Knowing “What to Do” Isn’t Enough
This week’s subject deals with some issues faced by every business, but we’ll be looking at their particular effect in family enterprises.
In addition, there’s an angle to this question that applies very much to advisors who serve business families and their members.
In fact, the inspiration for this post comes from something directed specifically at those of us who serve families in this space.
Let’s see how far we can get in connecting all these elements.
Personal Connection to Stories About This
When I began planning to write about “knowledge vs. skills”, for some reason I flashed back to my Dad, and I want to share two very different ways this was really relevant in his life.
Dad was trained as an apprentice in Austria before immigrating to Canada in the 1950’s. He had not realized what an advantage that European training in “how to do” his work for the steel fabrication industry would give him a leg up when he got here.
There was a skills shortage in those post-war years in North America. Many knew what needed to be done, but we didn’t have enough skilled hands to do the work.
Much later in Dad’s life, he’d often make sure we took the time to distinguish the “what to do” from the “how to do it”.
“Let’s figure out ‘what to do’ first, then we can figure out ‘how to do it’”.
Onboarding the Rising Generation Family Members
In lots of family businesses, the first generation who founded the business need to have the skill to pull off the important work to get the company off the ground.
A generation later, the questions of how and where to integrate the next generation into a company typically arise. Naturally, there’s always more than one “right” way to do things in any particular situation.
Many families struggle, though, with whether or not to start their offspring “on the ground floor”, like working in the factory, or whether they can just saunter into an office job, because they were educated, and therefore arrive armed with lots of knowledge.
Some really interesting challenges can arise when one sibling ends up with skills useful to the operation and another is better educated and has lots of knowledge and they’re expected to get along well together and complement each other for the good of the business.
It’s great when it works, but fraught with negative consequences when they don’t get along.
What About Those Who Advise FamBiz?
A couple of weeks ago in When Being Wealthy Doesn’t Equal Having Money, I mentioned the work of someone I look up to in this space, Dr. Jim Grubman, and I’m going back to his well and wealth of experience in the field of serving enterprising families again here.
In a sense this post will serve only as a tease to further writing about the recently formed Ultra High Net Worth Institute, and their work, where I know Jim was involved in the creation of their new model, The Ten Domains of Family Wealth.
I first became aware of the UHNW Institute last year, and when I saw that they had created this new model to help understand all the important areas that wealthy families need to consider, I was hooked.
Great Knowledge, Yes. Skills Also Required.
One of the points Grubman makes is that while knowledge is great, it is not sufficient, for those who wish to truly serve families well.
Many people know that families need to work on their governance and have family meetings, but knowing that doesn’t automatically make one the best person for a family to hire to help them with such matters.
And when merely knowledgeable people act as if they are also skilled, bad things can occur. Skills matter.
It’s More Art than Science
This blog idea has been simmering in my “future posts” folder for a while now, and it finally stuck its hand up and said “now!”
It’s based on a great book that I read during the winter, called The Art of Gathering, How We Meet and Why It Matters, by Priya Parker.
The book is a great resource for anyone who is occasionally charge with organizing any kind of get-together involving people, for whatever reason they might have to be in one place together.
Of course most get-togethers do involve people, unless you spend a lot of time at the local dog park. The issue is that many gatherings seem to forget the importance of the people attending.
Now that such gatherings are once again becoming possible, with much of the pandemic hopefully behind us, this is topical again.
Family Gatherings Are a Particular Subset
While the ideas in the book can be applied to all sorts of gatherings, I read it with a particular interest in family gatherings, because I sometimes work with families who are just getting used to having regular family meetings, and some of the details can be pretty important.
The organizing of such events typically falls onto the shoulders of one or two people, and most families can readily point to the “usual suspects” who play that role in their clan.
Such “family champions” or “CEO’s” (Chief Emotional Officers) would do well to pick up the book to get some ideas and tips that they’ll find useful.
Even experienced gatherers will get something out of it, if only for a better understanding of why they’ve already been successful.
Parallels to Other Areas of My “Family” Work
Aside from wanting to plug Parker’s book, there’s a bigger reason why I wanted to write this particular post. Regular readers know my penchant for metaphors and analogies so that’s naturally at play here.
