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Relations Harmonieuses Maintenant; Mais Après?

J’ai eu le plaisir dernièrement de passer du temps avec plusieurs couples qui étaient tous au stade de leurs vies où la planification d’une transition inter-générationelle de leur entreprise familiale était un de leurs plus gros défis.

Le tout faisait partie du programe Triomphe de l’École d’Entrepreneurship de Beauce, où j’avais été invité pour discuter de mes expériences et de mon livre, Changez votre vision de l’entreprise familiale.

En fin d’après-midi, je me suis présenté au groupe, et ensuite ma tâche était de répondre à quelques-unes de leurs questions. N’ayant pas eu la chance de répondre à toutes leurs questions, j’ai décidé d’en faire le sujet de quelques blogues.

Cette semaine, c’est la question d’une mère, qui s’inquiètait sur la relation entre son fils et sa fille, mais pas pour aujourd’hui. Je vous laisse lire le texte de sa question:

“ Comment peut-on s’assurer que la relation entre les deux relèves, frère et soeur, vont continuer en harmonie, au fil du temps, à travers la difficulté, quand on y est plus?”

Wow, toute une question, une chance qu’il me reste encore plusieurs paragraphes pour tenter une réponse! Mais elle n’est certe pas le seul parent à avoir ce souci non plus.

Et une chance aussi que je n’ai pas essayé de répondre sur le coup, puisque c’est une question qui demandait beaucoup de réflection pour donner une réponse complète, et j’aurais sûrement manqué au moins une partie de ce qui suit.

En effet, ma meilleur réponse contient trois volets;

  1. Des conversations, 2. Une cédule, 3. Un parti neutre.

Conversations

Nous avons tous des soucis pour nos enfants, et trop souvent nous les gardons à l’intérieur. Je recommande fortement de prendre le temps et de faire l’effort d’en parler ensemble, en famille.

Si c’est plus facile d’aborder le sujet un-à-un, faites le ainsi, mais parlez-en. C’est presque toujours les non-dits qui causent les plus gros problèmes.

Et n’attendez pas la chicane avant d’agir, c’est toujours mieux de parler ensemble et de partager nos pensées quand tout va bien.

En discutant ensemble, vous avez la chance de réussir deux chose. Premièrement, vous allez vous soulager d’avoir lancé le sujet pour qu’on puisse en parler ouvertement ensemble.

Et deuxièmement, les paroles de vos enfants, qu’ils vont prononcer devant vous, seront très difficiles pour eux à oublier quand vous n’y serez plus.

Ça vaut la peine, et c’est bon pour toute la famille.

Cédule

D’autres experts iront plutôt avec un mot comme “gouvernance”, mais je n’aime pas ce mot parce que chaque personne y attache une définition différente, et souvent ce mot fait peur aux gens.

La cédule, et surtout ce qu’on va faire avec, va accomplir les débuts de la gouvernance pour l’entreprise familiale.

Pendant que Maman et Papa sont encore impliqués, je recommande fortement de prendre le calendrier annuel et de céduler au moins 2, ou peut-être même 4, rendez-vous familiaux, où vous aller discuter uniquement du sujet suivant:

Nous possèdons une entreprise familiale, mais encore plus, nous sommes une famille entrepreuriale, et c’est la famille qui doit remporter.

Ce sont les débuts de votre “conseil de famille”. Vous développerez votre propre ordre du jour, vous ferez un compte rendu, vous allez céduler votre prochaine rencontre, etc. Mais vous allez formaliser un processus pour discuter des sujets importants dont on n’en parle pas tous les jours.

Parti Neutre

J’en parle souvent, mais à long terme, il est primordial d’avoir une personne externe, avec un nom de famille différent, à qui la famille a accès, et en qui ils ont tous confiance, pour discuter des sujets inter-personnels.

Ça pourrait être un employé sénior, un professionnel externe (avocat, comptable), un ami ou voisin, ou peut-être une personne d’une autre famille que vous connaissez qui a déjà fait face à ces sujets.

L’important c’est de commencer à inviter cette personne à vos réunions de conseil de famille au moins une fois par année, pour qu’elle puisse suivre le fil des sujets importants.

