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Businesses are not families
Engineering Echelons
Collin P. Wheeler
April 25, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
Hey, it’s Collin. Welcome to Engineering Echelons, a newsletter full of ideas and insights to help engineers excel at management.
Here’s what I’ve got for you this week.
New and noteworthy news
Something to consider
Some insights to delve into
And more…
First time reading? You can subscribe here.
Alright, let’s get into it.
Noteworthy Headlines
Tariffs, Taxes, and Turbulence (Zweig Group)
Highlights:
“Tariffs introduce uncertainty - and with it, risk. . . . For the industry, this means adapting designs to accommodate rising costs, managing client expectations, and navigating pricing volatility with suppliers and contractors. Projects already on tight margins may face delays or cancellations, and firms could see increased pressure to value-engineer or redesign around fluctuating material availability.”
Tariff Fallout Hits Contractor Confidence (ConstructionDive)
Highlights:
Over 40% of contractors anticipate a decline in profit margins in the next six months.
Around 80% of contractors said suppliers notified them of tariff-related materials price increases.
20% of contractors had projects paused or interrupted because of tariffs in March.
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Management Perspective
We’ve all heard it before. A new hire joins the team and someone says, “Welcome to the family!” Or a hiring manager, while trying to sell the benefits of the company, tells an interviewee that the company is one big family.
It’s not.
Some prominent business leaders have made strides to clarify that their business is not a family.
Toby Lutke, CEO of Shopify, issued a memo addressing the use of the word “family” after hearing team members call colleagues “Shopifamily”. Here’s an excerpt (emphasis is mine).
Shopify, like any other for-profit company, is not a family. The very idea is preposterous. You are born into a family. You never choose it, and the can’t un-family you. . . . The dangers of “family thinking” are that it becomes increadibly hard to let poor performers go. Shopify is a team, not a family.
Netflix has a similar mantra on the culture page of their website (emphasis is mine).
If you think of a professional sports team, it is up to the coach to ensure that every player on the field is amazing at their position, and plays very effectively with the others. We model ourselves on being a team, not a family. A family is about unconditional love, despite, say, your siblings’ bad behavior. A dream team is about pushing yourself to be the best teammate you can be, caring intensely about your teammates, and knowing that you may not be on the team forever.
Many people on LinkedIn have started posting about how it’s a red flag if a company describes itself as a family, which has led to a lot of consenting dialogue.
Good.
Calling a business a family might work in good times, but it cannot work in bad times when layoffs are needed. You don’t get to lay off or furlough family members to meet profitability goals.
As a leader, consistent messaging builds trust. And saying one thing and doing another does not build trust.
In the end, as Shopify and Netflix stated, a business is a team.
Although the term “team” is a better descriptor for a business, it’s still a pretty broad construct used to describe people coming together to achieve a common goal. Saying a business is a team is only the first step in the right direction of clearly laying out what the business actually is and how the team members are expected to perform.
The next step is setting clear expectations for the team and its members. The team has to understand the expectations. Then they have to execute. That’s aligning rhetoric with action.
Does your company understand they are a team?
If you’re interested in reading more, I wrote further on this issue here.
Management Insights
Peter Thiel on two types of companies:
“All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.”
—
Angela Duckworth on cultural grit:
“The bottom line on culture and grit is: If you want to be grittier, find a gritty culture and join it. If you’re a leader, and you want the people in your organization to be grittier, create a gritty culture.”
—
Joe Coulombe on finding solutions in business:
“Trying to find an optimum solution in business is a waste of time: the factors in the equation are changing all the time.”
Management Resource
When Your Colleague is Jealous of Your Success (HBR)
Maybe you got promoted before a colleague. Maybe you’re younger than the employees who report to you. Whatever the situation is, success can seed jealousy.
There are things you can do to mitigate sore feelings and be an effective leader.
Get in Touch
Did something strike a chord? Tell me about it.
Or…
Let me know if you’ve found something worth sharing.
Let me know what challenges you’re having as a manager.
Let me know what challenges you see other managers having.
Send me an email at [email protected]
Looking forward to hearing from you. See you next time.
Collin
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