"We Are a Family." When The Message Becomes Noise?
It happened on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, when a member of my team walked into my office almost in tears. I still remember the look on their face.
This person was a first-line manager and had just come from an all-hands meeting. The CEO had said, from the stage, what CEOs almost always say at all-hands meetings. “We are a family.” “We are all in this together.” “Our people are our most important asset.”
A few days earlier, every manager in the organization - including me - had received a directive. Identify 5% of your team to be managed out during the year. The official framing was “performance improvement,” but the actual meaning was clear enough. Headcount reduction. And by the way, nothing unusual about that. In some form or another, it happens at most companies at some point.
What upset my colleague was the contradiction. How could the CEO stand on a stage and talk about family, just days after asking managers to identify people to be effectively laid off? Which message was real? What did any of it mean? For them, it was not just a mixed message. It felt like a breach of trust.
Here is the part I still think about, years later. I was genuinely surprised that anyone would be surprised.
Because in my head, those two things had never been in conflict. They were like a weather forecast and a board meeting agenda. Both real. Both happen in the same week. But not designed to explain or correlate with each other. It never occurred to me that anyone would expect one to.
That conversation quietly changed how I think about corporate life. Not because somebody was wrong to feel what they felt. Because I realized I had spent years operating with an assumption I had never articulated: that people in management positions naturally learned to separate corporate language from corporate mechanics.
I was wrong. Nobody teaches this. Nobody ever sat me down and explained it - I had just absorbed it slowly, over years, by watching what actually happened versus what got said. So people miss the lesson entirely and get blindsided by a contradiction I had long since stopped noticing existed.
Two channels, running at the same time
Here is what I explained to my team member that day.
Every big company communicates on two channels simultaneously. They are not officially named or labeled. Nobody hands you a diagram on your first day. But once you learn to hear them separately, you will not be able to un-hear them.
The first is the motivational channel. This is where “we are a family” lives. Also “our people are our greatest asset,” “we are on a journey together,” “we are transforming the industry,” and every other phrase that shows up on wall posters and welcome slides. This channel exists to create belonging, alignment, shared identity, and engagement. It is real work. Companies need it. And most of the people speaking on it - including the CEO in that all-hands - mean what they say. They are not lying.
The second is the operational channel. This is where budgets get set, headcount gets decided, projects get prioritized, and directives like “manage out 5%” get issued. This channel runs on numbers, market conditions, and business logic. It does not hate you. It does not love you. Most of the time, it does not even know you exist and, certainly, does not care about your feelings.
Both channels are real. Both are legitimate. But - and this is the part nobody puts in the onboarding deck - they are not designed to correlate. Nobody in the organization is officially responsible for making Monday’s all-hands consistent with Tuesday’s directive. That is not a bug someone forgot to fix. That is the architecture.
Why decent people say things on Monday that will be contradicted by Tuesday
This is the part I want to be careful with, because it is the part where cynicism can creep in if you are not paying attention. And cynicism is a poor lens for understanding organizations.
The CEO who said “we are a family” was not lying. He believed it. He probably believed it while the manage-out directive was sitting in every manager’s inbox, because to him, those two things were not connected. He was speaking on the motivational channel. Someone else, possibly in finance, HR, or the executive team, had made the operational decision, and he eventually approved it. He was not being asked to reconcile the two, and he was not thinking about them as one thing that had to line up.
This is how it works in almost every organization. Different people, in different rooms, on different channels, all doing legitimate work and nobody explicitly responsible for ensuring the messages match. When people get blindsided, it is not because leadership lied. It is because they applied the rules of one channel to a situation governed entirely by the other.
Once you see this pattern, you can see it everywhere. The genuine warmth at the team offsite that arrives three weeks before an unexpected reorg. The “open door policy” that quietly stops applying the moment you actually walk through the door. The town hall where the CEO talks about caring for people while the layoff list is being finalized. None of these are lies. They are two channels, running at the same time, with communication coincidentally arriving on the same day.
The Rare Case: One Message To Rule Them All
I once worked for a British company led by a Dutch CEO. In every all-hands meeting, he said some version of the same thing:
“We are here to make money for the shareholders. That is the purpose of this organization. Everything else serves that purpose.”
The first time I heard him say it, I remember thinking: did he really just say that out loud?
He did. Every time.
He never said we were a family. He never said we were making the world a better place. He told us what was true about the company and trusted us to be adults about it. I found it inspirational. Because there was no gap. Nothing to decode. He was not asking us to pretend the organization was something other than what it was. There was something oddly respectful about it. He was not dressing the business up in language that made adults feel foolish for noticing reality.
Later, when the company was sold to a large American corporation, he negotiated strong terms for both shareholders and employees. The words matched the behavior all the way to the exit.
Many years later, I still remember him and the first all hands meeting I attended. That is how rare that kind of alignment is.
What to actually do with this
If you are working inside a large organization, the useful thing is not to become cynical about the motivational channel. Belonging is real. Shared purpose is real. Relationships with your colleagues are real. Turning any of that off in your own mind would cost you something worth keeping.
The useful skill is learning to hear the two channels independently, at the same time - the way you can hear two conversations at a dinner table without confusing them.
When you are making decisions about your career, your team, or your future - listen to the operational channel. Budgets. Funded headcount. Directives. Reorgs. Who is actually in the room where decisions get made. That is where your real situation lives, and it is where your future is going to arrive from.
Enjoy the family speech at the all-hands. Feel what you feel at the team offsite. Take the belonging that is offered, because most of it is genuine. Just do not confuse it with information about what is going to happen next.
And if you manage people do not assume they already know the difference. I made that assumption once, and it took someone almost in tears in my office to show me how wrong I was. Now I explain it to people. Not because I want them to be cynical. Because I want them to be less likely to be blindsided.
That is the Hidden Game: hearing both channels at once, valuing each for what it actually offers, and never confusing them for one another.
This is the written version of Episode 2 of The Hidden Game — real stories from thirty years inside large software enterprises, and what they reveal about how these places actually work. The full episode is on YouTube. And if you are navigating something at work that does not fully add up — there is a free discovery call. A real conversation, not a pitch.
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