It has to do with the experts whose advice is typically sought when one begins to make important plans, and what those experts focus on.
The best way to set this up is with a direct quote from the book:
“Because so much gathering advice comes from
experts in food and decor rather than from facilitators,
that advice almost invariably focuses on preparing
things instead of preparing people.”
Preparing things instead of people….
Focusing on What, When, and Where
There are plenty of people who can help you find a great place for a gathering, and they all have a calendar on which they can see if your date will work, and they’ve likely held similar events to yours too, so you can count on their advice to make yours great, right?
Likewise, when planning for the future of your business and wealth, and how they will affect your family, there are also plenty of experts who have done similar work for other families, and can tell you exactly how you should set things up legally and financially.
And guess what; if you follow their plan, you’ll save your family lots of money in taxes! Because that’s what’s really most important.
Not!
Let’s Think About the WHO (Or Is It Whom?)
You may see me coming from a mile away, but just in case, let me suggest that the people, those members of the rising generation of your family, may be an important factor to consider here.
And, it probably makes sense to actually speak with them, and perhaps even involve them, before, during, and after you make such important decisions and plans.
Here’s another quote from The Art of Gathering:
“This advice makes the pregame window about physical
setup rather than human initiation, about the
gathering space and not what it holds: people.”
What the gathering place holds: People. Hmmm.
Preparing the Heirs for the Assets, Not the Other Way Around
One way to make sure that you’re preparing the people for their future roles in managing and stewarding the family’s wealth is to gather often and discuss these exact subjects, in regular family meetings.
These meetings don’t just happen by themselves, they need to be planned and coordinated, and you need to make sure that you make some progress towards the goal.
That goal is to make sure that everyone understands what will be expected of them, while also figuring out how they’re going to make decisions together when their turn comes.
Yes, the work the experts do to prepare the assets for the heirs is important, but it’s definitely not sufficient.
When Being Wealthy Doesn’t Equal Having Money
Things Aren’t Always as They Seem
There are all sorts of wealthy people in society, and you may think that you know how to tell them apart from “regular” folks.
And, on many occasions, you’d be completely wrong.
Not only that, you’re as likely to make errors in both directions: overestimating and underestimating.
Even within the same family, attitudes towards wealth, and how one goes about putting it on display or carefully concealing it, vary greatly. This happens between generations, and also within them.
Today we’ll be looking at this from a few different angles to see what we might learn from this nebulous area.
Immigrants and Natives to the Land of Wealth
One of the reasons that parents and their children often differ in their views on wealth is that for the “wealth creators’” generation, there’s often a process of “immigration” to the land of wealth.
I wrote about this in 2015 in Independently Wealthy vs INTERdependently Wealthy where I wrote about the book Strangers in Paradise, by Dr. Jim Grubman.
Grubman details that parents are often born into a lower class life, but then make the journey to a new land of wealth, much like immigrants who uproot their lives to move to another country.
The children of those immigrants, though, are born into the land of wealth, and therefore typically consider themselves natives.
How Parents Treat their Offspring
I’ve been involved in youth sports much of my life, and the way that parents who coach their children’s sports teams has always fascinated me.
The vast majority of the fathers I’ve witnessed who had their sons on the team they coached would either severely overestimate or underestimate their child’s ability.
For every coach who thought his son was the next Gretzky and always put him on the power play, there was another whose child actually was the best player on the team, but was constantly treated more harshly.
Few could find the proper balance.
And so it seems quite often with parents and their children when it comes to wealth.
Entitled Kids Showing Off on Social Media
Many of us are familiar with one extreme, where the entitled children of the uber-rich have huge social media followings where their excesses are on display for the world.
Like the sports example, there’s another side to this coin, and it doesn’t get any press coverage.
There are plenty of cases where families are quite wealthy, financially, by any measure, but where the offspring spend much of their lives without much access to any amount of liquid wealth that they can actually spend.
I was part of a group Zoom call recently where a colleague referred to this by quoting a typical sentence uttered by one of these wealthy family members as follows:
“Yes, we’re rich, that’s nice, thanks.
Now, can I also have some money?”
(Thanks, T.H.)