Ça prend les Trois

Je sais très bien que la grande majorité des familles ne suivront pas les conseils ci-hauts, mais je sais également que pour chaque famille qui décide de tenter de les suivre, les chances de faire un succès de leur transmission inter-générationnelle seront grandement améliorées.

[Si vous avez une question sur les entreprises familales que vous voulez me lancer pour en faire le sujet d’un blogue, allez-y. Merci!]

 

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Planning your Dreams and Dreaming about Plans

Spending quality time planning for the future is something that just about everyone should do, but which very few actually do in sufficient quantity and detail.

There are so many reasons why this is the case, like the fact that:

  • we are very busy putting out today’s fires;
  • we kind of think we know where we are going, and we figure that everything will kind of work out anyway;
  • we really aren’t sure how or where to begin.

In most cases, it is some combination of all of these elements, and even a few others.

To their credit, many advisors who specialize in helping people with long term planning have developed various approaches and processes to help engage clients in these important tasks.

Coming at this as I do, from a holistic family point of view, where I specialize in helping business families and families of wealth with their long term “Continuity Planning”, the process can get a bit hairy. Let me explain.

There are a lot of moving parts in a family, where each person is important and has their own views, priorities, and desires. There are lots of stakeholders, if you will.

Add in things like different generations, gender differences, in-laws, those working in the business versus those not, and you can start to see how complexity rears its ugly head.

Now let’s look at some of the subjects that need to be addressed:

  • Who will manage the business in the future?
  • Who will “lead” the business, how will decisions be made?
  • How do we get from today’s realities to the best set-up in the future?
  • Just when will the leading generation cede control to the rising generation?
  • Who will own how much?
  • What are the legal, accounting, tax, and insurance questions that we need to address as part of this planning?

Most of the answers to these last questions are found with the help of specialists in the various domains. The advice industry, however, is still very much based on a “silo” approach, and while everyone says that they “collaborate” with professionals in other disciplines, they do so with varying degrees of ability and success.

OK, so I am sure that some of you are saying, “Yeah, yeah, I know that, but what about your “dreaming” and “planning” stuff that you teased us with in your headline?” Here goes.

I have been developing a process to address these issues for families, and in so doing I came to an “A-Ha!” moment of sorts a couple of weeks ago, based on the planning and dreaming points of view, and which I am convinced will be the heart of its success. Here goes:

  • You do NOT plan your dreams, but you MUST discover them so that you can then plan on achieving them.
  • When the dream is for a family, and not just an individual, communication is vital for the co-creation of the dreams.
  • Just as you do not plan the dream, you do not dream up a plan either, you must develop the plan, which then helps you arrive at your dream.

The tool, or process, that I am currently putting the finishing touches on, is based on a “Business Model Canvas” that I found on my wife’s desk at home. It is a tool that she uses in her job coaching social entrepreneurs.

Rather than calling mine a Canvas, I have entitled my tool a Blueprint, as in “a photographic print that shows how something will be made” and “a detailed plan of how to do something” (a couple of definitions I found via Google).

The Blueprint looks at the three circles important to Business families: Family, Business, and Ownership.

We look at where they are now, the dream of what they could look like in the distant future, and the plan for the transition to get them there.

It may look simple, but it is actually quite a detailed process to help families discover their dreams, and work together to develop the plans to achieve them.

 

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Exit Door or Exit Corridor?

Last week’s blog about “Exit Planning” elicited some confusion, and this week’s post will try to clear things up.

To actually exit a family business, especially one that you founded, nurtured, and grew, is not something that is taken lightly. To do so on one’s own terms, and to the satisfaction of all stakeholders, is truly a rare feat. But just because it is difficult, does not mean that we can’t try to pull it off.

One reader questioned the fact that setting an exit date that is too far in the future might actually “de-motivate” the rising generation, if that date was too far in the future. Another asked which date I was referring to when I spoke of the “exit date”, was it management of the business, or ownership?

These are both valid questions, of course, as they invite further discussion. There are no “stupid questions” in my book, the only stupid question is the one that you are afraid to ask, for fear of looking stupid.

