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Enough – Assez – Basta – Genug

Lots of Ways to Say It, and to Think About It

There are words in every language that are used in a wide variety of ways, and as someone who bangs out over 700 of them every week here, I’ve developed a certain appreciation for many.

This week, we’re going to hone in on the word “enough”, especially as it relates to the kinds of family clients that I deal with regularly, i.e. those who’ve created a business or amassed a certain level of wealth, and who are now concerned with transitioning those to their rising generation.

I had jotted down the idea of “enough” as a blog idea, and was wondering how to turn it into a longer title, and decided to go with translations into the languages with which I have some familiarity.

But rather than focusing on the concept in various forms used in different places around the world, I instead want to break my thinking down into its use with a few different verbs, to wit: Having, Being, and Doing.

Having Enough – How Much Does It Take?

The initial impetus for the idea behind this post came from something I saw online, probably on LinkedIn, that I clipped and emailed to myself.

It was a snippet from The Psychology of Money, by Morgan Housel, a book that’s chock full of wonderful anecdotes.

It describes a scene in which two guests at a party being hosted by a very wealthy man are discussing how much money their host had recently made in a single day.

One of them states to his friend, “Yes, but I have something he will never have: enough!”

And therein lies the obvious question when discussing the ultra rich: how much is enough?

I recall an interesting response to this that I once heard, which was “About 25% more than I have now”.

The man quoted in the story did have enough, while his much wealthier host seemingly did not, and the assumption is that no matter what, he never would.

And which of them is happier, I wonder?

I Am Enough – Not Always Easy

While the idea of having enough or not will often be a question we consider when thinking of those who created lots of wealth, let’s move now to something that will more typically affect their offspring, being enough.

Friend and colleague Dr. Jamie Weiner refers to this dilemma faced by many rising gens as the “Quest for Legitimacy”, and he wrote a book about it a few years ago. 

You can listen to The Quest for Legitimacy podcast I recorded with him.

His premise is that those who grow up in the shadow of very prominent parents so often suffer silently from the feeling that they’ll never be able to live up to the standards that those extraordinary parents have set for them.

This boils down to feeling like no matter what they accomplish, they will still never be enough.

Another friend and colleague, Danielle Saputo, wrote a book titled “I Am Enough” about her own version of this challenge.

I’ve Done Enough

My guess is that for many readers, the first two concepts above are ideas they’ve considered at some point, especially if they live or work in the family wealth and legacy space.

Let’s see if that continues to be true as we now pivot to the question of doing enough, or actually better stated as “having done enough”.

We are now in the world of “over-functioning” that some parents have a hard time letting go of.

We’re also back to the idea of having enough, so that we can now slow down and begin to thrive without having to strive as much.

See Striving Before Thriving in a Family Enterprise

The stages of life through which we progress are full of twists and turns, and how we occupy the majority of our time is naturally one that offers lots of opportunities for reflection.

What have I done, or accomplished, feeds into what should I do next.

Is there some “unfinished business” that needs to be tended to?

More of the Same, Or a New Direction

I began a fresh new decade of my life last year, which has me now asking such questions of myself.

It strikes me, though, as someone who works with multiple generations in families, that the questions around having enough, being enough, and doing enough are constantly sitting there.

I hope this framework helps you with your reflections.

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Making It Safe to Share Your Feelings with Family

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.

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On Accepting Acceptance and Self-Awareness

It Is What It Is, And What It’s Going to Be

I’ve been known to say, somewhat cynically, that the secret to happiness is having low expectations.

The reactions that this statement elicits vary, of course, but rarely do people take me up on it for discussion.

So this week I feel like delving into the question of what we’re willing to accept, and how thinking about that can be helpful in managing oneself, especially in the context of working with family members.

This may get a bit hard to follow, so I apologize in advance, but I hope you’ll stick with me until the end to see how this will unfold.

Accepting That You Have to Accept Things

I can’t control anyone except myself. 

And neither can you, but of course we’re now talking about “yourself”, and not me anymore!

Far too often, we wish we could control others, and we even believe we’d be doing them a favour by doing so.

If you’re a parent, you probably have a certain perspective on this that others may not be able to relate to.