Testing the Limits of Patience
This phenomenon is present in many families, and sometimes it gets passed down from one generation to the next.
Other times, when one generation has been forced to wait decades to have any real access to the personal benefits of their family’s wealth, they might realize the negatives of this reality and adopt an attitude of sharing the wealth with their offspring at an earlier age .
Getting back to the quote from above, when I heard it, I was reminded of something I once heard from an Asian-American who wasn’t good at math, who lamented that it wasn’t easy for her to deal with that because it doesn’t fit society’s expectations.
Some professionals who work in the family wealth space refer to such offspring as “waiters”, and when they do, I’ll typically add “Yes, and they don’t work in a restaurant!”
Is There a Cure for This Phenomenon?
I touched on this in Great Expectations in Enterprising Families last summer. My view is that the rising generation have a right to know what they can expect, and that it must be a lot more specific than “someday this will all be yours”.
Many professionals who advise wealthy families convince the senior generation to maintain a tight grip on their wealth and happily provide them with horror stories to make them believe that grip is necessary and actually beneficial.
It’s also typically self-serving for those advisors.
All I know is that I have personally told my offspring that I won’t set things up in a way that’ll make them hope I hurry up and die so they can have some money.
Plenty of Subtle Yet Important Differences
Working with members of business families often means crossing paths with other professionals who also advise their businesses along the way.
One of the under-appreciated subtleties involved in such relationships comes when the person seeking the professional advice needs to also get personal advice, as opposed to simply seeking counsel for the good of the business.
These issues can get especially tricky when the professionals in question are attorneys, who have their own professional codes and standards regarding who their client really is.
These professionals are typically very aware of the differences and quite astute as to the ways that they need to be handled; it is often the clients themselves who sometimes blur the lines.
Let’s look at some of the situations where this can occur.
It Comes Down to “We” Versus “Me”
The simplest way to describe the different scenarios is to think about who needs the advice; is it the company or one of the people from the company.
Just to put a finer point on this, the vast majority of these cases involve the owners of the company, as opposed to those who are simply employees, although that can also certainly happen on occasion.
But when someone needs to clarify things from a legal perspective, it typically comes down to whether the advice is around how the company should do something, or what various owners’ rights are on a certain matter.
And those differences are rather stark, and need to be looked at not just on their merits, but also on the perception around how seeking that advice is seen by others.
Intra-Company Urinating Contests
There’s a huge difference between saying “I’m going to call our lawyer about…” and “I’m calling my lawyer!”
Is the person calling the lawyer “for me” or “for us”?
When things among co-owners of the same business become an “Us vs. Them” contest, watch out.
Let’s just look at a few types of situations I’ve been involved with in the past couple of years.
I had one coaching client, a woman from the second generation of a family, who now co-owned 1/3 of the company her father started, along with her two brothers.
When she expressed a reluctance to be alone in a room with one of them, I knew that this situation was beyond what coaching could help resolve, and I recommended that she engage a lawyer, for herself.
Dad and Brother Put On the Squeeze
More recently a man who was preparing to become a 50-50 owner, with his brother, of the company their father started, came to see me about helping them mediate some rough spots.
At our second meeting, I learned that both his brother and his father had recently done some things that gave me grave concern about their intentions.
I recommended that he “start looking for a lawyer”.
As I explained to him, he needed to create a relationship with an attorney now, in advance, because it felt to me like he may, one day (perhaps soon) need to take some action, legally, vis-à-vis, his partners.
In both of these cases, I knew that the potential for me to have any impact was very limited, and I was better off stepping aside, and essentially saying “I’m outta here!”.
Mediation as a “Last Gasp Effort”
Another recent client family, involves a sibling group of four, who are now equal owners of what’s left of a business started decades ago by their late father.
With some siblings who worked most or all of their adult lives for the company and others who did so very intermittently, they’re now in a situation where the distrust outweighed the trust.
During my one-on-one meetings with each of them, every last one of them, at one point or another, mentioned that they were considering engaging their own lawyer.
In fact, it became clear to me that I was the last stop for them, and if things did not work out with me acting as their mediator, at least one of them would be hiring a lawyer.
In Case of Emergency, Break Glass
Being in a position where I feel like I’m almost a “last hope” comes with its challenges.
But when the participants all know it too, and are aware of the stakes, they can become quite focused on working out a deal.
Because if one of them “lawyer’s up” the rest will need to as well.
Getting Vertical: From the Iceberg to the Balcony
Finding New Angles and Perspectives
A couple of weeks ago in The Value of Symmetry in Enterprising Families, we were looking at things on a relatively horizontal plane.
This week, I want to take a 90 degree turn and move us to the vertical axis, and see what we can gain by changing the angle and seeing what we can learn when we look at things from a new perspective.
Once again, this is a post inspired by a discussion with colleagues, who were together over a group Zoom call, all trying to learn to serve our family enterprise clients even better.
It’s amazing how often sessions like these get me thinking about ideas in new and useful ways, and I’m glad to have this outlet for them.
Writing these weekly blogs forces me to think about them in ways that I can explain easily, which often comes in handy later.
Iceberg, Straight Ahead!
It’s easy to think of an iceberg as a potential villain. I’m not going there, but instead to another visual analogy.
I think everyone’s familiar with the part about the visible portion of the iceberg, above the water line, being only about 10% of the entire mass of the entire block.
One colleague in that aforementioned call brought up the idea of having to dive deep into the water to look at a family’s issues from various depths, to try to identify the real root of certain presenting problems.
Of course the things on the surface are easier to see, but then again if everyone could see and agree on all the problems, there would be a lot less work for people like me!
The Old Standard “30,000 foot” view
So one way to get vertical is to do a deep dive, but what about the other direction, up?
Many people talk about the view from 30,000 feet, and that can also give you a very different perspective that can be useful in a lot of ways.
As someone who has studied family systems theory, I’m a big fan of the idea of looking at things from outside the system, because it is often so much easier to understand what’s going on when you are not stuck in the middle of it.
It’s a key reason that bringing in an independent outsider can be such a benefit to so many families.
The Balcony Is High Enough
But you don’t need to get into a plane or helicopter to begin to get some of the benefit from the new perspective that an overhead view can provide.
In fact, that’s where the balcony comes in.
If you really went way up into the sky, you wouldn’t be able to hear what people are saying or notice the facial reactions of the people anymore, and these are key to understanding what’s going on.
A balcony is just high enough to allow you to see things differently while remaining close enough to stay in touch with the emotional field in the family group.
Horizontal Views Are Often Obstructed
There are naturally limits to any analogy, but I think this one still has some juice left in it. When you’re all on the same horizontal plane, your view of each other is often obstructed.
There’s a reason why round tables work better for many kinds of meetings than rectangular ones.
When a family invites someone like me to work with them, one of the things that they get, in addition to my unbiased independence, is the advantage of different perspectives.
So whether I am trying to dig deeper and look under the surface, or going up to the balcony to see how things look from up there, it’s all about trying to get the family to better understand and clarify what’s going one.
Shining a Light on What I See
Of course sometimes when I travel to a different plane and notice something new, it can be an interesting task to figure out what to do next.
Most often I try to shine a light on what I’ve seen and share it with the family, if only to verify what I think I’ve found.
But that isn’t always the right thing to do; sometimes I need to process what I’ve seen before sharing.
Either way though, getting vertical by going deep or going up can both be valuable ways to gather important information to help a family move forward.
“What for” Isn’t the Same as “Why”
Be Careful How You Ask Your Questions
In this space I deal with all sorts of topics that all converge around how families can do a better job transitioning their wealth and/or business to the following generations of their family.
So “communication” naturally comes up often, in a variety of different ways. One of the most important subsets of the whole communication topic is the area of “conversations” that people have.
While written communication is more easily copied, widely disseminated, and preserved, so much of what transpires verbally between people is forever lost into the ether.
But even though spoken words seemingly disappear after they’re spoken, they can leave lasting marks on one’s psyche.
“What Questions Should I Ask?”
A big part of our conversations comes down to asking questions, and that makes this area ripe for great discussion for people like me, who like to share our ideas on family topics.
But there are always plenty of subtleties involved in using questions properly, and the quality and content of the response you get will have a lot to do with how you ask your questions.
