When Your Job Runs on Your Family's Rules

How childhood survival habits and assigned family roles bleed into your professional life.

When a job gets bad enough that a woman dreads Sunday night, the first explanation she reaches for is a person. It might be the director who changes the priorities every Monday or the coworker who presents her work in meetings as his own, and sometimes one person really is the whole problem. A boss who reminds her of a parent is another explanation, which Is It Your Boss or Your Childhood? goes into, but there's a third one that gets less attention. Some offices run on the same rules as a family where one adult's moods decided what everyone else was allowed to say. Replacing the difficult person in those offices wouldn't change much, whoever got hired next would end up in the same role.

In families like that, keeping the parent happy counts for more than being good at anything, and the children learn to check the parent's mood before asking for anything. An office led by someone with that temperament ends up working the same way. People stop raising problems in front of the vice president, because the last person who did got left off the next project. A lot of the department's actual work turns into keeping one person from getting upset.

The Golden Child and the Scapegoat at Work

Leaders like that split their staff into people who can do no wrong and people who can't do anything right. The favorite gets the projects the executives see, and she gets a pass when her report comes in two weeks late with the wrong numbers in it. None of it has much to do with how good she is at her job. She's being rewarded for agreeing with the boss and making the boss feel competent, and families have a name for her, the golden child.

Somebody has to take the blame the favorite never gets. It goes to the employee who's good at her job and willing to tell the director the project is $40,000 over budget, or that two people can't hit the launch date. Nobody changes the launch date. The woman who raised it gets treated as the problem instead, and by the end of the quarter the missed target and the director's bad mood have both turned into her fault.

If you were the scapegoat growing up, you've done this job before. You learned early to notice when an adult was about to get angry and to do something about it.

You changed the subject or apologized first for something you hadn't done. An office like this one will let you do all of it for nothing and then hold you responsible when it fails anyway. Nobody has to assign you the role, either. You see the tension before anyone else in the department does and start covering for it, and the covering is what makes you the obvious person to blame.

Leaders who can't stand direct conflict also route it through somebody else. A director who's unhappy with an employee's work calls her coworker into his office to complain about her, and the employee never gets the expectations in writing. He gets out of the conversation he was supposed to have, and his staff stays suspicious of each other. The coworker he picked walks out feeling trusted. She's also just been given part of his job, the part where someone tells an employee her work isn't good enough, without the title or the pay that comes with it. If the employee finds out who's been talking about her, the coworker is the one she stops speaking to, and the director stays out of all of it.

The "We're a Family" Trap

The companies most likely to run this way are the ones that describe themselves as a family, in the all-staff emails and especially during layoffs. A family expects loyalty whether or not anyone's earned it, and it forgives a parent for what nobody would forgive a stranger. A company borrowing that word wants the loyalty and the forgiveness without having to keep anyone on when the budget gets cut.

A job is a deal where she does specific work and gets paid a specific amount for it. Once the office is a family, the limits any employee is entitled to start looking like disloyalty, like not answering texts on a Sunday or saying no when a laid-off coworker's duties get added to her job with no raise. A woman who grew up where saying no was treated as betrayal feels guilty right away, for asking the company to stick to the terms of the offer letter she signed.

Setting the Boundary

You can't fix an office that runs this way, you didn't set it up and the people at the top are getting what they want out of it. You can stop doing the parts of it that were never in your job description. When a boss or a coworker starts complaining to you about someone else, one sentence is enough: "That sounds like something you should talk to her about directly." After that you don't pass anything along, and you don't add your own opinion of her.

When a deadline can't be met, put the trade-off in writing instead of working nights to make the date: "With the people we have, we can deliver the first phase by Friday or both phases by the end of next month, let me know which you'd prefer." Ten unpaid hours a week, on a salary that works out to $30 an hour, comes to $300 a week. Over a year that's about $15,000 you're handing the company, so a director doesn't have to tell his own boss the timeline was wrong.

Leaving is also allowed. A woman raised to believe that walking away from her family made her a bad daughter feels the same way about a job. She'll stay two years longer than she should, while the raise promised in her last review gets moved to next quarter and then the quarter after that. The company offered her a salary for a set of duties. Once it started expecting her evenings and her silence about the budget, it stopped meeting its own terms, and taking another offer is a business decision she doesn't need to apologize for.

Further Reading

If you find yourself constantly over-functioning at work or feeling responsible for managing your coworkers' emotions, understanding where that training started is the first step to stopping it.

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