Observations
“Talent” describes a person’s natural aptitude. It’s a predictor of potential ability, but it’s not ability itself. Most people can generally learn basic skills. Acquiring advanced skills and capabilities requires the application of training and experience to an appropriate measure of talent. Along the scale, talent separates the incompetent, the mediocre, and the sublime.
Leadership talent often determines success or failure in competitive business markets. Indeed, when you find a successful family business it’s probable you’ve also found a talented leader.
Business founders are often motivated by a sense of competitiveness, creativity, frustration, opportunity, personal desire, financial need, or family obligation. Subsequent generations of leaders may be more rounded, better educated … and driven by a lesser sense of urgency.
Highly talented successors build on the achievements of their predecessors; adequately talented individuals maintain the business they’ve taken over; untalented successors shouldn’t accept leadership of the family business, because it will probably collapse under them.
As businesses grow and evolve, their circumstances and needs become more complicated, generating a corresponding demand for increasingly capable and talented personnel to lead and manage them.
Leaders, and other family members working in less exalted roles, may have and/or develop the necessary skills over time, or not. They may be self-motivated to upskill, and seek out or receive relevant training, or not. They may have the natural talents they need to help them develop the advanced skills required by their more advanced business, or not.
Put simply, if they lack relevant talent, there’s a limit to how skilled a person will become at doing a complex task, no matter how much training they receive, how much experience they accumulate, or how much support they’re given. We’ve all known people who struggle to gain one learning from a hundred experiences, while others squeeze a hundred learnings from a single experience. Some acquire skills quickly, while others never do.
The more successful a family business becomes, the greater its demands on the family talent pool. If the family can’t produce the talent it needs to keep up with business growth and, for whatever reason, the business can’t or won’t seek the talent it needs elsewhere, either: (a) business performance drops and commercial risks increase due to the absence of key people in key roles, or (b) family members are forced into roles they’re not well-suited for – AND THEN performance drops, risks increase, and conflict is likely to erupt – in the business and in the family.
Some business families insist that key business roles must be occupied by family members, despite the fact that any objective analysis would find an obvious lack of talent, desire, capability, or suitability in the family to support this goal, on a responsible basis.
This is not a good place to be. It generally indicates the presence of insecure individuals in charge of (unrecognised) low trust environments, or a form of parental control that puts business needs above individual needs, within the family. It can also result from having an overly rigid family values system, based on outdated cultural or ethnic norms.
Result? The wrong people get shoehorned into unsuitable jobs that they themselves don’t want to be in. Everyone, and everything suffers when impractical performance needs and unrealistic expectations are placed on the shoulders of people who clearly will not / cannot perform the tasks required of them.
Working parents (or at least one of them) get into conflict with their poorly suited progeny, when they place business needs before individual and family needs. They often then clash with their own spouses as a result of the excessive protection and promotional support the latter is providing to their child – who, despite the support and forbearance they receive from the family, still cannot / will not contribute to the business in any way that looks even part way acceptable.
Meanwhile, dedicated and talented siblings who do put in the time and effort required to develop the skills, qualifications, and personal competencies to do their jobs also develop resentments against their less dedicated, less gifted siblings – who appear to be treated with kid gloves; seem to get overpaid in relation to their contributions to the business; take up disproportionate amounts of parental care, attention and support, and may even be seen to be threatening their own futures due to the increasingly unbalanced (unhinged?) support they’re receiving from said overly protective parent(s).
Lack of family talent is a common cause of conflict in Family Business.
Solution
Reality Check: ask yourself what’s really happened / happening? Are we using business-first thinking to help solve a business problem, or family-first thinking, or not much rational thought at all? Suggestion: take a deep breath; rewind; start again and,
Diagnose needs: what root business HR problem(s) are we trying to solve? What objective criteria should guide and validate whatever decisions we need to make?
Ensure the solution resolves the problem: match detailed job requirements > to formal job descriptions > to the objective qualifications, experience, personalities and personal competencies of relevant family members. Question: do you have an objective match, or at least 80% of a match? If not, you almost certainly don’t have the right person for the job, and if it’s a critical role, the business, the individuals concerned, and the family, are all likely to suffer.
Consider Family Values – what drives the family, as a family: Money? Personal happiness? Individual success and fulfilment? Self-determination? Nurture? Harmony? Equality? Equity? Are your decisions congruent with, and supportive of, your declared values, or are they the result of bias, expediency, or something else?
Refer to your Family Plan, and its rules for family employment (usually contained in the Family Constitution). If you don’t have a Family Plan, and/or a Family Constitution, they should be developed, and implemented.
Objectively assess the personalities, capabilities and career intentions of all relevant family members. Note that this will probably require investment in personality profiling; competency assessments, and a career interview process.
Ideally, start grooming and training selected family members for appropriate roles in the business, during their childhood. Family Businesses provide ideal training and assessment opportunities for developing and testing the metal of upcoming family members.
Make the training process as professional as possible by using a mix of family and non-family supervisors, trainers, coaches and mentors.
Listen carefully to the views of trusted non-family personnel and advisers when assessing the competencies and suitability of family members to work in key roles in the Family Business.
If you have the right people in the family program, consider yourself blessed. If not: (a) consider non-family employee options and (b) ensure that family members deemed unsuitable for careers in the business have great alternatives available to them.
Apply Family Rules to make realistic decisions about family members’ aptitudes, capabilities and real desires. There are few things more likely to create conflict and destroy family harmony than forcing unwilling or incompetent family members into unsuitable roles in the family business. Encourage them to develop careers elsewhere, and ensure that the rest of the family approve and support their plans. Treat this as a family project, using family resources, rather than as a family business task.
Synchronise Family Plans with Business Plans to make the whole issue of family talent a commercial, rather than a personal, discussion.