Some people think this family work is easy, and are under the mistaken belief that having a list of “the right questions” will allow them to effectively facilitate a meeting with a client’s family.
If only it were so easy. It’s not, but, there are a few things I do want to share that could prove useful.
French : “Pourquoi” versus “Pour Quoi”
The idea for this topic actually came from a LinkedIn post from a French-speaking colleague who was sharing thoughts on a recent event for business families that she had attended.
She noted something about asking 3 questions, “Pourquoi, pour quoi, and pour qui” (Why, for what, and for whom).
I’m guessing that some readers can already see where my “A-Ha” came from, noticing the fact that by simply adding a space between the “pour” and the “quoi” of the French version of “Why” gives you a very different question.
I did mention something about “subtleties earlier, didn’t I?
Back Down the Same Road Once Again
If some of this is sounding vaguely familiar, we went down some of this same path a couple of months ago in Questioning Someone vs Asking Questions, which delved into a situation where a friend and colleague realized that she needed to readjust her attitude in her own family business, and stop “questioning” people, and begin to “ask questions” instead.
The idea behind looking at the subtle differences between “why” and “what for” (or “for what”) isn’t too dissimilar.
It comes down to emphasis, and in situations where emotions may be running high, tiny tweaks in word choice and tone can make a huge difference to how your question will land with the recipient.
Some people go so far as suggesting that you never use questions that start with “why”. Let’s look at that for a moment.
Why Not Start with Why?
The simplest way for me to relate my feelings on this topic is for me to share one of the biggest keys I learned very early on in my coach training.
It was there that I was taught the importance of listening, but it wasn’t the simple and typical “let people finish, nod along with them, etc.” stuff. It was listening with an important added qualifier.
The key to being a great coach is the ability to listen without judgement.
Now think about a situation where you are speaking to someone, explaining something that you did.
When the first word coming back is “why”, that often feels like it is carrying at least a small amount of judgement, and sometimes a full load of it.
Small Changes Can Become Habits with Practice
So if you simply learn to start your questions with “what” instead of “why”, you may find you get better results.
Personally I’m not all the way there yet myself, but well on my way.
I’ve also taught myself to bite my tongue when the word “help” comes to mind, and replace it with “be a resource” whenever possible. See “The 3 R’s: Finding a ‘Responsive Reliable Resource’”
And of course I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention one of the first such modifications I made years ago, switching from “Yes, but…!” to “Yes, AND…!”
In retrospect, that was a great place to start, and the cumulative effect of these changes has been beneficial in many of my relationships.
Be Wary of Asymmetry Wherever It Lurks
A subject that’s been coming up in my work a lot recently is the idea of symmetry, and how important it can be for families.
In reality, it’s one of those things that’s more noticeable in its absence; that is, when asymmetry crops up and needs to be dealt with, that’s when it becomes apparent.
Please bear with me as I explain where I’m going this week, because I’m introducing some vocabulary that’s personal to me, meaning that I’m not sharing ideas from others, but my own.
Let’s start with a fact that most people appreciate about a standard family diagram (or genogram), which shows a family drawn as a series of generations, one flowing beneath the other, in succeeding waves down the page.
Because of this, I like to refer to the relationships between generations as “vertical” due to the way they’re portrayed.
Moving on to the Horizontal Part
So if the relationships that involve those from one generation to the next are vertical, it then stands to reason that those between siblings, drawn on the diagram along the same line, are those we would label as “horizontal”.
By my understanding, the concept of symmetry involves things being balanced around a central line, like a person’s face, for example.
To be sure, I Googled “symmetry” and happily found this to corroborate my thinking:
“the quality of being made up of exactly similar
parts facing each other or around an axis”
That’s close enough for my standards.
But Aren’t All the Siblings Different?
Of course anyone who has siblings or who has children can tell you how different each sibling is, even though they come from the same pair of parents.
The most dangerous kind of asymmetry that I harp on with families is “information asymmetry”, which happens all the time, and is impossible to fully eliminate.
Before we go too much further, I want to recall the Three Circle Model and remind everyone that we can and should look at enterprising families in terms of the three major systems of which they are composed, namely: family, business, and ownership.
