I’ve always disliked the phrase “we’re like a family here” at work, and I know I’m not alone in that opinion.
There are some fairly obvious reasons for that. Work is a commercial relationship with boundaries around it. You’re being paid to be there and, unlike your actual family (hopefully!), your employer can get rid of you when the numbers no longer work.
However, when you dig a little deeper, there’s another problem with the family metaphor. If your workplace is a family, who are the parents - and who are the children?
Think about how a traditional family operates. Parents set the rules and make decisions on behalf of their children. Children ask permission. Ultimately, the parent gets the final say.
That dynamic makes sense if you’re raising a child, but it’s a little weirder when everyone involved is an adult. And yet, companies recreate versions of this relationship all the time.
In fact, it’s such a common dynamic that there’s even a term that helps explain it: workplace infantilisation - or when companies treat employees like children by imposing a level of supervision, permission or control that doesn’t match someone’s competence or the responsibility they’ve given them.
“We’re like a family” fits neatly into this dynamic. Researchers have examined how family language can cast managers as parental authority figures and employees as the children expected to accept that authority.
When you start thinking about it that way, “we’re like a family here” takes on a rather different meaning.
We’ve normalised asking permission
Corporate life is littered with examples of the parent-child dynamic. We accept an extraordinary amount of permission-seeking as part of having a job.
Take annual leave (as we call it here in Australia, or PTO for my US audience). An adult asks another adult for permission to take a day out of their statutory entitlement. The manager can say no because the needs of the business take priority that day.
Obviously there’s a genuine operational need for this. A business can’t have an entire team disappear at once and still expect everything to operate normally. However, it’s also worth examining the underlying dynamics, and whether the better approach would be to “inform and negotiate” about taking time off, rather than approaching it as a permission-seeking exercise.
Sick leave is another example. Let’s say you wake up with gastro or a migraine. You know you can’t work that day. Depending on your employer’s policy, your assessment of your own health might not be enough. You may need a doctor to confirm that yes, you really were sick.
Again, employers will sometimes be justified in seeking medical evidence. Extended absences or particular circumstances can justify asking for documentation. However, is it really necessary for a single sick day for a trustworthy employee? Why do some companies still have policies in place that require every employee to prove they’re telling the truth - rather than assuming they can be trusted as a default?
The same dynamic appears in everyday decision-making. Companies hire experienced professionals, give them responsibility for important work, then require approval before they make relatively minor decisions within their area of expertise.
Of course, companies sometimes need controls in place. There will always be situations and decisions where oversight and process are required. However, the fact that a rule or a cultural norm exists doesn’t automatically make it reasonable.
When I was in my last corporate role, which was littered with policies and procedures, I often used to find myself wondering whether the level of control matched the actual business need. Did this decision genuinely require approval? Did that employee need supervision here? What risk were we actually managing?
When you’re routinely asking experienced adults to seek permission to make decisions that sit comfortably within their experience and responsibilities, accountability starts to look a lot more like paternalism.
Take ownership, ask permission
Companies love telling employees to take ownership. You’ve probably heard a version of it if you work in corporate - “be proactive, make good decisions”.
Then it’s so often the case that someone does make a decision and hears: “Why didn’t you check with me first?”
Human beings tend to learn quickly from experiences like that. If making a decision independently gets you questioned, you start checking with your manager. If escalating something protects you from blame later, you take it up the chain. We’ve all found ourselves copying someone senior into an email because you want a record that they knew what you were doing.
Soon, asking permission becomes the safer way to work. When you ask your manager and get approval, you share responsibility for what happens next. If you make the decision yourself and your manager doesn’t like it, you’re suddenly in the position of having to explain why you didn’t ask first.
Companies can effectively train people out of working independently this way - then you often see those same companies complain that employees don’t take enough initiative.
While it may look like individual reluctance to take ownership, what you could actually be seeing is a reflection of what people have learned about the consequences of doing exactly that. When employees discover that independent decisions carry more personal risk than seeking approval, they adapt their behaviour accordingly.
What the research says about this
One meta-analysis I came across brought together 72 studies examining autonomy-supportive leadership. These managers gave employees meaningful choice in how they did their jobs and avoided unnecessary control.
The research associated that management style with higher job satisfaction and employee engagement, along with better wellbeing. It also found an association with lower levels of workplace distress.
It’s also worth noting that the concept of “autonomy” doesn’t mean giving employees permission to do whatever they want. A company can set clear expectations and hold people accountable for meeting them. Similarly, managers can define the boundaries around a role and intervene when someone repeatedly makes poor choices.
