Many founders say it with genuine intent. They want people to care about each other, stand by each other and feel they belong.

• But then someone isn’t performing.
• A difficult conversation gets postponed because “she has been with us for years.”
• A senior employee’s experience gets more weight than actual competence.
• A conflict comes back to the founder to resolve.

Someone gets another chance. And another.

That is where the family metaphor starts getting in the way. In a family, relationships can come before performance. You don’t stop being someone’s family because they aren’t doing well.

In a family, relationships can come before performance.

– Who said it can matter more than what is being said.
– Seniority can command more respect than competence.
– Past performance can continue to carry weight long after potential has faded.

A high-performing team is different. Relationships still matter. But so do contribution, competence, accountability and difficult conversations.

When these get blurred, founders can find themselves protecting people they should be challenging, tolerating performance they should be addressing, and resolving conflicts the team should be capable of resolving itself.

So how do organisations create belonging without letting it dilute performance?

But the dilemma isn’t uniquely Netflix’s.

The Physio Co, founder Tristan White says a family-like culture was the right starting point. But as the organisation grew, he found care and loyalty alone weren’t enough for a high-performing team, and shifted towards greater accountability and performance

TaskRabbit, founder Leah Busque describes a close-knit, happy team, but recognised that the business wasn’t performing at the level it needed to. Looking back, she wished she had built a high-performance culture into its DNA much earlier.

Closer home, Mahindra CHRO describes culture as a “caring meritocracy”: supporting people while maintaining high standards of performance and outcomes.

Different companies. Different contexts. A similar realisation.
The culture that helps you build the organisation may not be the culture you need to grow it.

The answer isn’t to care less.It is to recognise when care, loyalty and belonging start getting in the way of meritocracy.

When you find yourself saying:
“They’ve been with us for years.”
“Let’s give them another chance.”
“I don’t want to upset them.”
“I’ll handle it.”

Pause. Ask yourself:
Are we caring for the person, or protecting them from accountability?

And then ask:
What is this costing the team?

You may be surprised by how often care shows up as avoidance, protection or founder intervention.

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Then success demands playing to a different genre. Nimble competitors adapt to the new rhythm while the organisation struggles to keep time.

Someone concludes, “Our structure is the problem.”

A restructuring exercise begins. Boxes move. Titles change. Reporting lines are redrawn.

Six months later, competitors continue to gain market share. People still look for approvals for routine decisions. Functions still blame each other when work stalls.

The chart changed. The flow didn’t.

In reality, structure only defines reporting relationships. Every organisation has another, less visible structure—the network through which work, decisions, information and influence actually move.

Customers, products, projects and problems rarely stay within teams. They move across functions, geographies and expertise.

The more interconnected the work becomes, the less the org chart explains how things actually get done.

The real challenges usually appear when

• information doesn’t move
• decisions climb unnecessarily
• teams optimise locally
• dependencies fall between the teams

A flat structure doesn’t automatically create autonomy. A hierarchy doesn’t automatically create bureaucracy

What matters is whether the people closest to the work have enough context, trust and authority to keep it moving.

That is exactly what Alan Mulally recognised when he took charge of Ford Motor Company in 2006. Over time, regions, functions and product platforms had evolved into separate systems, each optimising its own priorities instead of the company’s overall performance.

Through the One Ford initiative, he focused on creating shared visibility, common operating reviews and a single operating rhythm across the organisation. Teams could see how their decisions affected others, making it easier to collaborate across functions rather than operate within silos.

The breakthrough came not from redrawing the organisation chart, but from reconnecting the organisation behind it.

Draw the work flow. Map who works with whom, not who reports to whom

To start with, pick one important customer escalation, project or decision.

Map:

1. Which teams touch it?
2. Where does it slow down?
3. Where does it get escalated?
4. Who influences the outcome without formally owning it?

Then ask:

If there was no org chart, how would teams work to actually get things done and create value?

Identify a bottleneck that creates friction. Then ask what would remove it instead of who owns it.

No sweeping restructuring discussion. Just removing friction, one at a time.

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Everyone else knows only their piece of the work.

• Sales chases revenue.
• Operations cuts costs.
• Teams ask for budgets.

Managers approve or reject.

Decisions get made with incomplete context. The business becomes a black box.

Employees obey, not own.
Leaders wonder why ownership is missing.
 

When people don’t understand how the business works, they optimise for their own department. Not for the company.
– A discount that helps sales may destroy margin.
– A cost-saving measure may hurt customer retention.
– An approved expense may create more value than the money it costs.

Without visibility, people guess.
Organizations that promote information transparency work differently.

They treat financial information as operational information. Not executive information.

When people understand revenue, margins and costs, decisions improve.

Not because they become accountants.
Because they finally understand the consequences of their choices.

It started off with founder Jack Stack focusing on building ownership.

Not through equity grants but through ownership of decisions.

He started with sharing financial information with employees.

Many thought it was dangerous. Why would you give everyone access to the numbers? What if they misuse it?

Over time, employees learned how the business made money and how their choices affected results. They stopped acting like employees. They started thinking like “entrepreneurs”.

But the breakthrough wasn’t transparency alone. It was teaching people how to understand the numbers.

Because a profit-and-loss statement nobody understands is just another document. A profit-and-loss statement that people can interpret becomes a decision-making tool.

Forty years later, the practice is still central to how the company operates. Now, people weren’t being asked to think like owners. They already are.

Run a Business Literacy Hour once a month.
For 60 minutes, open the books.

Explain:

• Revenue
• Gross Margin
• Profit
• Major cost drivers
• Cash flow basics

Keep it simple.

No finance jargon. No PowerPoint marathons.

Use real company numbers.

Invite questions. Especially the uncomfortable ones.

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