It’s October, and Halloween is approaching like midnight footsteps in the hall. This post stirs a bubbling cauldron of family business fears, worries, and anxiety. Rising with the reeking vapors from the foul potion comes – oh no! The Family Meeting.
By “family meeting,” we refer to anything from a half-day gathering to multiday family retreats. We recommend that families should start meetings when the second generation is old enough to start working in the business, though it’s never too late to begin. If you’ve never had an agenda-based family meeting, or tried once and failed, this post is for you.
Anxiety-Provoking, but Essential for Good Stewardship
In their book Complete Family Wealth: Wealth as Well-Being, 2nd Ed. (Wiley, 2022) James E. Hughes, Jr., Susan E. Massenzio, and Keith Whitaker acknowledge that family meetings can be scary: “… most families approach holding a true family meeting or a family retreat with some anxiety.” (p. 127)
Nevertheless, the authors recommend having them anyway. “Family meetings are one of the most important tools a family of wealth can use to grow its complete wealth. … Every family that succeeds over multiple generations makes some use of family meetings.” (p. 128)
What is ‘Complete Wealth?’
Did you notice the term ‘complete wealth?’ It’s important. For many people, “wealth” means only one thing: financial capital. But that is an impoverished and ultimately insufficient understanding of wealth. Resilient multigenerational family enterprises that succeed over the long haul understand themselves to be stewards of not one but FIVE forms of capital: Human, Intellectual, Social, Spiritual, and Financial. “Strategic owners understand the power of dynamically preserving all five of their capitals to enable all family members to benefit fully from them.” (James E. Hughes, Jr. in the Foreword to Own It! How to Develop a Family Enterprise Owner’s Mindset at Every Age by Wendy Sage-Hayward, Gaia Marchisio, and Barbara Dartt (Palgrave, 2022)
When we read that, we hear an echo of ancient wisdom. St. Irenaeus of Lyons, a 2nd century Church Father, said, “The glory of God is man fully alive.”
Wealth As Well Being
Pursuing complete wealth involves using a portion of your family’s QUANTITATIVE capital to develop your family’s QUALITATIVE capitals. Some families designate 2% of annual business profit to a complete wealth fund. They use it to develop their family’s nonfinancial capitals. This might cover annual family retreats, leadership development programs, rising gen education, or professional facilitation services. These families understand wealth as holistic well-being. This understanding is consistent with the origin of our word wealth, rooted in “weal,” which originally meant well-being.
Prudent business leaders intuitively grasp the importance of investing a portion of profits back into the business. Establishing a complete wealth fund applies the same principle to family, strengthening relationships and increasing capacity. Aileen Miziolek writes, “Family meetings help us to structure our learning together, solve problems we can’t solve individually, and create a greater sense of belonging.”
Before pursuing a vision of complete wealth, however, many business-owning families will need to face down their fears related to family meetings. What are some of those fears, and how might they be addressed?
Fear #1: The Memory of a Failed Attempt
“We had a family meeting once, and it was a disaster!” There are some family meeting horror stories out there, no doubt about it. Maybe what began as a tense but respectful conversation devolved into a shouting match, ending in tears. Perhaps someone stormed out and threatened never to return. Did only one or two personalities and voices dominate while everyone else sat passively on the sidelines with no opportunity to participate or shape outcomes? Maybe the purpose of the meeting was never clear to begin with, and so nothing of substance was accomplished.
Does a failed first attempt mean that you should give up entirely on family meetings? Not at all! (Now that would be scary.) G. K. Chesterton said, “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly at first.” If something is truly important, it should be pursued regardless of the quality of the initial attempt. No one expects a child who just enrolled in piano lessons to play Chopin at their first recital. So be patient with yourselves as you develop the skills and discipline required for successful family meetings.
This Time We Mean It
To overcome fear rooted in the memory of a failed first attempt, fail forward. Persistence is probably a family value, is it not? Acknowledge that while the initial attempt was suboptimal, it was a learning experience that enables the family to try again – this time, better prepared for a successful outcome.
Download the free Family Business Starter Kit on the Resources page of the Aspen Family Business Group website. Module 1 has 15 pages on family meetings that you can use with your planning team. It will walk you through clarifying the purpose(s) for the meeting, listing benefits, developing an agenda that the family owns, and planning, promoting, leading, and evaluating the family meeting. If your planning team could use assistance with planning and/or event facilitation, Family Business Facilitators is here to help!
Ground Rules: The Most Important Variable
The Starter Kit emphasizes the value of ground rules. It is wise to start a family meeting by helping the group create a list of behaviors describing how they want to be together in family meetings. Hughes says, “Of all the elements needed for a successful family meeting, solid ground rules may be the most important.” (p. 132) Here are a few examples:
- Be on time
- Be fully present (cell phones are put away)
- Be respectful in words and actions
- Listen well
- Speak only for yourself, use “I” messages
- Be open, transparent, and direct
- Evaluate this session so we can improve future meetings
Your family will need to come up with your own ground rules. And once you have adopted them, you must uphold them. (Expect your resolve to be tested.) Not having ground rules, or having them but not upholding them, may help explain how past attempts at family meetings got off track.
Time for Play and Recreation
Your agenda should balance the serious business of work sessions with time for rest, play, and recreation. Downtime, fun, and games at family meetings and retreats aren’t so much luxuries as necessities. And despite what some may think, they make the work sessions more enjoyable, productive, and efficient.
