Irritating coworker remind you of anyone? How family relationships trigger fighting at work
It’s easy to come back from a holiday season full of family time feeling less than refreshed. But when you find yourself snapping at a coworker, there may be more at play than lack of sleep and frazzled nerves.
If that coworker reminds you a bit of your brother, you’re likely to respond to his prodding in much the same way — especially if you left some things unsaid across the dinner table. As Sigmund Freud taught psychologists more than 100 years ago, unconscious emotions drive actions, as much or more so than rational thought processes do. You may think you’re purely objective in the workplace, but you don’t leave behind your impulses when you walk through your office door. Management psychologists are especially attuned to the ways leaders’ personal lives influence their business lives, whether they want them to or not.
When I consult to executive management teams, I often observe patterns that don’t seem to make much sense — that is until you think about how unconscious family dynamics may be at play. Take, for example, a group of mostly male leaders who are meeting to discuss a roadblock to their business plan. One of the female leaders, Lori, proposes a solution, but no one reacts to her idea. Five minutes later, her male coworker Matt offers up the same suggestion and the room responds with great enthusiasm.
What just happened? Everyone in the room is a senior executive. Everyone in the room wants to solve the business challenge. Both people made the same suggestion — but the impact is very different based on the leader’s gender.
Lori no doubt feels disrespected — and she has been, although perhaps unintentionally — and frustrated about how to make her voice heard in the future. Rather than stopping at the simple explanation of sexism, I go deeper, suggesting that the barrier is what I call the “Mommy Channel.” As young boys mature in our culture, they must break the powerful bond with their mothers to become autonomous, adult men. We all know men who don’t succeed at this important developmental task, and they can struggle to define their own lives. They are also often the subject of mockery — think Wolowitz from The Big Bang Theory. Eager to avoid this fate, adolescent men tend to start making this break by tuning out their mother’s voice, so she no longer has the power over them she once had. More often than we may realize, this inattention can generalize to all women’s voices, so men simply don’t hear what women have to say. As a result, Lori has difficulty landing her ideas, while Matt subconsciously hears her idea and presents it as his own.
Once you start to see workplace relationships through the lens of family relationships, you’ll find examples everywhere. Women executives often have complicated relationships with their female assistants, and while some female leaders are surely impossible to work for, most are not. Yet their relationships with their support staff can still be strained. Consider the dynamic between mothers and their teenage daughters. Because the power dynamic is so similar between female executives and their assistants, the same tensions can manifest, no matter the relative ages.
Boomer business leaders can fall into similar patterns with their millennial employees. I’ve written before about how boomers and millennials should be natural workplace allies, but to realize their similarities, they must first overcome their differences. The age gaps replicate parent-child relationships, or even grandparent-grandchild relationships, and the same skepticism about millennials’ capabilities can carry over from the household to the office. Another source of friction can be older people’s natural envy of young people’s confidence, energy and beauty. These dynamics are unproductive, and they stand in the way of more positive patterns like mentoring.
Peer relationships can be some of the most challenging to navigate at work. Many people find it easier to collaborate with bosses or subordinates than to work smoothly with their peers. This tension often manifests itself in ways that are a lot like sibling rivalry. The brothers and sisters of the workplace compete for their parents’ attention and praise in the form of acknowledgement and promotion to senior leadership.
All of these relationships are interdependent, much like in a family. If a set of peers finds themselves behaving like children thanks to a sibling dynamic, it may trigger a parent-child relationship between them and senior leadership, creating a situation where no one benefits. To ensure your own success, and the success of your company, it’s crucial to avoid falling into these unconscious patterns. After all, sitting in the backseat of the car pinching your coworker doesn’t exactly demonstrate your leadership potential.
I’ve seen unconscious family dynamics plague companies from 20-person startups to Fortune 50 businesses. Being aware of how family relationships can influence work relationships is the first step in correcting the behavior. Once we make our unconscious biases conscious, we can begin understanding the underlying feelings in both our own and others’ behavior and start navigating these relationships in a more mature, rational manner. I have worked with both individual executives and senior leadership teams to help them identify dysfunctional patterns and replace them with more effective behaviors that drive business success. The results? The leaders’ energy is freed up to focus on the real challenges of leading and growing a business.
If you find yourself, or your employees, really struggling to overcome these patterns, please feel free to reach out.