The point of last week’s post was that IF we are able to get the founder to choose a date (actually, just a year) in the future, where he would no longer be involved in the company he founded, we could use that year as a reference point, or an anchor.

The idea is that just getting “engagement” is an important starting point, and if we don’t get to the point of engagement, then no real, worthwhile discussion of the issues will ever happen.

The title of the blog, “Under-Promise and Over-Deliver on your Exit Plan”, was used to highlight the fact that once a date is set, the engagement in the process can begin, and THEN, with time, the person would grow into the idea that there would be a future phase when he would leave the business to others.

As the person begins to “get” the fact that he will one day no longer manage, lead, and own the business, he will (hopefully) also buy into a future of great possibilities for himself, and look forward to this reality, and eventually agree to leave sooner than originally planned.

If you are really paying attention, you will have notied that the previous paragraph is actually a segue to answering the second question, that of understanding which date we are referring to.

That is where the title to this week’s post comes in.   An exit door represents a “one step” exit process, whereby the owner sells his business and in one fell swoop goes from “all in” to “all out”.

This does happen on occasion, of course, but is not common in the family business arena. More often than not in business families, when this does occur, it is almost always the result of an untimely death or other tragic circumstances.

A better scenario is almost always a phased approach, where the “exit door” is replaced by an “exit corridor”

The corridor is a place that one goes through on the way to the exit. The first door (to enter the corridor) is most often the day-to-day management of the business. The six-day work -week becomes five days, then four, then three. Eventually, coming in once a week is sufficient.

After management comes leadership; approving all major decisions is often the norm as you enter the corridor, but by the end, there is sufficient trust and confidence in the successor(s) to allow them free reign.

The final hurdle is usually ownership, where the person who was at one point the 100% owner of the business actually gets to be 0% owner.

That is the final exit, and does not always occur while the founder is alive, but that’s okay too. Just getting a founder to understand that they will not live forever can be a big step.

Traversing the corridor is a process that is usually measured not is weeks or months, but in years. That is also okay too, so long as there is a plan.

 

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Underpromise and Overdeliver on your Exit Plan

The concept of under-promising and then over-delivering is not a new one, not by any stretch of the imagination. However, early this morning upon waking, I believe that I came up with a novel application of the idea.

My usual weekly blogging schedule has me selecting a subject on Thursday or Friday, writing on Saturday, reviewing and posting to my website on Sunday, and putting up a link on LinkedIn and Twitter on Monday.

I am composing this on Wednesday, July 1, which happens to be Canada Day. Perhaps it is the fact that as day off work, it felt a bit like a Saturday, which may have inspired me. But I think it was more a case of the confluence of a few things that I have been working on that so inspired me.

I recently committed to writing some longer content pieces, which I have dubbed the “Quick Start Guide Series”. The first such Guide is entitled “My Kids in My Business?”, and it is available on the Resources tab of my website.

It seems kind of lame having a “series” in which only the first output is available, so I have quickly begun working on the second piece, which will be called “Sticky Baton Syndrome – Ask Prince Charles” (working title), and which is slated for August 2015 release.

Let’s just say that I have been reading a lot of stuff that is out there about how to encourage the senior generation of leaders in family businesses to loosen their grip on passing the baton to the rising generation.

Simultaneously, I have recently been spending a good deal of time working with a colleague, who works the “wealth management” side of the street, and together we have been developing a methodology and tool for working with business family clients.

We are trying to find the most useful way to help them begin the process of planning for the intergenerational continuity of their enterprising families and the wealth contained therein.

We are tentatively calling it the “Blueprint”, and we are just entering trial mode with a select number of families as we work on the exact application and sequencing of the intervention.

What I can tell you for now is that I had a bit of an A-Ha moment when trying to figure out how to piece together the “Current Situation” part of the Blueprint and the “Next Era” portion.

(Basically, the Blueprint is a three-part affair: 1) Where are we now? 2) Where do we want to go? 3) How do we get there?. No reinventing the wheel, just structuring the discussion).

The trick, I discovered, is in setting the date for the “Next Era” part. You see, asking a business founder to picture things after they are gone is always a dubious proposition at best, so there are many nuances that need to be thought through.

