We're All Family Here

In November 2022, after “letting go” of about a third of its original workforce, Elon Musk sent an email to the remaining Twitter employees asking them to click a button to confirm that they were committed to working “hardcore” for the company’s next phase. Those who did not click by the deadline would be treated as having resigned. A few months earlier, Twitter’s former leadership had described it as a family.

The family metaphor is endemic to tech. Amazon has “Day 1 culture”, while Google offered free meals, nap pods, and climbing walls, and expected employees to treat the campus as home. The metaphor does real work: it extracts commitment, discourages outside offers, and makes employees (particularly younger ones) feel that the relationship is something other than a transaction. What it does not do is change what the relationship actually is.

Families (at least, those outside organized crime) do not terminate members for underperformance. They do not eliminate positions when margins tighten, or ask you to sign a noncompete agreement before letting you in. In most of the United States, and in varying degrees elsewhere, employment is at-will: either party can end it, at any time, for any reason not specifically prohibited by law. This means that the “family” exists at the employer’s pleasure.

The political scientist Harold Lasswell defined politics in 1936 as the study of “who gets what, when, how.” His definition contains no implication that the getting is fair, no assumption that what gets distributed is material, and no requirement that the process be democratic. It is simply a description of how groups make binding decisions about the allocation of things people want.

Politics is what happens when a group of people who do not fully agree on goals or values nonetheless need to act together. The alternative to politics is not harmony—it is coercion. A group that appears to have no politics is usually one in which someone has already won so decisively that further fighting seems pointless.

Both definitions apply to workplaces. An organization contains people who disagree about what matters, what to build, who to hire, where to cut, and who should lead. Those disagreements do not disappear because the employee handbook calls everyone a family. They get resolved through decisions that favor some people’s views and interests over others. That process is workplace politics.

Bueno de Mesquita and Smith developed a framework called selectorate theory to explain why leaders behave the way they do. The core observation is simple: leaders of countries, companies, and volunteer organizations need enough support to stay in power. They get that support by distributing benefits to a minimum necessary winning coalition.

The winning coalition is not the whole organization: it is the subset of people whose support the leader actually requires. In an autocracy, this might be the military brass, a security service, and a handful of oligarchs. In a publicly traded company, it is the board, major institutional shareholders, and a small number of indispensable senior executives. Everyone else—the people who are told they are family, and that the company’s success is their success—is interchangeable. They are what the theory calls the selectorate: large enough to give the winning coalition options if any member defects, but not powerful enough to claim a significant share of private benefits.

This is why perks, mission language, and family rhetoric are so common in organizations that also behave ruthlessly when conditions change. The perks are cheap ways to signal belonging to people who are not actually in the winning coalition. The rhetoric costs nothing but extracts real commitment. When the company faces a genuine crisis, the winning coalition keeps their jobs. The family discovers it was not, in fact, the family.

This is where a common misreading needs correction. The people who use family rhetoric are not, for the most part, cynical manipulators who despise their employees. Nor are they altruists who genuinely believe the metaphor and are simply wrong about how the world works. Most are somewhere in between: people who have genuine beliefs about what the organization should do, who also benefit when those beliefs prevail.

Jeffrey Pfeffer, in decades of research on organizations, found that political skills like the ability to build coalitions, read organizational dynamics, and time moves correctly are stronger predictors of career advancement than technical competence. The engineer who wants to rewrite the legacy codebase genuinely believes it needs rewriting, and also gets promoted if the project goes ahead under her leadership. The VP who champions a reorganization genuinely thinks it will improve outcomes, and also ends up at the top of the new structure.

Interests and beliefs are not opposites. People pursue what they think is right, and what they think is right is shaped by their position in the organization. A sales leader who believes the product team should prioritize enterprise features is not lying. She is telling the truth as experienced from where she sits. She also reaps the benefits if her plan is adopted.

The family metaphor recurs worldwide. Korean conglomerates like Samsung, LG, and Hyundai are structured around patriarchal family governance. The founding family holds controlling stakes across dozens of subsidiaries through complex cross-shareholding arrangements, and leadership succession has historically tracked the founding bloodline. Workers inside these chaebol structures are subject to intense loyalty expectations that draw on Confucian family ethics, and that coexist with some of the longest working hours and most aggressive anti-union practices in the industrialized world. The family metaphor creates expectations of deference that flow almost entirely upward.

The Latin American patrón model, widespread in family businesses across Mexico, Brazil, and the Andean countries, works in a similar way. The employer-as-patriarch provides jobs, loans, sponsorship of employees’ family events, and intervention with authorities. In exchange, the employee provides loyalty, discretion, and deference. The relationship can be lifelong, but is between parties with radically unequal power.

Japanese’s lifetime employment system in the postwar decades produced what selectorate theory would describe as a very large nominal selectorate of permanent employees with a winning coalition drawn from senior management and major shareholders. When the asset bubble collapsed in 1990 and corporations needed to cut costs, the permanent employment guarantee at the heart of the “family” bargain was broken through expansion of temporary and contract employment that covered the same work under worse conditions. The family language remained; the security it implied did not.

The phrase “we don’t do politics here” appears regularly in tech companies. It usually means one of two things. The first is a genuine belief that technical decisions should be made on technical merit, that interpersonal dynamics should not determine outcomes, and that coalition-building is a form of corruption. This belief is reasonable, but almost entirely wrong about how decisions actually get made.

The second meaning is that when the people in the winning coalition say “we don’t do politics here”, what they usually mean is that they have already gotten what they want from the current structure, so there is no need for them to engage in visible political activity. People who are well-served by existing arrangements can afford to describe those arrangements as natural and political contestation as illegitimate.

Understanding that your workplace is a political environment is not the same as deciding to become a political operator. It does not require manipulation or coalition-building for its own sake. What it does require is honesty about what is actually happening when decisions get made. Someone who believes their technical approach is correct and advocates for it strongly, who seeks allies among colleagues with aligned interests, and who times their proposal for when decision-makers are receptive is not doing something shameful. They are participating in the ordinary process by which organizations make decisions in the absence of shared goals. The person who refuses to do any of this and then wonders why their ideas never get adopted is not taking the moral high road. They are making a practical error while feeling virtuous about it.

Your organization is political. The question is not whether to participate in its politics. The question is whether to participate consciously and honestly or not.

see the whole series · email me

BuenodeMesquita2011

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith: The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics. PublicAffairs, 2011, 9781610390446.

Crick2000

Bernard Crick: In Defence of Politics (5th ed.). Continuum, 2000, 9780826450654.

Pfeffer1992

Jeffrey Pfeffer: Managing with Power: Politics and Influence in Organizations. Harvard Business Press, 1992, 9780875844404.

Runciman2014

David Runciman: Politics. Profile Books, 2014, 9781846685989.