(knowledge, skill, and discipline required for success)
Observations
Every family business has a business family sitting behind it, but: “Family Business” makes no sense – because every commercial driver that empowers a good business conflicts with the human success factors that make families happy:
This creates a huge conundrum: family businesses are the most common form of business structure in the world, and have been since the beginning of recorded history, but by all the rules of humanity and commercial commonsense they shouldn’t be … because fundamentally: “Family Business” … makes no sense!
The Family Business Curse
Dysfunctional Business Families are cursed. They suffer long-term unhappiness, no matter how materially successful they are in business. This is the Family Business Curse.
According to everything we learn during our growing up years, families should be environments full of love, respect, nurture, support, growth, happiness, and trust – where parents keep everyone happy and safe, and siblings show unconditional love and undying loyalty towards each other. When this isn’t happening, or even worse – we perceive we’re experiencing the very opposite of what we feel family life should be, it challenges our whole world picture.
And if we feel helpless to fix things, or worse, feel guilty that we’ve somehow caused or contributed to this “unnatural” situation, being part of a dysfunctional family can seriously screw with our sense of self and self-worth, even when the individuals involved are pretty much blameless.
Family Business Success
There’s very little that’s natural, or purely lucky, in the makeup of a successful Family Business – especially one that’s survived in a family across several generations. Scratch the surface and you’ll find a family that’s worked hard doing almost whatever it felt it needed to do to produce and sustain a cohesive family team that owns, manages, and takes pride in operating its own business.
You’ll also find a family that has created a structured and complex environment where family members actually enjoy working and socialising together.
The Challenge
Regrettably, most families don’t have the genetic constitution, and/or don’t work hard or smart enough to achieve Family Business Nirvana and, like the participants in an unhappy marriage, suffer interminable misery, life-long conflict, and constantly strained relationships – both in and out of their business.
The outcome is “a mathematical certainty” when family members are forced, or feel obliged to work together in, jobs they wouldn’t naturally choose for themselves, working alongside people they’d rather not be with, for a variety of reasons.
And making pots of money doesn’t improve things much, although it’s much better than not making enough money – personal financial pressures are a primary cause of dissatisfaction and complaint.
The Solution
Take nothing for granted. Know your family; know your business – and respond to each of their needs, appropriately. Separate them for all important decisions so each can freely apply its own values; follow its own visions; pursue their separate goals, and do so in whatever ways seem best to them.
Be alert to actual and potential problems and deal with them sooner, rather than later. Small problems are like weeds – hard to see at first; growing large and prickly when fed, watered, and left unattended, and harder to approach and remove once they’ve gained a hold.
Get the right people on the bus and get the wrong people off. The right people create and support great cultures in families and businesses; the wrong people are simply toxic, and a danger to everyone and everything in any organisation.
Appoint trustworthy leaders to your family and your business who: (a) know where they want to go and (b) inspire followers to want to go where they want them to go. Leadership styles vary enormously and the right person for your family may not be the right leader for your business at a given point in time, and vice-versa.
Implement best business practices in your business by doing things that are widely known to work well in business environments, and avoid doing things that are known to not work.
Do the same for your family – there’s no shortage of advice about how to increase your chances being a happy, rather than dysfunctional, family.
Now let’s talk about Family Business Best Practices. Academics tend to avoid this topic due to the many messy variables in play, but successful family businesses, and the small number of genuinely holistic advisers who work with them beyond the traditional boundaries of law, accounting, wealth management, and counselling, know exactly what Business families should and should not do if they want to enjoy happy ever afters.
We’re talking about a non-prescriptive, individually-responsive approach to managing Families-in-Business and Business Family affairs. The process model draws heavily on accepted best practices for both and melds them into a workable composite that will be successful if, and only if, both the family and the business established disciplined cultures, structures, and rules of engagement t that support the guidelines (not rules) that constitute Family Business Best Practice.
It looks like this:
