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Some Things Are Always on the Agenda
Working with families who want to transition their wealth or business from one generation to the next is fascinating and challenging.
Part of what makes it fun for me is that no two days are ever the same, because each family is different.
But some parts of the work are reliably predictable, and I always like to try to point those out when I come across an interesting way to do so.
So that’s where we’re going this week, with a hat tip to a long-time friend and colleague (B.E.) who unwittingly inspired this post.
She was hosting a webinar and innocently noted something about “…working with families on their anxieties and aspirations…”
I jotted that phrase down, loving the alliteration, which I later decided to add to in my title.
Alliteration Instead of a Mnemonic
Regular readers may recall that I self-confess to writing these weekly posts for myself, as a way to continue to refine my thinking about the career I’ve found myself in.
Sometimes I come up with a mnemonic way to remember something, which I’ve done as recently as a few weeks ago with Ideas on Dealing with the Family CRAP, or over eight years ago in Start Cleaning Up Your M.E.S.S.
While mnemonics have been a go-to for me over the years, I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve used alliteration.
Even though “anxieties and aspirations” barely qualifies, I decided to strategically add “again” for reasons I’ll expound upon.
Family Anxieties and Aspirations around Wealth Transitions
It’s completely normal for families to experience anxieties when thinking about how they’ll transition their business or wealth to the next generation.
My buddy Mr. Google says anxieties are “feelings of worry, fear, or dread”, and I know many family members have such feelings on a regular basis.
Aspirations, from the same source, are “strong desires or ambitions for things you hope to achieve”, and plenty of family members also have many such desires.
When a family is blessed with significant wealth, which some say is a great amplifier, both those categories, the anxieties and the aspirations, become way bigger than for the average family next door.
They Don’t Really Ever Go Away
Families have been dealing with these potential negatives and worries since the beginning of time, and the hopes of what they can achieve thanks to their privileged place are also always there.
For those of us to work with such families, part of our role is to normalize that these feelings are real, they exist, and that the best way to deal with them is to name them and talk about them regularly as a family.
The blog about Family CRAP mentioned above is all about Convening Regularly And Productively.
What I didn’t talk about in that piece was that anxieties and aspirations are always on the table, even when they aren’t labelled that way.
They’re just below the surface in almost every discussion.
The Family Is Comprised of Many Individuals
Things would be much simpler if there were such a single thing as “family anxiety”; of course each individual person has their own version.
The same is true of their aspirations.
This is why having a forum in which to discuss these, as a family, is so important.
When rising gen family members understand why their parents are concerned about things, conversations about that can assuage people.
When parents hear from their offspring about some of their aspirations, the family can come up with ways to support those.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Again and Again
These discussions are not a “one and done” occurrence. They need to continue to happen over and over.
When I’ve worked with a family for a few years, I feel like the Chief Repetition Officer, because we go over the same ground all the time, and that’s the way it should be.
There are always going to be anxieties, and the ones from 2015 or 2020 are not the same as the ones in 2025.
And the ones in 2030 and 2035 will be different again.
The same goes for each person’s aspirations, they evolve and change all the time.
Addressing the anxieties and aspirations is never on the agenda, per se, but at the same time, they’re always on the agenda.
And they come up again and again, and that’s a good thing.
Families that make it a point to meet and discuss them will do better than those who don’t.