If you are a parent of young children, it’s actually a part of your responsibility to try to control your children, as you prepare them to become responsible adults.

But at some point, they do actually become adults, and then, controlling them is no longer their parents’ job.

Eventually, you need to accept that the child you raised into adulthood is now an adult, and they’re no longer your responsibility.

It Often Comes with Age

There is certainly a correlation between one’s age and one’s ability to accept that one can no longer control one’s offspring.

But age is only one component, as I know some people who’ve been alive for many decades who still haven’t arrived there yet, and I also know some younger people who already get it, despite their youth.

I only wish that those who have not yet arrived at this point would recognize how liberating it is to let go of this desire to ensure that others conform to their desires.

It really is a basic principle; I do me, and you do you.

Very simple, and yet not necessarily easy.

Once you do learn to accept that others are going to do what they want, and not what you want, a lot of pressure comes off.

An Unexpected Real World Example

When I first met “Lou” he was very high energy but also quite high strung.

He was a neighbour at my cottage, so I’d see him over the summer and then over the winter we’d lose touch.

One spring, he came over and seemed so much more calm, to the point where I mentioned it to him.

His recent divorce had caused him so much stress that his doctor had to have a serious discussion with him about the negative health consequences he was dealing with.

“So did he prescribe you some meds?”, I asked.

No. He told me to let it go.

There was more to it than that, of course, but that was the key. I’m glad that Lou was able to take the message to heart, because otherwise I fear he may no longer be with us.

Lou’s doctor helped him see that the stress he thought his ex-wife was causing him was actually something he could control, by letting it go.

Coming to Your Own Realisation

Each person either comes to this conclusion or doesn’t, but like I said earlier, anyone who has arrived here can tell you how liberating it is.

Are you aware that you are causing yourself harm by continuing to hang on to that desire to have others behave the way you wish they would?

That’s the self-awareness angle I hinted at in by title.

I’ve been over this ground in the past, in Rest in Peace, While You’re Still Alive, and in Equanimity, Yours for Only $250 Million.

If you devote only a small portion of the energy and emotion that you are dwelling on about how others are living their lives, and instead decide to focus on getting on with your life, you too can benefit.

The Greatest Irony of It All

One part of this that always strikes me is that those who are most guilty of this flaw are typically perfect case examples of those who themselves behaved very much counter to the desires of their own parents.

You raised them to be adults, now let them be adults.

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Knowing What Your Family’s Stuck With

The Latest Legal Documents Typically Rule

When it comes to the planning that families work on to transition their assets from one generation to the next, there are lots of moving parts.

It’s not unusual for discussions to drag out over months and years, when family leaders are trying to arrange things for the future. 

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because in my view it’s better to take your time to get it right than to rush into something that turns out to be sub-optimal.

But there’s also a danger in taking too long, or waiting too long to take care of overdue updates and revisions.

If someone important happens to die before everything is signed, you may very well be stuck with what was written the last time that agreements were actually fully executed.

The Illusion That All Is Good

Because the vast majority of people really don’t like to think about this stuff very often, there’s a tendency to delay taking action, even when you know that you really should be working on making your latest ideas and plans official.

Quite often a family will undergo weeks and months of discussions and drafting and revising and signing documents, and so when that’s finally all done, the last thing they want to do is open up that Pandora’s box again, even if several years have elapsed in the interim.

So more often than not, they continue to live under the false illusion that all is good.

Far too often, the sprint to wrap things up, and the fatigue that naturally occurs afterwards, means that few of those family members affected by these agreements actually know what’s really in them or have a good understanding of what’s to occur upon someone’s death.

The exhaustion feeling is a real thing.

“They’re Stuck with It!”

This subject came (back) onto my radar a while back during a peer call, when one experienced colleague was lamenting the fact that she often has to deal with such situations, where a family realizes that what they signed is not what they actually thought they’d agreed upon.

It’s also not what they want nor what they need.

This call was in French so I’ll give you the direct quote followed by my translation:

                           « Pis là, ils sont pognés avec ça! »

                           “And then, they’re stuck with it!”

I can’t convey her tone here, but let’s just say there was a certain amount of frustration in her voice, likely amplified by the number of times she’d experienced this (Merci AV).

