Your organization is not family.

"It's a beautiful thing when your organization is strong in purpose and the staff absolutely believe in the mission and see it as a calling. Many people…will talk about [our organization] as a family. And when you do business with family, we all know that can cause problems."

Oof.

Carol Bremer-Bennett is the U.S. Executive Director for World Renew, a large international disaster relief and development organization. Like many of us, Carol counts her colleagues among her favorite parts of the work. People in the nonprofit sector usually like other people. That’s why we’re here. That warmth is real, and it's good. And it also makes this so hard.

Because thinking of colleagues as family "can cause problems," as Carol said. You don't pay your cousin a salary. You don't run performance reviews on your dad. There's not a strategic plan for your kids. There are no KPIs for a marriage. And you don't fire your family.

Thinking of staff as family can bring all kinds of trouble: shaky accountability, crummy morale, misallocated resources, lousy communication, etc. (You may know a few families like that, too!) But the most acute problem, the one CEOs raise with me most, is when someone is underperforming and needs to go.