For the purpose of illustration, we might exaggerate and invite the person to look at things in 2065. Can we agree that you will not be running and owning your business in 50 years? Unless we are dealing with a young entrepreneur, we all know what the right answer is.

So if 2065 is surely part of the “next era”, what about 2055? 2045? I think that you can see what I am doing here. But how far do you reel it back? As you get closer, you can step back in 5-year increments.

And where do you stop? Glad you asked, because this is where the “under-promise and over-deliver” comes in.

Why don’t we let “Dad” under-promise and choose a year that is “too far off”, and then as the plan comes together, and he can see how the rising generation is pulling up their socks and getting ready to take over, we can always let him “over-deliver” and in fact leave a few years ahead of the plan?

It sure beats the other way around.

 

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Mes 24 heures en Beauce

J’ai récemment eu la chance et le privilège de passer une période de 24 heures dans la compagnie de plusieurs personnes assez extraordinaires, et le tout s’est passé à St-Georges-de-Beauce.

Mais avant de vous raconter ma visite, je dois reculer dans le temps. En octobre 2014, durant une formation de la Business Families Foundation à Montréal, j’ai rencontré Jessica Grenier, de l’École d‘Entrepreneurship de Beauce (EEB), qui est devenue une amie.

À l’époque, je ne connaissais rien de l’EEB, mais je suis maintenant prêt à louanger cette merveilleuse institution pour son originalité et son audace, en plus de ses programmes uniques.

Vous pouvez visiter leur site web pour toute l’information sur ce qu’ils offrent, et moi je vais me concentrer sur mes fameuses 24 heures les 14 et 15 juin derniers.

Le plus récent programme de l’EEB s’intitule “Triomphe”, où les clients ciblés sont des entrepreneurs qui ont eu du succès en bâtissant ou en grandissant leur entreprise, mais qui sont maintenant prêts à passer à autre chose, et à passer le flambeau à la prochaine génération.

Quand je dis “plus récent programme”, en réalité ce que j’ai appris c’est qu’ils étaient en train de finir leur première “mini-cohorte” de 7 entrepreneurs et leurs conjoints lors de ma visite, et que la version complète de Triomphe sera lancée en 2016.

Jessica est responsable du programme, et elle m’avait contacté quelques semaines avant la troisième et dernière session de 3 jours de ce premier groupe à vivre l’expérience de Triomphe signé EEB.

Elle m’a confié qu’elle avait eu “un feeling” que si elle m’invitait à prendre part à quelques-unes des activités du début de ce troisième séjour à l’EEB de ce premier cohorte, ce sera un Win-Win-Win pour l’école, les participants, et moi. Je ne peux pas parler pour les autres, mais pour moi, je peux vous dire que j’en suis sorti gagnant.

L’expérience que chaque entrepreur vit, quand vient le temps de planifier sa sortie de son entreprise, est unique à lui-même, mais ceci ne veut pas dire qu’il ne peut pas bénéficier d’un groupe de pairs avec qui il pourra vivre la planification et les premiers pas de cette expérience.

Ceci résume assez bien la raison-d’être de Triomphe. Chaque programme de l’EEB fonctionne selon la formule de cohortes de participants, qui passent à travers plusieurs étapes tous ensemble, mais j’imagine que les liens formés entre ceux et celles de Triomphe seront parmi les plus puissants et profonds.

Pour débuter le dimanche après-midi, il y avait une scéance de “réchauffement” avec un accompagnateur-coach expérimenté, suivi par une session de “L’athlète sur le podium”, où quelques participants partagent un défi auquel ils font face actuellement, et les autres leur offrent leurs suggestions et points de vue.

J’ai eu la chance de passer, moi aussi, où j’ai raconté mon histoire personnelle et j’ai répondu à quelques questions des particpants.

Lors de la soirée, durant le souper, les entrepreneurs et conjointes ont chacun fait une présentation de 10 minutes au groupe, et il semble que le devoir de préparer ce discours avait causé du stress à certains d’entre eux au courant des semaines précédentes. Mais c’était tellement émouvant comme spectacle!