So often this is the result of well-meaning professionals who were trying to do right by the family, but who, for a variety of reasons, ended up supplying “standard” documents that did not respond to the “custom” situation of the family in question.

All Good, We’ll Just Revise Them!

I noted above that this occurred a while back, and yet I’m only writing about it now, because I wasn’t sure there was enough there for a blog post until this past week.

I had the opportunity to be part of an annual forum over a couple of days with other professional who serve UHNW families in Canada.

While most of the peer groups and events I’m involved with are dominated by those who work the “family circle” around process, relationships and family dynamics, in this group I was a part of a small group of such specialists, surrounded by technical experts from the tax, trust and estates world.

The discussions we had brought this subject back into focus for me in a real way.

A Case Example Brings It Home

We were assigned into breakout groups to discuss a case loosely based on the Yellowstone TV series.

It was during my discussions with lawyers and tax specialists that it became very clear that it didn’t really matter what the family wanted, because if John died before they could get it all signed, sealed and delivered, they’d all be stuck with whatever his last will stated.

The Antithesis of “Plans Are Useless”

Back in 2019, in Plans Are Useless, Planning Is Indispensable, we looked at how important it is for families to come together to discuss and clarify what they want to happen in the future.

But unless EVERYONE agrees, they’ll be stuck with what’s written in the legal documents.

Best keep them current; but that takes work, time, and intention.

Let’s get going then.

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On Matching Families with Advisors and Teams

So Many Matches to Try to Get Right

When families are trying to get their continuity planning right, there’s never a single professional advisor who can handle all of the family’s needs.

That statement is becoming accepted today, more than ever, and that’s a good thing.

Of course that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still some who see themselves as able to cover off most of what a family might need, but we’re thankfully finally arriving at a place where most professionals openly acknowledge their limits.

They’re recognizing the importance of collaborating with others in service of their family clients.

Unfortunately, there remains a huge gulf between saying that you’re open to collaborating, and actually collaborating well on some regular basis.

If it were easy, more of us would be doing it, and doing it more often.

See Key Challenges to Serving Enterprising Families

The Initial Introductions Are Simple

Let’s get to back to the idea I broached in the title, on matching families with advisors.

A family leader will often know an advisor or have a friend in a similar situation who will introduce them to an advisor they know and like.

But after that, it gets difficult for that family leader to evaluate if that advisor they met is a good fit, and to what extent they can be a good resource for their family.

Most often, such relationships begin with technical advice around legal and tax questions, which regular readers will recognize that I find is a sub-optimal place to begin.

Eventually, some families get to the point where they recognize that they need support with getting the other family members to the table and involved in discussions and planning.

The family may realize that they need someone else to come in to deal with the dynamics and relationship issues, without which much of that technical work will be at risk or perhaps for naught.

Solopreneurs, Some Pros and Cons

Many of the specialists in the “family circle” space are independent, “solopreneurs” if you will, like me.

A major advantage we have is the flexibility to collaborate with others, regardless of the logo they have on their business card (remember those?).

Speaking from experience, this is an important asset.

But on the con side, I have spent over a decade waiting for most of the “institutional” players to understand and adopt this mentality.

Ten years ago, I was hopeful (perhaps naively so) that those who serve families on technical aspects of their planning would clearly see that they’re not necessarily well equipped to work with the family dynamics challenges and invite me in regularly.

Referral as a Handoff, Or an Integrated Team

Being referred into a family is wonderful, and it would be nice if it occurred more frequently.

Perhaps some of the hesitation to do so comes from the view that one is “handing off” a client to someone outside their firm.

Nothing could be further from the truth of course, as any good independent consultant recognizes that while serving the family comes first, a very close second lies in making the “referrer” look good (if only to hopefully encourage future referrals).

The idea of having an “integrated team” is beginning to see the light of day in some of the larger institutions, as they recognize the importance of offering a full range of services to families.

But the number of places where you can do “one stop shopping” is not large. See The Elusive Perfect “Cookie Cutter” Solution

Integrated teams are mostly aspirational, at least as far as finding the mix of technical skills and also the relational savvy to deal with an entire family.

