Linked: Is Your Corporate Culture Cultish?
I think this might apply to much of Silicon Valley, but is there a little bit of this within law firms as well?
“What characterizes corporate cult is the degree of control management exercises over employees’ thinking and behavior. This starts with recruitment, where employees are screened for their “fit.” Once in, they then see that on-boarding processes and incentive systems tend to reinforce the need for alignment. This drives the way people communicate, make decisions, evaluate each other, as well as hiring, promotion and termination decisions. In such a climate, individualism is discouraged, and group-think prevails.
Some cult-like companies go so far as to position the workplace as a replacement for family and community, isolating their employees (perhaps unintentionally, perhaps deliberately) from those support networks. They encourage people to center their lives around their jobs, which leaves little time for leisure, entertainment, or vacations.”
I’ve long been critical of the legal industry when it comes to work-life balance, managers who refer to the organization as a “family” make me cringe, and good lord have I had it up to here with hiring processes that evaluate “fit” over every other possible criteria. (People who lack the skills to do the job don’t fit, period) But does it come across as cult-like? It may to some junior associates, for the rest of us, it’s really just a job. Or at least it should be. But, I’ve never been on the partner track, it may look very different from there.
What’s the point of making your life all about your job? How much is everything else in your life really worth?