Lundi matin, c’était au tour d’une invitée spéciale, la conjointe d’un entrepreneur très connu, à venir nous conter son histoire, avec ces hauts et ces bas. Encore émouvant et révélateur pour tous.

À tout celà s’ajoutait une scéance sur les génogrammes, donnée par Jessica elle-même, en utilisant sa propre famille.

Le partage de tous ces éléments personnels est au coeur du succès de ces interventions. Les participants vivent tous leur propre version de la vie entrepreneuriale, mais ils s’inspirent les uns des autres.

J’ai eu la chance de partager mes perspectives sur le Modèle des 3 Cercles, et j’ai donné une copie de mon livre “Changer votre vision de l’entreprise familiale” à chacun des participants.

Je devais quitter après dîner, et laisser ma place à Placide Poulin, qui était arrivé pour partager ses perspectives pour le bénéfice de tous.

Je n’étais présent que pour 24 heures, et je suis sorti avec beaucoup d’idées et d’histoires. Pour les participants, il leur restait encore une journée et demie. Je ne doute pas qu’ils étaient tous épuisés, mais motivés, en partant mardi soir!

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Succession Planning in the Laundry Room

To begin, I must confess that I really hate the term “succession planning”, but in a title or headline, it is important to use words that are familiar to most people, otherwise they will likely miss your whole point.

I must also confess that the term “laundry room” was only used in the header here because it was a way to make my idea a bit catchier. The “real” title of this blog would more correctly be something like “How Succession Planning is Like Doing the Laundry”, but that doesn’t feel as sexy.

So how is succession planning like doing the laundry? I am glad you asked, but first, I told you that I detest the expression “succession planning”? Can we please just call it “Continuity Planning” instead?

Continuity planning is like “life insurance”, insofar as the insurance industry realized many years ago that selling “death insurance” (which is what it really is, after all) was not an easy thing to do, because people don’t want to talk about their ultimate demise.

So, without further ado (I think we have had enough “ado”, don’t you?), just how is Continuity Planning similar to doing the laundry? Let us count the ways.

To some people, and here I am picturing my Dad, as well as most fathers of his generation, the laundry room of our house was just a place that he passed through on the way into the garage. His job was to make sure that if the washer or dryer ever broke down, he was to pay to have them repaired or replaced.

The “doing the laundry” was never in the realm of the things that he worried about. As someone who was the beneficiary of having the laundry taken care of by my Mom and my grandmother who lived with us for many years, I am going to go out on a limb and guess that he never fully appreciated everything that went into the effort.

As someone who know lives in a house with my wife and two teens, and where we separate the household tasks more equally (give or take…) I can tell you that laundry is more than throwing the clothes in the washing machine and pressing “start”.

Nobody “wants” to do the laundry, but if the person who takes care of it is absent, it doesn’t take more than a few days before you start to notice that something is amiss. As people start to run out of clean clothes and the hampers are overflowing, someone eventually decides it is time to do something. And how hard can it be, right?

Put the clothes in the washer (what, you are supposed to separate them by colour first?), add some detergent, and press the button. OK, great, I’m glad that’s done. Oh, the washer is done. I guess now we move the wet stuff over to the dryer, right?

Now the dryer beeped, so we are finished. Oh, some of the stuff is still a bit damp, so I guess we press Start again. Alright, everything is dry now, but it is all mixed up, inside out, crumpled. This is a lot more work than I thought.

For people who are so busy taking care of business, there is a great potential to underestimate what goes into preparing the next generation of leaders and owners of their business.

Getting your accountant to do an “estate freeze” is putting the clothes in the washer and starting the machine.

The real work takes place before, and especially after. And it takes a long time, there are lots of steps, and it never seems to end.

The clothes need to be folded and hung up, and you need to make sure that the right clothes go back into the right rooms, the right closets, and the right drawers. Throwing the clothes in the machine and pressing the button was the easy part.

Maybe you should get going, before you run out of clean underwear.

 

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The Roadrunner-Coyote Rulebook

Recently I gave a short presentation to a group of business people, all of whom have children, on the subject of possibly bringing their children into their businesses.