Serving Every Member of a Family

Thus far I’ve only been speaking of the advisors, and I haven’t even touched on the fact that for anyone to be able to serve as a facilitator for their family meetings, you need to have very close to unanimous approval of all participants.

I always say that if one single person doesn’t want me there, it really makes my job nearly impossible.

They don’t all have to love me, but it’s better when they at least like the person who is running their meetings.

It’s also important that that person have what some call “multi-disciplinary fluency”, or an ability to understand what the other, more technical advisors, are talking about with the family.

Finding the right match for a family can take work, but is worth the efforts.

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On Peer Groups and Feelings of Infidelity

Sharing and Learning from Each Other

Working with enterprising families is naturally quite challenging and not for everyone. 

It can also often feel quite lonely when you are the only person who comes from outside the family system that you’re working with.

For those and many other reasons, I’ve always been on the lookout for any way possible for me to interact with peers who do this kind of work in one fashion or another.

Sharing and learning with other professionals who work with similar client bases in related ways, or even in almost exactly the same way, can be a very enriching experience.

Regular readers will recognize that many a weekly post here has its genesis in some sort of peer group experience, of which this is simply the latest.

Different Formats, Similar Results

I’m writing this piece on after having just completed two of my favourite group meetings, and they were very different yet equally enjoyable and stimulating.

One group convenes in person for one weekend annually, and fourteen of us gathered recently.

The other is a monthly hour-long Zoom call, where there were 10 of us this latest time.

The former group also added monthly Zoom calls in the past few years to great success.

Something that these groups have in common is that as members get used to being together, the conversations get easier, friendlier, and thus much deeper.

Each gathering feels more and more like a safe space to share, and that’s when the good stuff comes out.

The Meta View of Work with Families

What I also find incredible is how often the work we do together as a group mimics what we’re all trying to do with the families we get to work with.

Like how I just talked about the safe space and the comfort level that grows the more we gather together as a group.

Another such angle is around the leadership of each group, which can vary but is typically rather informal.

A related question surrounds the various roles that each participant plays and is expected to play, and whether or not such roles and leadership are fixed or will vary over time.

Sometimes It Feels Like I’m Cheating

As these peer groups mature, the closeness that members feel for each other can begin to feel pretty intimate, which is a feeling I enjoy developing with peers.

But my personal experiences are a bit different from most such members, I think, because I’m involved in a handful of such regular group gatherings with like-minded professionals, and it almost feels like I’m cheating on one group when I spend time in another!

I say that because in many of these meetings, someone will utter something like “I love these get-togethers with you all, because this is the ONLY place where I can talk about this stuff”.

Whenever I hear that, and it happens several times a year for me, I get a bit of a guilty feeling because I have a few other places where I get that warm and fuzzy glow.

But that guilt normally quickly morphs into gratitude for the fact that I have other such deep relationships, and even get to do this in more than one language.

Jealous of the Families We Serve

The concept of jealousy doesn’t only happen around the peer groups I’m part of.

Sometimes it can be the families themselves that can make me feel a pang of jealousy.

This doesn’t happen as often, but I have had (and still have) some client families where I admire what they have built as a family who regularly enjoy each others’ company.

What these situations have in common is that there are people who come together to talk with each other and spend time with special people in their lives.

It’s All About Affinity

One of the founders of this field is James E, (Jay) Hughes Jr., and he talks about creating a “Family of Affinity”.

For any peer group to have staying power (not all do) you need to create the type of culture around how you “are” together, even more than what you are going to “do” together.

Peer groups that begin to feel like an affinity group will do better than those where that culture doesn’t get developed.

Each group member bears some responsibility for its culture; I like to think I’m doing my part.

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You Want a MEDAL for That?

Well, Hard Work Can Justify It!

A few weeks ago in The Elusive Perfect Cookie-Cutter Solution, I lamented the fact that the work that I do with families seldom allows for a formulaic approach.

Because each family is unique, every business is different, and the people who compose every family are one-of-a-kind individuals, much of this work involves starting fresh and doesn’t allow for a lot of “cut’n’paste” operations.

But there are naturally some aspects of the work that do repeat themselves in many cases, so this week we’re going to take a look at things from that angle.

And, as I’ve done a number of times in the past, I’m going to share a mnemonic way of remembering the sequence I’m sharing.

