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Does your startup act like a “team” or a “family”? (with Terry Lee)

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caneel executive coach

I'm a social scientist who helps people break out of the invisible traps and make whole-life changes easily and naturally.

A lot of startup founders refer to their teams as “families”, especially in the early stages. They spend all of their time together, laugh together, cry together, and care for each other as human beings beyond their roles as colleagues. Just like a family, right? Not quite. I sat down to talk through the implications of using “team” versus “family” to refer to our companies with Terry Lee, a Kickass client who is building a company right now called Panacea. In the video above, we unravel the issue with using the term “family” and why we prefer “team.”

We’ll follow up on how you can retain the positive effects of the “family” mentality, such as recognizing and affirming your teammates’ humanity and supporting them emotionally, in a future post. Look for that here in the coming week!

P.S. Here is a link to Reid Hoffman’s Masters of Scale podcast. Check out the episode on Netflix’s “Culture Deck” we mention in the video.

xo,

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