On one of the Powerpoint slides, the heading “Rules and Roles” appeared. I explained that it was key for every new employee to have a clearly defined role, and that this was even more important for family members upon joining a family company.

But in addition to the “Roles”, I really wanted to emphasize the “Rules” part. Most families do have a few rules that they use to govern household issues, but very few families actually write them down and keep track of them.

For families in business together, it is considered a “best practice” to not only have rules, but also to write them down, review and update them, refer to them as needed, and generally know what the rules are and understand how important they are in keeping things clear.

A few months ago I came across something on Twitter that I filed away for a future blog post, and since we are talking about rules, it seems quite à propos to pull it out now. Someone had taken a photo at the Museum of Moving Image in New York and tweeted it out, and it got retweeted by several others.

I don’t think it came close to going viral, but it did garner quite a bit of attention for a few hours. The photo was a list of 9 rules that Chuck Jones of Warner Brothers had compiled to govern the Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons of our youth.

For example: Rule 1 states that the “Roadrunner cannot harm the Coyote, except by going Beep Beep”. Rule 4 states, “No dialogue, ever, except Beep Beep”. Rule 8 says, “Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote’s greatest enemy”.

This got me wondering why they actually took the time to write these things down, and whether they made these rules before they began, or as the went along over the years. Also, did they write the rules out all at once, or did the list get added to over the course of seasons? How often did they have to refer to the rules, was it only occasionally if there were creative differences, or if a new person was brought onto the team?

My guess is that they did find it useful to write the rules down in order to make things consistent over time. If the Coyote suddenly started buying his stuff from Amazon instead of Acme, viewers would have known immediately that something was amiss.

I think we all knew that the chances of the Coyote ever catching the Roadrunner were worse than for Charlie Brown to ever actually kick the football that Lucy was holding.

In an attempt to tie these rules into the realm of Family Business, I think it makes sense to look at the second rule on the list.

Rule 2: “No outside force can harm the Coyote, only his own ineptitude or the failure of the Acme products”.

Some family businesses fail due to outside forces, relating to their markets, their products, competition, new technology, and all sorts of other “business” reasons.

Unfortunately, a larger percentage of family businesses actually fall apart due to family issues, and not due to “outside forces”.

Does that make them “inept”? Well not necessarily, that may be too harsh a word for it. But if more families in business would take the time to create rules together, make sure that they are understood and followed, and kept all their lines of communication open, it would certainly lead to less family business failures.

Rule 9: “The Coyote is always more humiliated tham harmed by his failures”. Unfortunately in some families, some members do feel humiliated, and often some people are harmed.

It is never too early, nor too late, to start working on your business family’s rulebook.

 

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Négocier avec sa famille

Cette semaine j’ai eu le plaisir d’assister à une activité de Groupe Relève Québec, qui est devenue l’inspiration pour ce blogue hebdomadaire. C’était une présentation donnée par M.Pierre Gratton, de UQTR, qui nous parlait de son thèse de recherche qu’il entend poursuivre pour l’obtention de son doctorat.

M.Gratton était venu nous parler du “Processus de négociation d’une transmission/reprise externe”. Malgré le fait qu’il ne s’agissait pas d’une interlocution sur les transferts familiaux, je suis content d’avoir fait le voyage à Québec quand même, puisque des questions sur les transmissions familiales ont aussi été abordées.

C’était justement la réponse à une de ces questions que j’ai retenu et qui m’inspire à écrire ce blogue. M.Gratton mentionnait que lors d’une réunion avec une famille qui s’apprêtait à entreprendre une succession entre père et fils, il avait déclarer que certains éléments seront “à négocier” entre les membres de la famille.

Il semble que la mère était choquée par cette proposition; comment ça, “négocier avec sa famille?” Mais lors de sa prochaine rencontre avec cette famille, la mère, ayant bien réfléchi, est venue s’excuser, et lui a mentionné qu’il avait bel et bien raison, et que oui, il y aurait besoin de négocier les termes et conditions du transfert entre les membres de sa famille.

