Some family-business owners look at their business through a lens where they see themselves offering a job to any member of the family. Others see through a lens that focuses primarily on the needs of the business.

The first view may be supportive of family relationships–but I venture to say that it may not provide the healthiest outlook for family members in the end. The second may benefit the business but may kill the family along the way.

A combined view is needed. One that takes in the responsible support of family members and includes a vision for professionalizing the business. The resulting scene shows generations of continuing strong leadership supporting a prosperous business and a prosperous family.

One means of developing this combined view is by way of your family. Begin by fostering a sense of responsibility in your young children. My friend and colleague Jeff Savlov illustrates this idea as teaching the next generation to put the sippy-cup on the counter when done with it.

In the Family Business Management class I teach for entrepreneurship majors at Baruch College, City University of New York, the discussion on women in family enterprises, always attracts an elevated level of attention.

The Baruch student body is one of the most diverse in the country. Remarkably, students from a wide range of cultural backgrounds share an appreciation for the inequality of women and men in family firms. The topic invariably draws comments from both women and men saying in essence that they were aware of the challenges for women in the work place, but never realized the unique situations of women in family businesses.

Not all gender-related differences are negative though, and some play to the unique qualities of women. From research[1] on women in family firms:

• Because of traditional family roles women’s contribution in family firms often remains in the background
• Women frequently take on positions that support the business such as bookkeeper as well as participate in “feminine roles, such as human resources, sales support, etc.
• Women take on roles of caring for peace and harmony in the family, nurturer of the next generation leadership, and can help their children to love the family business.
• Daughters have different relationships with their father than sons do. While the father-son relationship may be steeped in competition, the father-daughter relationship is more cooperative in nature.
• The psychology and socialization skills of women, their ability to overcome manage contradiction, as well as to trust instinct and intuition, rather than analysis and rationality may suit them well to succeed in an evolving business culture.

[1] Jimenez, Rocio Martinez, Research on Women in Family Firms. Family Business Review, 2009, Vol 22, No. 53

Family businesses have an intangible asset: they are perceived as being successful, providing superior service, having a strong culture and deep industry knowledge–-all of which can provide competitive advantages.

Why else do family enterprises make public the claim of being a family business?

These advantages though must be earned, decision-by-decision, action-by-action and generation-by-generation.

They are the result of choice and not of happenstance. They begin with conversations within the family about what it means to them to be a multi-generational family enterprise.

When someone hears that I work with family businesses, one of the recurring problems they tell me about is that the children do not want to work in them; and I always find myself considering the origins of the issue.

In her article in the Harvard Business Review “Three Things that Actually Motivate Employees” Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Professor and Director of the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative wrote that mastery, membership, and meaning are the primary work motivators (https://hbr.org/2013/10/three-things-that-actually-motivate-employees/)

Mastery and meaning play significant roles in both non-family businesses and family enterprises. It may be assumed that the third element, membership, is obvious and a given in a family business. Kanter writes, however, that membership requires “allowing the whole person to surface.”

“Allowing the whole person to surface” may be an obscure goal and an uncertain generational challenge for some family business founders whose sheer dominance and drive created the success of the family business in the first place. It is, however, critical to the next generation finding success under their own leadership.

Seth Godin recently wrote a blog post titled, “Two heads or one?”  (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/04/two-heads-or-one.html)

The blog is based on the question of whether there is an inevitable split in a business as it grows, between the people who design products and those who market them. Godin points out the benefit of having one person successfully taking charge of both roles. He ends by saying: “There are a lot of reasons that this is quite difficult to pull off. That doesn’t mean it isn’t important.”

Though Godin was expressing a slightly different perspective, the question shows up for many family businesses as they consider succession in leadership. For example, there are two siblings or cousins both qualified to lead the business, who also bring different skills and experiences to the table. To answer the question the family must consider their goals for succession and the qualifications of each prospective successor.

It cannot be assumed that the interests, strengths, and abilities of the next generation are identical to those of the current generation of leaders, or that the attributes required to launch a business are the same as those required for growing and managing it.

It is incumbent upon both current and next generation leadership to recognize that succeeding heirs of the business need to provide a vision that rejuvenates the business and ensures that it will be competitive in the next generation.

Samuel Johnson III, former Chairman of SC Johnson, made the statement that every generation has the responsibility of bringing their own vision for the future of the business.

Imagine if when envisioning the future of my family’s business I started was buggy whips, or floppy disks. Where would that take the business? What I want to see carried forward are our values, those things that are important to us as a family. Values are the foundation upon which a vision is built. They are the enduring bedrock.

To provide perspective I often reference Joan of Arc. Her mission, her battle cry was, “to free France.” Her underlying vision; “a free France.” Her grounding value; “freedom.”

A family enterprise is a system, and one cannot look at it without taking into account the performance of its individual subsystems–the business, the ownership, and the family–for the behavior of any one part of the system will influence and be influenced by the others.

The fate of each of the subsystems is intertwined. It is necessary to understand that these strands may not be disentangled without seriously disrupting one or all parts of the system.

–adapted from Kepner, E. (1991), The Family and the Firm: A Coevolutionary Perspective. Family Business Review, 4: 445–461. doi: 10.1111/j.1741-6248.1991.00445.x

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-6248.1991.00445.x/abstract

In its online “Insights and Publications Section” McKinsey & Co. recently published an article subtitled “What will it take to shift markets and companies away from a short-term way of thinking” with excerpts from “Perspectives on the long term,” a book of essays contributed by leading executives and academics. In the article, the issue of shifting from “quarterly capitalism” to longer-term thinking is called out as being “particularly essential.” http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/Leading_in_the_21st_century/Perspectives_on_the_long_term?cid=other-eml-alt-mkq-mck-oth-1503.

Many multi-generational family businesses have proven successful in thinking long-term. Family Business Magazine has listed 100 of the world’s oldest. http://www.griequity.com/resources/industryandissues/familybusiness/oldestinworld.html

The youngest of these, Laird & Co., a New Jersey-based brandy distiller, was founded in 1780. The oldest, Kongo Gumi, is a Japanese construction company that built the Buddhist Shitennoji Temple in Korea 1400 years ago. It was founded in 578 and is in its 40^th generation.

A critical factor in this kind of success is an “intention” that the family continue to own and operate their business for many generations. A “best-practice” of this long-term thinking is often initiated by considering what the family and the business should be like when the grandchildren assume leadership.

This illustrates that what the McKinsey article states as requiring “wide-ranging shifts in both mind-set and practice” is in fact a way of thinking that has governed the operation of family-owned business for centuries…”ahead of the curve.”

While reading a recent blog post by Seth Godin, entitled “Sorry Confusion,” http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/03/sorry-confusion.html, I was reminded of a meeting with a business owner who was planning to retire. At that time he was pondering whether he should sell the business to his employees or to a third party. But internally what he was struggling with were two children who were not speaking with each other; a son-in-law working in the business who did not have the skills to actually run the business; a non-family manager who to a large degree was running the business but did not have resources to buy it. He also had grandchildren who, from his perspective, were too young to be considered for anything. His thinking and plans at that moment did not include any of his family.

One of the sorry things about this situation is opportunities being missed. By his thoughtlessness with regard to his family members and existing family dynamics–conjuring “escape plans” rather than face them–the businessman has willfully blinded himself to every possible resource, every possible talent, that one or more of his family members might contribute to bring the family business into the next generation.