Family and Business Asymmetry
Every parent is familiar with the concept of trying to treat all their children equally, or as similarly as possible, at least in age appropriate ways.
We strive to find the right balance and are always trying to make sure things don’t get too far out of whack in the family.
In a business, it’s acceptable to have some hierarchy in your structure, but more often than not, siblings are put into roles that are relatively close in stature, wherever possible.
So if asymmetry shows up naturally and is tolerable in plenty of families and businesses, what’s the big deal?
Are We Forgetting Something?
Of course we’ve yet to explore the ownership circle, and this is where the biggest dangers lie.
The whole idea of ownership is already too easily overlooked. See Ownership: The Forgotten Circle of Family Business
Not only is ownership not discussed enough, but sibling relationships are also not highlighted enough in family business continuity discussions, because everyone prefers to focus on the vertical relationships between the generations instead.
When you think about it, our sibling relationships are almost always the longest lasting relationships of our lives.
While parents and their offspring are lucky to get 4 or 5 decades together, brothers and sisters typically get 7 or 8.
Ownership Information Asymmetry – Red Light Flashing
Having noted that siblings are all a bit different in a family and roles in the business are normally not identical, it’s in the area of ownership that each person’s stake will most likely be identical.
I know that there are plenty of exceptions, but as a general rule, siblings end up with identical stakes in their family’s enterprises, because of a desire for fairness, which is easy to understand.
But because people hold differing roles with respect to the management of the assets, they end up with much different levels of knowledge of what’s going on with everything the family owns.
I regularly see instances of “insiders” versus “outsiders” in sibling groups that can become a huge issue if not addressed.
The onus is on those insiders to do whatever they can to rebalance this information asymmetry, by willingly and openly sharing as much as possible with their siblings.
Over-communicating is almost always better than under-communicating. Please don’t forget that.
Striving for the Right Kind of Ego in a FamBiz
It Can’t Be All About “Me”
When the inspiration for one of these weekly posts comes from an actual coaching session I had with a client from a family business, I really get excited.
Regular readers may recall that I have a penchant for mining for ideas in the land of translations between words in English and other languages, typically French.
So if you’re a fan of those, keep reading because that’s where we’re going this week.
It all began with a misunderstanding on my part, which I quickly realized, and then happily recovered from.
Young Rising Generation Leaders
I’ve been fortunate to recently become involved with some local organizations who offer programs to entrepreneurial families who are preparing for eventual intergenerational transitions.
The program I’m part of, as a freelancer, has me coaching some young rising generation family members who are expecting to take on leadership roles in both their business and their family, as the parents eventually hand over the reins in the coming years.
As I said this is local, and in Quebec that typically means that the work is done in French, which thankfully for me, n’est pas un problème.
My French is not 100% perfect, but I’m more than functionally fluent for the job, thanks to five decades of practice. (Merci École St-Rémi)
Management Versus Ownership
So there I was on a Zoom call with “Sandra”, the oldest of three siblings who are preparing to eventually succeed their father, the founder of the business.
Although she’s the oldest, she’s still in her early 20’s, and so they’re still obviously in the early innings of this eventual transition.
Because of her age relative to her siblings, and the position she holds thanks to her seniority working in the business, she’s poised to hold the eventual top role in the running of the company, at least as things stand today.
However, in terms of the ownership of the company, the assumption is that Dad will be looking to make his three offspring equal owners, with one third of the company each.
Take note of the word “equal” there, as it foreshadows where we’re heading.
Did I Hear That Right?
As I was trying to impress upon Sandra the difference between her management role and her ownership role, I pointed out that in the business a hierarchical situation is likely warranted, but the ownership reality is actually flat.
As she was replying that she recognized that they would all be “equal” in the ownership, she obviously used the French word, “égaux” (pronounced “AY-go”).
The problem was, in my head, I heard the word “égo”, which is pronounced exactly the same way. I think you can guess what that translates to in English.
So here I was, thinking that she was talking about her ego, rather than the fact that they were equals.
Bang!
Calling a Timeout
Wait, stop, sorry, back up!
I asked her to pause to allow me to explain and apologize and thank her for the blog topic.