From my headline, which includes one word in ALL CAPS, you may have already guessed that MEDAL is what we’ll be working with.

(If you’re curious about past mnemonics, see: Start Cleaning Up your M.E.S.S., Is your Continuity PAL in Danger, and Seeking Resources to Get Back on Kilter).

Going for the Gold (Medal, That Is)

The first letter in Medal is M, and in my case, M is for Meet.

Everything starts with a meeting, and new phases of any work almost always necessitate a meeting as well.

A meeting, in many cases, involves me sitting in a room with a number of family members together, or it could be meeting virtually.

It could also be just me and one or two other people, and those situations, while more often virtual these days, can also be in person.

But important phases of most process work involve some sort of coming together to discuss things with others.

E Is for Exchange and Explore

Let’s not to minimize the meeting aspect of this, because for larger groups of people, simply getting everyone together at the same time and in the same place can be a huge obstacle.

Virtual meeting technology has made this easier in recent years, but even with Teams and Zoom, coordinating schedules with busy people is a huge lift in many cases.

Now that you are together, meeting, what are you going to do to maximize the fact that all this brain power is in one place for the next few hours?

This is where the E’s come in, and for me the two biggest ones are Exchange and Explore.

Exchanging is about both giving and receiving, which in the case of information involves talking and listening.

You brought everyone together, now let’s hear from them all.

If you accentuate the Exploration mode, to see what you can discover together, that’s even better.

D Is for Discern and Develop

So you had your Meeting where you Exchanged and Explored, and now you are each back in your own space, for the coming days, weeks, months, etc.

If each person then takes some time and makes some efforts to Discern what was learned and tries to figure out how to Develop something from what was discussed, that could be useful.

Integrating new learnings and reflecting on current realities allows the Explorations and Exchanges that you had at the Meeting take root.

A Is for Act and Advance

Now that something new has taken root as a result of the Meeting, the Exchanges and the Discernment, what’s next?

Well, hopefully you can find ways to Act and Advance ideas, projects, journeys, or whatever you are trying to accomplish together.

Too often there’s inertia that needs to be overcome, so this is a reminder to put things into motion with Action and Advancement.

New ideas were conceived and now new ways forward have emerged, which need to be Acted upon in order to Advance.

Some of these items can be done individually, others will involve additional folks who were part of the initial Meeting.

L Is for Loop Back and Meet Again

Eventually the progress that you have been making on your own or with a small group will come to a natural arc where it will become time to repeat the process again.

This is where you need to Loop back and Meet with the group again and enter into the next iteration of the process.

Coming together again in a Meeting, to once again Exchange and Explore, will begin the next cycle of the work that needs to be done.

After the next meeting, you will once again retreat into solitude or a smaller group, to Discern where you now stand, and Develop next steps.

You’ll figure out the next Acts and Advancements, and Loop back again.

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On Role Clarity for Family Enterprises and Advisors

Minimizing the Stepping on Each Others’ Toes

When dealing with family members who work together, certain subjects come up all the time.

One challenge I’m always working on is making things more clear for everyone, because much of the confusion that such families face comes from the fact that there’s a lack of clarity around so many subjects.

This week we’re going to zero in on one type of clarity, and that’s “role clarity”.

Of course even though we’re going to try to focus on one seemingly small subject, we’ll quickly see that even this single question of role clarity has many tentacles.

Who Does What, Sounds Simple Enough

In its simplest form, role clarity comes down to answering a very basic question, who does what.

Ideally, each task is handled by someone who’s competent at it, which is not always the case, of course. 

And it’s in such situations that we sometimes begin to see cracks, which bring up other, related questions.

These questions are usually less about the role itself, and more about who is assigned to it.

Who “wants” to do it and who “has” to do it are a couple of variations.

Let’s throw in who “gets” to do it, which sometimes also applies.

See Who Gets to Decide Who Gets to Decide from 2017

Ability, Competence, Desire

Ability and competence surely enter into it, but so does desire, especially in families where some tasks arise that don’t necessarily fall under a category where people are paid for taking on certain roles.

Competence raises the question of “who can do this for us?”

As I wrote those last sentences I flashed back a few decades to a time where my sister, who was studying to become a CPA, was assigned the task of keeping the books for our family holding companies.