Retournons au sujet de la présentation sur le processus de négociation de M. Gratton. Si j’ai bien compris ce qu’il avançait, c’est en grande partie la définition que plusieurs donnent au mot “négociation” qui est beaucoup trop étroite, et ce qu’il voulait offrir est une nouvelle interprètation beaucoup plus large.

Notons que “affaires” et “business” se traduisent en espagnol comme “negocios”.

J’appuie son raisonnement sur ce sujet, puisque pour moi, nous négocions les détails de notre vie plusieurs fois par jour, sans même nous en rendre compte. Décider ce qu’on va faire aujourd’hui, où on va manger, est-ce que notre ado est dû pour se faire couper les cheveux, ce sont des négociations que nous tenons de façon régulière.

Ce que M. Gratton propose, c’est de créer un outil, ou un modèle, qui décrit tout les éléments qui font partie d’une transmission ou reprise d’une entreprise entre le cédant et le repreneur. Il nous a dit qu’il limitait sa recherche aux transferts externes, puisque l’idée d’élargir le contexte pour inclure les transferts internes et familiaux serait un travail beaucoup trop onéreux.

Mais mes blogues se portent sur les PME familiales, donc je me permets de continuer sur cette longueur d’ondes.

Pour moi, les mots “négociation” et “discussion” ne sont pas aussi différents que plusieurs penseraient. Je préconise la communication ouverte, claire et régulière. Que ce soit par écrit ou oralement, le simple fait d’avoir un échange d’idées, où les partis sont libres d’ajouter leurs pensées, est la clé.

Dans la PME familiale, souvent il y a beaucoup trop de “non dit”. Trop de choses se passent en silence, et chacun doit deviner ce que les autres pensent, veulent, et croient. Avec le temps, les gens ont chacun leur façon d’interprèter ce qui se passe, mais personne en parle, puisqu’il y a des sujets dont on ne parle pas entre membres de la famille.

Arrêtons ces niaiseries!

OK, je m’excuse, je suis parti sur une tangeante. On a commencé ce blogue en parlant de transfert d’une entreprise d’un propriétaire à un futur propriétaire, ce qui est quelque chose qui se négocie, même entre les membres d’une famille.

Mais là, je me suis permis de me plaindre du manque de communication entre les membres d’une famille que travaillent ensemble dans une PME familiale au jour le jour, en dehors d’un contexte de transfert.

Mon point c’est que la communication est importante tout au long de notre vie, en famille, et en affaires, et que nous devons travailler très fort pour encourager les gens à communiquer leur propre point de vue.

Mon défi pour ceux qui travaillent au sein d’une entreprise familiale est de créer un forum régulier (aux trois mois?) où les membres de la famille peuvent échanger sur tout sujet à l’intersection de la famille et la compagnie. Je vous encourage de mettre la génération montante en charge de l’agenda, du processus, et le suivi. Voyez où ça vous mènera.

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Look Forward, Don’t Look Back

This past week I attended a full day event put on by IMAQ, the “Institut de la Médiation et Arbitrage du Québec”, which included four separate presentations by experienced practitioners in the field.

Their goal was to “demystify” mediation and arbitration as they pertain to workplace conflicts, and I attended to get a feel for the local med-arb scene here in Montreal. The quality of the presentations was quite high, and it was nice to learn that the alternative dispute resolution world seems to be healthy and growing.

One of the presentations dealt with how to handle a narcissistic person when conducting a mediation. The two presenters were both experienced mediators, but they came from different professions. The first one to speak was a lawyer, which is not uncommon, but the second was a psychologist.

The psychologist offered lots of do’s and don’t’s for dealing with this type of person, and I was reminded of a recent discussion I had with a colleague who told me that he tried to avoid dealing with business founders because most of them are narcissists.

I am not sure that founders are actually true narcissists, but I can tell you that if there is a continuum of narcisism, most successful business founders would score more towards the higher end of the scale for the most part.

But the main idea for this blog post was hinted at in the title, and it dealt with looking forward versus looking backwards.

During a presentation on the various different types of alternative dispute resolution, there was a slide that mentioned that mediators look forward, while arbitrators look backward. Hmmm. I never thought about it like that.

