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Some Recent FEC Symposium Takeaways
Much of the work I do these days comes down to helping families talk about important subjects together in a productive manner.
This involves coaching and facilitation skills, and sometimes a little bit of mediation too.
Most of the conversations that I assist with are around topics that every family knows they should be discussing, but without someone helping guide them, the conversations often feel a bit too risky to attempt, so having a neutral outsider along makes sense.
I’m always grateful for the opportunity to assist in such situations, because I understand why families are hesitant to attempt some of these discussions alone.
I’m just returning from the recent Family Enterprise Canada(FEC) Symposium in Halifax, and there were a couple of sessions on the first day that dealt specifically with helping to make it safe to share feelings among family members.
Allow me to relay some of my takeaways from them, because the question of safety is often at the root of the difficulty.
Fatherhood Unlocked
The first was a plenary session title Fatherhood Unlocked, featuring Dan Doty.
I had some idea of what to expect, because I’d recently hosted an episode of FEC’s podcast, Let’s Talk Family Enterprise (ep. 66), with Doty as my guest, as a tease before the conference.
It was one of the final messages during his talk that stayed with me, and I want to share his 3 keys to remember when you want to help someone open up and share their true feelings with you.
It’s OK to Feel your Feelings
The first step is to make sure to let the people know that it’s perfectly OK to feel the feelings that you’re feeling.
While this sounds pretty simple, it’s actually huge, because it runs counter to so much of the lifelong programming that many people, especially men, have been receiving for most of their lives.
You will feel feelings, I think we can all agree, but not everyone understands the importance of acknowledging them and trying to understand what they’re telling us.
Leaders Go First – Modelling the Behaviour
After reminding people that feelings are OK to have and acknowledge, there’s still a bit more work that needs to be done to get people to open up.
That’s where “modeling” comes in. Modeling is a fancy word for what we’re getting at, which comes done to this: Go first!
If I want you to do something that you might feel is risky, I’m much more likely to succeed in getting you to take that step if I jump to the front of the line and I go first, to show you not only how it’s done, but that it’s entirely survivable and even cathartic.
Be a Great Listener
Most people believe that they’re good listeners, and a lot of them are wrong.
But they aren’t usually wrong because of what they don’t do enough of, but because of the extra things they do that aren’t helpful.
Doty explained that it’s so hard to not jump in while listening to someone who’s sharing something difficult, because we want to be helpful.
We are prone to offer advice, and to try to “fix” the situation.
That doesn’t make one a great listener, and more often than not, simply listening so that the other person can feel heard is what is really needed.
Avoid offering advice and trying to fix someone.
Moving Towards Safety, Or Away from It
After that plenary, it was time for a breakout session and I chose the one lead by friend and colleague Shauna Trainor.
It was about getting (and keeping) families aligned and accountable.
One of the exercises she had us do at our tables was to make two lists, while thinking about creating a safe space and environment for teams to share ideas with each other.
Her prompt was, “What do people do that moves people towards safety, and what do we do that moves people away from safety?”.
We all came up with long lists and you can too, but I’m sharing this because in the moment I felt like it dovetailed so nicely with what we had all just heard about in the previous session.
Groups, including families, work better when they can share openly and learn together.
The safety that we help create and the culture we build to make things go well are a constant work-in-progress.