Fear #2: The Ghost of an Unresolved Issue
Some families have avoided the “Failed First Attempt,” but are prevented from having their first family meeting by an unresolved issue. Maybe it’s a past trauma, a controversial former family business decision, or some other challenge. These families have made an unspoken deal: “I won’t bring up the painful stuff if you won’t either.” This allows them to enjoy relative quiet, but the resulting “fake harmony” is fragile and survives only for as long as any substantive issues are avoided.
At one level, this is an understandable decision on the part of the family. They sense that – or they fear that – if they dared to speak openly at a family meeting about anything more than mere surface issues, the ugly specter of the unresolved issue will arise like the Great Pumpkin in Linus van Pelt’s pumpkin patch. And once the Great Pumpkin invades the family meeting space, how will it be acknowledged, addressed, and resolved?
William Faulkner was surely right when he wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” To move beyond the unresolved issue, your business-owning family will need to summon the courage to address it directly and openly. The only way out is through.
Dancing Skeletons
Family historian Karen McNeill wrote an article for business-owning families who were concerned that commissioning a family history would dredge up old, shameful family secrets. The title? “Skeletons in the Closet: Let Them Out and Watch Them Dance.” In a recent podcast, she said, “I tell clients not to be afraid of [skeletons in the closet], because if the conversations go well, they can be a pathway to forgiveness and healing.” This is a profound insight that is grounded in her work with business-owning families who’ve made a courageous choice. Instead of sweeping difficult family issues under a rug, they have addressed them in redemptive ways.
An estate planning attorney told us how a family history enabled the patriarch of a successful family business to speak openly about his wartime experiences – something he had never done. He had lived through the Battle of the Bulge during the Second World War. The family history gave him an opportunity to speak about his experiences, and to share a sense of how his wartime service had shaped his approach to life and business. His children and grandchildren found this information extremely helpful and enlightening.
In another business family with a long history, G4 leaders collaborated to heal a rift in the family that originated in G2 and was perpetuated by G3. The G4 peers pursued reconciliation, which included acknowledging the facts of the case, and seeking to understand the motivations and decisions of the various actors in the family drama. Then they covenanted together to make a fresh start for the sake of the family enterprise, themselves, and their descendants. The resulting unity became a powerful asset for family enterprise. The G2 rift was no longer a source of division and perpetual grievance. It now became an illustration of the family’s commitment to overcome alienation to invest in shared purpose.
Fear #3: The Great Unknown
Scheduling family meetings to pursue a vision of complete wealth can feel like a plunge into the unknown. The typical leader of a business-owning family is an omnicompetent overachiever who understands how to make the numbers work.
Money-Focused Meetings are Commonplace
Most business-owning families are comfortable with regular meetings dealing with money and financial issues. Those meetings are typically planned and led by the family’s professional staff, such as financial advisors, estate planners, and risk management specialists. The meetings are scheduled on a regular basis – usually quarterly or annually. They are “crunchy” – grounded in numbers. Progress can be measured readily, as money and other assets increase in value.
Embracing a More Robust Vision of Wealth
As with Financial capital, the goal of investing in the family’s Human, Intellectual, Social, and Spiritual capitals is to grow them. But measuring progress in developing non-financial capitals is imprecise. And it’s difficult to know, especially at first, the best investment strategies for achieving a robust ROI when developing nonfinancial capitals.
Family Business Facilitators can introduce you to some assessment instruments that address these concerns. We can plan and lead meetings in which your family explores a vision of complete wealth, and wrestles with the question: “Should we commit to using a portion of our quantitative capital to develop our qualitative capitals?”
Admittedly, it’s scary to embrace the implications of this broader understanding of wealth! Courage is required. In practical terms, it means setting out on a journey of discovery and growth, knowing that you are beginning an adventure that others will need to continue in their own way, when their time comes to assume roles in family leadership.
It’s like shifting from solo competition to team collaboration – different skills, same intelligence required. You cannot be guaranteed success, but you can give your family members opportunities to grow and develop as stewards of wealth in all its forms. That growth and development become an enduring legacy of complete multigenerational family wealth.
Professional Facilitation Makes Family Meetings Less Scary
We like Karen McNeill’s qualifying phrase in that first paragraph under our heading, Dancing Skeletons: “If the conversations go well.” That is an important “IF.” Family Business Facilitators can help your family’s sensitive conversations go well. We invite you to schedule a 30-minute conversation with us to determine whether your family is ready. Professional facilitation is an investment in your family’s future. While costs vary based on your family’s size and needs, consider this: it’s less than the legal fees required to resolve one family dispute – and far less painful.
The anxiety families feel about family meetings is grounded in an awareness – conscious or unconscious – of the stakes involved. That anxiety can be amplified by a failed initial attempt, the ghosts of an unresolved issue, or a fear of the unknown. But we hope you will not allow your fear of family meetings to prevent you from experiencing the benefits of family meetings! Family Business Facilitators can guide you in creating a timeline of productive family meetings that will deepen family relationships and enhance business outcomes as you learn to work, play, and grow together, becoming faithful competent stewards of wealth in all its forms.
Failing to steward wealth wisely leads to a host of tragic outcomes – sadly, quite familiar to us all – too scary to contemplate.