An arbitrator listens to both sides and passes judgment, and ends up issuing a ruling, much like a judge, but with fewer rules and often less formality.

The arbitrator looks to what happened in the past, hears both parties talk about things that happened in the past, and tries to adjudicate and pronounce some sort of ruling that will be applied today to resolve the issue.

A mediator looks at things from a much different perspective, and in many ways cares more about the future than the past.

When you think about workplace situations, assuming that the people involved in a dispute both want to keep their jobs, it is important to find a durable, sustainable solution, which is why mediation is often preferred over arbitration.

When we look at family businesses, it is even more important to look for ways to work things out in a way that makes sense for the long term for the family and for the business.

Some people might say that once you get to the point of needing to bring in a mediator, things must already be pretty bad, and that could be true, but it is a matter of degree.

Ideally everyone gets along and things are harmonious. But often people don’t get along perfectly and they need help straightening things out, and this can sometimes be done with some simple facilitation.

If things start to get even worse, maybe it is time to try something more like mediation, where the mediator tries to find common ground on which to rebuild the harmony that people are trying to get back.

The sooner you recognize that something is amiss and bring in someone to help sort it out, the more options you will have between facilitation, mediation, or even arbitration.

If you wait too long and the dispute gets uglier, then the choices sadly diminish and it will become time to “lawyer up”, and that’s when you get those stories about family businesses that you read about in the papers.

And they rarely have happy endings.

 

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You Can’t See What You Can’t See

Is a blindspot really a blindspot if you don’t know you have it?

As is often the case, this week’s blog subject is based on something that happened to me in real life, and I have accepted the challenge of relating the story in an interesting and useful way.

Since this story involves people in my own family, I will use fake names for them, as I usually do when I talk about real people, and I will adopt my standard custom of employing a pseudonym that starts with the same first letter as their real names.

My daughter wanted me to call her “Sassy”, and she wanted me to call her brother “Rusty”, but he didn’t really like that name, and so somehow we settled on him being “Rambo” instead. If you have children, you probably understand the importance of keeping your kids happy and staying on their good side. Now Sassy and Rambo would make better names for pets than kids, but what the heck.

Rambo and Sassy will be going to a new school in September, and as part of the paperwork that the school has asked for, we needed them to have a physical exam done by a doctor, in part to pronounce them able to participate in the school’s sports programs.

So I made an appointment for them and brought them to see my doctor to get them checked out, have the papers officially signed, and thereby cross another item off the checklist that sees them one step closer to being ready for September.

Sassy went first, initially going with the nurse for noting her height and weight, as well as an eyesight verification. Rambo followed the same sequence, except that after the doctor finished with him, I got called in because there was something noteworthy that he wanted to share with me.

The doctor handed me a piece of paper on which he had written 20/60 and 20/50, which were the results of his eye test. What? Really?

How could this be, he never once said anything to us about having trouble seeing? I guess his vision has always been bad because he told us that he has not noticed any deterioration.

So I had the paper in my hand with the numbers on it and Sassy saw it and asked what it was. I told her that we would talk about it later, and then she said “Is Rambo blind?” She does have a tendency to exaggerate, even though I have told her a million times to stop it.

But when I confirmed that, yes, Rambo apparently suffers from poor vision, she proclaimed “I knew it! I knew it!” Apparently, Sassy has been telling her parents for years that her brother doesn’t see well, and we ignored her.

So getting back to the question I asked at the beginning of this post, the answer is a definite YES. Even if you don’t know that you have a blindspot, it’s still a blindspot. And if you have an observant sibling, they may have noticed it.

Everyone has blindspots, and it isn’t always easy to acknowledge them, understand them, accept that they are real, and manage them. It can be helpful to learn about them because that really is the first important step to doing something about them.

But like anything else in a family, and especially in a family business, the way that you learn about your blindspots, and how your family members use that information makes all the difference in the world.

The importance of Self-Awareness cannot be overestimated, but having a family where each member helps the others overcome weaknesses is a wonderful gift that is even more precious.

It is so much better than a family where members use people’s weaknesses against them, but unfortunately that happens all too often.

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