Startup Families Care for One Another in Sometimes Unexpected Ways

Startup teams start small – and they often feel like families, with co-founders in “business marriages.” The relationship dynamics of people within a startup environment are often different from joining larger, less personal, more established companies as an employee – and it shows when the larger context of people’s lives intersect with business operations.

As a company leader during my startup career, I have found some of my most surprising and challenging moments when “larger life issues” influenced the startup work we were doing. In the early stages, building a high-potential startup requires so much personal investment of time, energy, and focus that startup life often fuzzes into private lives. Hours and hours together turn into weeks, months, and years toiling and creating together. Over time, you get to know your colleagues very, very well – and often come to rely on each other for support as well as share stories of personal trials and tribulations.

Startup teams usually start small, with just a few co-founders that then expand to a concentrated team for the initial product development period. Groups of less than five, ten, or twenty can work closely together for years. The pressure-packed environment and collaborative work of a startup often results in deep relationships, and thriving under that pressure is often helped by developing a culture of caring for and supporting one another. My point here is to draw attention to the vital reality and the critical importance of supportive work relationships that often transcend what is typical in larger, more established companies.

For leaders, it is essential to embrace the reality that startups are composed of people working together to accomplish a shared mission with a shared set of goals.  A high potential startup demands a team, and that means you have to always remember that people have whole lives that are influenced by things that happen to them as you journey together. In fact, since startups often have a way of consuming immense amounts of life and attention, in many ways, startup teams often become like close-knit families. Wise leaders know that recruiting, leading, and retaining a high-performance team often requires extending beyond the fuzzy work-life boundaries.

I think little surprises me now after 20 years, but if you are just starting, let me give you a little taste of some of the range of “family” moments that I have encountered.  Every one of these has happened to me personally at least once – and some several times. As food for thought, take a moment to reflect on how you might respond in the moment when:

• A team member collapses unconscious or gets injured at work
• Someone or their child gets married
• A team member makes national news as a murder victim
• Someone or their life-partner or parent or child receives a terrifying diagnosis
• You discover that a performance problem was actually a substance abuse problem
• A team member heads to the ER and ends up hospitalized with questions about whether they will survive
• A sick team member’s girlfriend calls to tell you the team member unexpectedly died
• A colleague embarks on the journey of parenthood for the first or second or third time
• A team member gets shocked with 200,000 volts at work
• Someone is confronted with a devastating crisis involving their child or another young family member
• A colleague sends you a text during a Board meeting that they are unexpectedly on their way into emergency heart surgery
• A family member or friend of a team member dies
• Someone gets divorced
• A young adult far from family needs their surrogate startup family to take them to the ER when urgent post-surgical complications arise – and care for them for weeks while they cannot be home alone
• Someone ends up in a financial crisis that means they are losing the roof over their head
• A co-founder needs to move to another state to care for an ailing parent
• A team member retires
• Someone working routinely and recently with you gets arrested as a serial killer with body parts in a cooler in their car, and the police want to find out everything you might know about their whereabouts in previous weeks

Of course, every situation is unique and requires care, empathy, balance, wisdom, grace, and generosity in the moment.  Depending on the specific circumstances, I have called 911, spent nights in the ER, given extra time-off, called in favors to get an “instant” backup, provided a temporary place to stay, celebrated the joyful milestone, provided meal gift baskets/certificates, sent flowers, wished I had more emergency contacts, engaged with team members’ families, provided counsel, encouragement, advice, and a commiserating shoulder. No doubt that list is incomplete! Beyond just engaging with the colleague and rallying others to support them, I have also needed to manage the risk to the business, engage my Board members, formulate layered backup plans, adapted priorities, and made lots of other tweaks to our plans. Ultimately, startups are built out of individual people who live complex lives both inside the company and beyond – and sometimes, life just happens. May we all respond with grace, love, and care when it does!