However, what happens when companies give people responsibility for an outcome without giving them enough authority to make the decisions required to achieve it? You own the outcome, but someone else still needs to approve every move you make.
As an employee, it’s difficult to take that version of ownership seriously.
The link to workplace trust
I’ve written before about the gap between what an organisation says about itself and what employees actually experience.
Perhaps your company says it encourages innovation, but you have to wait months to get anything new approved. Or it says people are its greatest asset while repeatedly making decisions that suggest otherwise.
Trust and autonomy work in much the same way. A company can tell employees it trusts them as often as it likes. However, if people still need approval for relatively minor decisions, or have to justify where they’re working from, or need to prove they really were sick, those experiences will tell them far more about the organisation than anything written in its company values.
Meanwhile, workplace infantilisation might start with a micromanaging boss, but companies can also build it into the way they operate.
You see it in approval processes that require four people to sign off a decision an experienced employee could reasonably make themselves. You see it when companies monitor whether people are at their desks or online, instead of assessing them by the work they produce.
Trust still needs boundaries
Am I suggesting companies should abandon all controls and let employees go completely “free range” to get the best from their workforce? No, I am not.
Some employees do take advantage of trust. People “chuck sickies”, as we say here in Australia, or take sick leave when they’re not actually sick. Some employees misuse flexible working arrangements and others avoid making decisions because they genuinely don’t want the responsibility. In those cases, managers will sometimes need to intervene to keep the team functioning.
However, the fact that those employees exist doesn’t automatically justify building every workplace process around the assumption that nobody can be trusted. In fact, in my experience the vast majority of people can be trusted, particularly when you treat them like adults.
The key consideration is whether the level of control matches the actual risk or business need. Does the control solve a genuine problem? Or does it exist because the company assumes employees won’t make reasonable decisions without someone watching them?
It’s an important distinction to make, because blanket controls don’t only affect the person who might take advantage. They also affect everyone who would have done the right thing anyway.
They send the long-serving, trustworthy employee to get a medical certificate when they already feel terrible. They leave an experienced professional waiting for approval on a decision they could’ve made yesterday.
Eventually, we shouldn’t be surprised when everyone understands the need to prove they’re trustworthy over and over again, regardless of how long they’ve worked there or how much responsibility the company has already given them.
I don’t need a corporate parent
At the end of the day, most employees need to understand what they’re responsible for and have enough authority to do their job. The employer can then hold them accountable for any decisions made.
That also requires managers to accept something that comes with trusting adults: sometimes an employee will make a decision their manager wouldn’t have made themselves.
There’s also a useful test for how much ownership a workplace really gives people. The next time someone senior at your work complains that employees aren’t taking enough ownership, look at what happens when someone actually makes a decision.
Does their manager accept the decision when it falls within that person’s responsibilities, even if they would have chosen differently? Or does the employee hear: “Why didn’t you ask me first?”
People will always learn from experience what their workplace expects from them. Tell someone to take ownership while repeatedly teaching them that independent decisions cause problems and they’ll start seeking approval. Eventually, the company gets a workforce that has learned to ask permission rather than make the call. Then management wonders why nobody takes ownership.
We don’t need corporate mums and dads. We’re adults. If companies want us to take ownership, they need to trust us to do it.
One thing I’m thinking about this week
Or, more correctly, one thing I’m trying NOT to think about this week.
I’m actually going to stop thinking about AI for a little while. I know that sounds strange given how much I talk about it here, but I’m finding the current discourse genuinely exhausting.
Over the last couple of weeks we’ve had people involved in building frontier AI publicly discussing the possibility that these systems could pose an existential risk to humanity. We can argue about whether that risk is 10 per cent, 1 per cent or a tiny fraction of 1 per cent. Nobody actually knows.
The only conclusion I can reach is that either the people building these systems genuinely believe there’s a material risk of catastrophe and are continuing anyway, or we’ve reached a point where apocalyptic language has become normalised around an industry with enormous commercial and political power. There are other interpretations, but I can’t find one that makes the situation feel particularly reassuring.
I find it outrageous that this is where the public conversation about AI has ended up, while the broader trajectory remains essentially unchanged.
So I’m taking a break from it. No AI commentary from me for a little while. I’m going to think about something else. There’s plenty happening in the world of work that doesn’t involve debating whether the technology we are enthusiastically building might eventually kill us.
And frankly, I could use the rest.
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