This is the third installment in a four-part series on using metaphors in sales.
March 29, 2023
Last week, we considered what it means to motivate action using the rhetoric of war, or when you frame your sales in terms of a battle against competitors. This week, we’re looking at the metaphor of referring to your company or organization in terms of being a family. This metaphor is meant to suggest guidance, stability, and camaraderie.
Or rather, we’re eulogizing the metaphor, because declaring your co-workers are “family” is what we’d call a dead metaphor—as dead as a doornail.
(By the way: “Dead as a doornail” dates back to the 14th century and was common enough by the 16th century to be used by William Shakespeare in Henry IV, Part 2. The simile originates in a time when nails were valuable bits of shaped metal, conserved whenever possible. As an exception to that practice, nails used in doors were purposefully hammered clean-through and bent or clinched at the end, for the sake of added security. So, to be “dead as a doornail” meant to be removed permanently from future circulation.)
Whodunnit? What killed the usefulness of family as a metaphor in company culture? And what can we do, if anything, to bring this figurative concept back to life?
On a historical level, business-as-family became a dead metaphor because it points back to the literal reality of when most businesses were family-run, which was also an era of corporate structures centering on leadership by enfranchised men. Calculating the emotional and physical cost of labor in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, when 70+ hours of work per week became common, led to the October 1940 amendment of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which gave us the 40-hour workweek. Some business owners resisted on the grounds that government was meddling in what they considered to be a family affair. (Yes, it is true that Henry Ford had embraced the eight-hour workday much earlier, in 1920—but he did so, in part, to enable his auto and rubber factories to run 24/7.)
Whenever someone evokes the metaphor of “we’re a family in this office,” what might be intended as creating a nurturing work environment still carries the burden of not only the terms of payment, but a paternalistic attitude around what’s expected of how employees spend their time. Coercion often comes disguised as a perk. Why go home to cook dinner, when we’re willing to pay for delivery or an onsite kitchen? Why take extra vacation days if this year’s conference is in such a fun city? (Yes, it is true that Henry Ford sponsored square-dancing and country music nights for his employees—but he did so, in part, to keep them away from what he perceived as the dangerous temptations of jazz.)
On July 17, 2020, a headline assigned to an article by Erin Griffith, for The New York Times, set off a small shockwave by using a simile that poked directly at the analogy of family-as-business: “Airbnb Was Like a Family, Until the Layoffs Started.” Several firsthand accounts from former Airbnb employees use the term “Airfam,” a portmanteau that intersects with the vernacular use of “fam.” This shorthand for “family” doesn’t engage the neural patterns for novel metaphor; instead, the word uses the easily tread pathways of idiom or slang, referring to a close social network without engaging the complications of blood-tie or romantic partnership.
By 2020, it’s fair to say that the term “family” had lost its metaphoric oomph in the world of sales.
Even the sincerest commitment cultures encounter moments when capitalist needs run counter to idealistic priorities. And yet. When you find an employer that’s a good fit, especially if you have experienced toxic workplaces in the past, no surprise if you’re excited to think of them as “family.” What you’re not thinking of (I hope): secrets, silences, judgments, boozy holidays. What you are thinking of (I hope): a group that gets who you are, welcomes your eccentricities alongside your assets, shows a sense of humor, and gives you space to fluctuate or evolve in your identities.
There are good reasons to resist the rhetoric of calling your corporation or organization’s staff a “family.” That said, the figurative concept of family can be useful in team-building exercises. Anytime you’ve spent multiple hours in dialogue with someone, week after week, you start to form the depth of understanding that we attach to family relationships.
The tricky part is that discussing the metaphor of “family” head-on only produces the most reductive (not to mention cis- and hetero-centered) symbolic interpretations. I know it is counter-intuitive, but try moving your team’s attention left or right of target to hit the bull’s eye. Get weird by putting your perception of a metaphorical “family” into the bright, specific scenarios of a team-building exercise.
Here’s an exercise that can be completed in 30–60 minutes in person, or asynchronously across the course of a day. Set up a whiteboard space (or Google Doc) that announces three to five distinct scenarios drawn from the templates of family experience:
The rules are simple:
The goal is two-fold—to give credit to what you’ve already noticed about one another within your team, and to hold space for people to share more about themselves. In other words, this becomes a chance to foster the closeness that we associate with metaphorical family units.
You can do that even if the word “family” never enters the chat.
Next week, we’ll think about the ways that the world of sales draws on metaphors of nature, both in terms of designing functional structure and shaping company messaging.
Let us fill your metaphorical toolbox. Reach out at mastery@maestrogroup.co to find out more about our live trainings and self-paced learning modules.
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