people to successes, not people.

Generally, the reason you hire people who are just like you is because you're protecting your feelings. Surrounding yourself in a bubble of the same minds, and the same kind of ‘family’ does just that. You’ll be less likely to have challengers to your way of doing things, but having someone who challenges your and other people's perspectives through a diverse group of employees is key for success. Mainly because it breaks this ‘family’ groupthink issue and introduces new ideas quickly.

Honest Relationships

There's a difference between my staff caring about the business and caring about me. If anything, what I've learned is just how many of my team actually do care about the businesses success, they care about applying their success to it. So trying to make them care more about me than the business, that could be the number one failure of any leader.

A shelter mindset versus a serving mindset.

If you're sheltering people from the uncomfortable parts of business, you're actually holding them back from becoming the best employees for themselves.

Sheltering might look like, “Oh my God, if you had to deal with payroll, or if you had to deal with the fact that we had three months of money in the account, or if you had to deal with failed payments or payroll barely going through.” Sheltering this kind of information means you're stopping them from taking action and creates a bigger barrier between you and them

That's like being married to someone and not telling them that you have a ton of commercial debt. You’re hiding the important things, that if you really respected your people, you’d want them to know. You’d want them to be at the leadership team level with you and to understand how the business is objectively different than you. That it’s a problem you can and want to all solve together.

You are not your business,…

Your business isn't you.

And all of you have a place or a job and a relationship with this thing, but it shouldn't define you, and you shouldn't be hiding behind it.

Recently, I put this into action by using this separation mindset before entering our last board meeting. When I started speaking, I talked objectively about a business called SalonScale that I happened to run. I didn't have to sell me. My approach was 'Here's what I did with my team to deliver this thing' i.e. here's the business and here's how it's doing.

I think calling it my business, gives too much power over me to those that are worried about the business including myself. A lot of new founders are too close to theirs, so when people leave, or things don't happen as they are planned, they take it way too personally because they identify themselves as the business. There’s no separation. There comes a time for founders to re-evaluate the relationship they have with their business to ensure it stays healthy and strong.

Evolve or Die

Of course, it will start as your business, it has to start there but eventually you either evolve yourself and let go, or the business either fails or grows past you.

If you don’t evolve who you are in that business they'll replace you, and they'll likely put someone in who isn't so emotionally attached. This is because if you start to do things that affect the business negatively i.e. you get a complaint about the business and you take it personally, meaning you don’t take the actions needed from it, you begin to fail the business itself. You create bottlenecks and huge blocks for growth.

If you're not making decisions focused on serving your customers, and you don't like to hear the bad things about your business, that’s also a clear sign you're too close to your business. It’s possibly overwhelming you, and the reality is you need to redefine it back into a working relationship.

The Real Relationship - Yours

Did you know we have over 6000 thoughts a day, our heart beats over 100,000 times a day, and the gut has over 100 million neurons? That's a lot of information coming in every day.

A coach once told me, if you're ever in a moment of decision-making, you need to have all three of these things connecting to make a good decision. You can't just make gut instinct decisions, nor can you make logical choices or decisions from your heart, they all have to connect and talk to each other, so you’re in true alignment.

Your three minds talking to one another, and listening to be in perfect synergy.

And you should never lose your passion for your business but what you do need to do is step away from your emotions about the business, those are for you to feel your private time. The business doesn't have feelings, the business just needs to know whether it's doing good or bad. If it's good, you keep going that way. If it's bad you course correct.

A business doesn't feel guilt, shame, or even joy. A business only understands whether something is working or not, and decides to fix it or not.

Once you've created your business, it's the team and everyone around it that monitors its vitals to hopefully make it a success. Like when your children grow older, you can't keep them locked in your house forever. You can't control their environment or their decisions. You can only trust you advised them well and gave them the skills they needed, whilst fostering a securely attached relationship so they know you’ll catch them if they fall.

There's going to be a time where your business grows past you and you need to trust that you've given everybody enough information that's connected to the why so that they can figure out the how and what and everything else. Really your only job is to keep enforcing why the business exists, take a step back emotionally and foster great relationships with your team, your community and yourself.