She was not thrilled, to say the least.

She was, however, competent, and in retrospect, my Dad should have been applauded for trying to get other family members involved in aspects of his family business. Paying her probably would’ve helped.

Today’s Roles, Tomorrow’s Leaders

When you consider transitioning a business from one generation of the family to the next, you also need to consider a number of roles that will be handed down from the current leaders to those who are expected to succeed them.

These roles, where someone needs to learn to transition in, while another needs to learn to transition out, are often fraught with potential conflict.

I typically recommend a very gradual approach in these situations, because it’s quite likely that there will be several years where two people overlap in what used to be a single role.

Breaking things down into tasks and responsibilities makes sense in such cases.

And having regular check-ins is also key, so that everyone is clear on who will do what for the next while, so that things don’t fall through the cracks (which they will, inevitably).

You Do Your Part, I’ll Do Mine

Last week, in Giving Your All in the Family Enterprise, we looked at an aspect of how each party must hold up their end of things.

Over-communicating is always better than under-communicating.

Roles are always an important area to do some regular level-setting, and that doesn’t only apply within families, but also between advisors and the family.

Regularly Re-Designing the Alliance

As a coach, my training included a lot of reminding us to regularly check in with our clients on the “alliance” that we must continue to design and re-design together.

See Discovery, Contracting and Designing Alliances with Families

I’m not as good at this as I’d like to be, and sometimes that causes issues with clients.

In cases where the senior generation member has agreed to pay me to work with a rising generation future leader, this is really key.

What they think my role is, and what they want me to be doing, because it’s what they think my role should be, doesn’t always line up with the way I see my role.

When parents give orders that their offspring don’t follow, and then the parents hire someone else to tell them instead, in order to change the messenger, that isn’t usually a good strategy.

Hiring a coach to help them learn to lead in their own way is a better way to go.

Regularly communicating what my role is, and why it’s important for me to play my role that way, is something I’m continuing to work on. Wish me luck!

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Giving Your All to the Family Enterprise

How Much Does Everyone Need to Give?

Working with enterprising families brings with it a wide variety of challenges, as I and many colleague friends will attest.

Working in an enterprising family also brings challenges of course, and those of the family members become those of their professional advisors by extension.

The interplay of these protagonists always provides much fodder for people like me who love nothing more than to share what goes on in this fascinating work.

My greatest hope is that these missives continue to make people think, and hopefully learn, and ultimately help advance this nascent field.

So what am I getting at with my “giving your all” tease? I’m glad you asked.

“I’ll Give It 100%”

We all know that 100% is literally the maximum that one can give, but that doesn’t stop people from becoming hyperbolic at times and stating that they’ll give it “110%”.

I don’t make much of a distinction between those two numbers, and in fact I’m probably more inclined to have confidence in somebody’s claim that they’ll give it 100% compared to another who ups that figure.

This makes me think back to my late father who always hated it when anyone said “I’ll do my best”. To him, that was almost a guarantee that whatever was being discussed would not be done.

I just realized as I typed that sentence that while my Dad would’ve agreed with what I wrote, he also had a huge disdain for the word “hate”, but I digress.

I’ll do 100% of My 50%

The true inspiration for this post is an expression I first heard a few months back during yet another peer group call that I was on.

A relatively new colleague of mine noted “I always tell my clients that I will give them “100% of my 50%”.

I noted this back then and planned to blog about it, but it gathered dust for a few months.

Then, when this group convened again recently, she repeated that expression, and I knew it was time to write this (Merci CM), because I had never heard anyone else phrase it this way, and it felt like it was worth sharing.

All this was part of a discussion surrounding how we advisors are limited in how much we can do because the family (or some subset of family members) aren’t holding up their end of things.

Serving Families with Process, Not Content

When people learn about this work with families, one of their biggest A-Ha’s is almost always around how it’s all about process, and helping families make progress together.

See A Different Look at Process Versus Content

We aren’t typically responsible for much of the content of what the family is trying to create, although we are certainly there to make sure that things get done.

When we enter into a family system, and begin to get to know the family members and what they’re hoping to accomplish, we begin to create a picture in our minds of what’s possible, typically based on what we’ve seen in other families.