How the heck could the word “ego”, which feels like it is all about “me”, the individual, be pronounced the same way as the plural for the word equal, which is all about us?
I hope you aren’t expecting me to give you an answer, because I don’t have one. If someone reading this does, perhaps a linguist, please let me know, and in the meantime, I’m just happy to have stumbled upon this.
It feels kind of like an oxy-moron to me.
Lessons for Families Working Together
The take-away for me is simply that sharing this story and the reality behind it creates an opportunity to put this subject on the table with family members.
The business can be organized as a hierarchy, the ownership is flat, and the family, well, the family is the family. We are right back to the Three-Circle Model again. (I can’t believe it’s been almost 8 years since I wrote that!)
So each circle has a different structure, and that’s how it usually goes.
That means that the people who are part of more than one circle need to recognize that it’s always important to consider whether they are discussing matters that have to do with the running of the business, or ownership issues, or family matters.
Those differences matter, and must be discussed and made clear. It will allow you to separate “ego” from “equals”.
A Family’s Most Important Project of All
Welcome to another edition of “Steve tries to take a bunch of ideas and spin them into something coherent and useful for enterprising families and those who work with them”.
It should be interesting as I try to weave together the fact that families are very interdependent, that recognizing this is a key to intergenerational success, and that proper guidance on the journey will be of enormous help to them along the way.
These thoughts have all been brewing in my head for a while, stimulated by various recent interactions, and now it’s time to share where I’ve arrived. Thanks for joining me again.
Coaching Every Family Member Is Ideal
My favourite gigs with families are the ones where I get to spend both one-on-one coaching time with each family member, and then also participate in their group meetings.
While I’ve noted that in some cases it’s possible for a family to make progress in situations where there’s only one family member who’s sufficiently motivated to seek outside coaching, my best engagements are those where I get to work with everyone, both individually and together.
While recently discussing some cool aspects of coaching in general with another coach colleague, we kicked around the importance of the coach exuding an attitude of “I’ve got your back” and “I’m here for you without any other agenda, unlike most other people in your life”.
You can imagine that this might be a difficult role to play when you work with many of those “other people in your life” as well, and you wouldn’t be wrong either.
Serving the Whole Family’s Interests
The keys to doing this well are quite simple, in fact, but please don’t ever forget that simple is not the same as easy.
The first key is for the coach to see themselves as a servant of the entire family, not simply the one who hired them, or the one who pays their bill, but the group as a whole.
And then there’s another key that goes with that, and that’s the fact the to truly serve the family, it’s much easier when that coach is not serving an institution whose logo is on their (the coach’s) business card.
Family members are interdependent, and coaching them on their family journey is a special role with a unique skillset.
In fact, it’s more than just coaching, it’s also a bit of facilitation and lots of guidance.
Guidance for the Journey, Not the Destination
The term guidance is one that has grown on me lately, as I’ve re-branded my services and now call myself a Family Legacy Guide.
Part of the appeal is that I want clients to realize the importance of the journey they are on together, as opposed to any particular destination they’re trying to reach.
This is bringing back memories of a piece I wrote in 2018, There Is No Destination, the title of which is the first part of an expression I had recently discovered then, which is completed by “It’s ALL Journey. All. Of. It.”
The Individual – Togetherness Dichotomy
When working with various family members I also need to keep in mind the “familiness continuum” that exists, and how each person sees that.
Every member of the family is trying to find the right balance between their own individuality and the togetherness of the group, and that’s also a moving target.
By alternating my interactions from 1-on-1 calls with each of them to meetings with the group, I can stay on top of how this balancing act is evolving.
It’s during the group meetings that I notice issues that I can then take up with them individually.
Interdependence and Moving Targets
Most families underestimate their level of interdependence, as well as the importance that learning how to work as an interdependent system will have on their ability to transition their business or wealth to the rising generation of their family.
A few months ago in Planning your Family’s Declaration of Interdependence we looked at the fact that there needs to be a realisation that they are in fact all dependent on each other, in all directions, in order to make true progress.
The family is on a long journey that they are all on together, and so having someone come along with them, at certain strategic stages, can make all the difference in the world.
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