The difficulty sometimes lies in the fact that the family needs to want to put in the work as much as we do, and that’s not always the case.

In fact, that recent peer call had me suggesting to one presenter that the family whose story she was sharing with the group may just be one of those cases.

We, the advisors, can’t want it more than our clients.

When It Starts to Become Easy 

The work that we hope to help families do can be hard for them, and in fact it always requires intention and effort.

With more and more repetitions for the advisors, though, it can start to feel easy for us, and that can create its own share of problems.

Back to that call with my peers, that was also going on for a member of the group, who was dealing with a bit of imposter syndrome because of it.

Being there for a family, and being with the family members as they try to figure out their “stuff” together, isn’t something that everyone can do well. 

See On Connection and Empathy When Accompanying Families

If you happen to be one of those people for whom it feels easy, please make sure you don’t fall into the trap of thinking that your assistance isn’t worth anything.

We’re still giving it 100% of our 50%!

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The Elusive Perfect Cookie-Cutter Solution

This Is Not Science, Rocket or Otherwise

Serving enterprising families is fascinating work for a number of reasons.

There’s typically a good deal of complexity to deal with, meaning that a number of specialist professionals are required to properly serve all of their needs. 

That’s already quite a bit of work, but that assumes that you’re looking at the enterprise and the family as two monoliths, which of course neither of them is.

So it stands to reason that it will be nearly impossible to come up with any kind of “standard process” that can be used, or any “cookie-cutter solutions” in this world.

But that doesn’t mean that nobody’s looking for those.

The Insatiable Craving for Simplicity

Over a recent three-day span, I had a few interactions that brought this idea to the fore for me, so let’s see what we can learn by looking at some of the details.

There was an event put on by a local professional society about Family Offices, and I was invited by a friend and colleague to join his firm’s table.

The panel on stage described how each of their single family offices works, and I found it to be quite informative, because the reality of each family represented was so different, and therefore the stories about how they do things differed greatly as well.

Some of the other folks at my table came away with a different impression though, believing that their dissimilar stories meant that some of them didn’t seem to know what they were doing.

There is no “right way” to build a family office, and certainly no simple formula either.

A New Potential Client Introduction Meeting

The following morning, a colleague invited me to join him for a meeting with a potential new family client, at the client’s accountant’s offices.

The CPA has mentioned this family to my colleague, and he then invited me to tag-team with him to see if we could serve this family as a team.

Because this fits with my favourite equation, “1 + 1 = 5”, i.e. with two advisors, the client will get five times better service than from one, I eagerly joined him.

The family representative who attended the meeting, like most others, asked questions of us, as they always do.

When we left the meeting, it dawned on me that almost all of their questions were around understanding the process that we’d use.

And as usual, I left with the feeling that they didn’t seem satisfied because the answers we gave seemed to be on the vague side.

In truth, we really won’t know what we’ll be doing until we’ve met all the family members and can understand the challenges they’re facing.

Somehow sharing that “we’ll meet with everyone individually and then bring you all together and then we’ll see” isn’t what most people want to hear.

Speaking with Coaches and Colleagues

Later that day over a lunch with some colleagues, while I noted that my current clients were all so different from each other, I also lamented the fact that that doesn’t always help us when trying to attract new clients.

The reaction at the table was interesting, because some of them nodded along, while others seemed more perplexed by my comments.

Over a decade ago, in Family Business Advising: Art Vs. Science, I was already complaining about some of these challenges.

That blog post ended with me sharing an analogy about “paint-by-numbers” as bridging the gap of the art and the science of this work.

I consider myself much more of an artist in this work, and so I don’t believe in a scientific approach to it, in much the same way as I hate almost any image I’ve ever seen that was made with A.I.

The next day when meeting with my coach, I brought this up with her, and the result was that I’d write about it this weekend to see if that helped!

I Like Cookies Too

Some people prefer all their cookies to be identical, so a cookie-cutter is perfect for them.

I prefer my cookies in a variety of shapes, so I like to hand-craft mine.

Every family is different, and in turn so are each of the members of each family.

Maybe this is just going to be one of those “forever challenges” for me that I’ll just have to learn to live with.

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