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This Week's ERN
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interbiznet presents the Bugler |
| November 6, 2001 |
Dot Net Services
Microsoft and some possibilities of the future. Read more in today's Electronic Recruiting News.
Thinking Families Businesses
You live together, work together, report to, and supervise each other resulting in a double level of relationship – one inside
and one outside the family – and they influence each other tremendously.
I spoke with Katharine Baker about the unique organizational structure of a family-run business. Dr. Baker is no stranger to it, she is a senior consultant to The Metropolitan Group, an international organization offering consulting and educational services to family and closely held enterprises.
According to Dr. Baker, the difference between a family
business and any other business is a higher sense of obligation to the business
and to the relationship system that encompasses that business. Often when the
original entrepreneur starts the business, he/she is not even
thinking of a multigenerational business. But, as more family members become
involved, it begins to take on more of this relationship system overlay that
adds a higher sense of obligation and attachment to running the business. Issues,
such as having a baby or a kid going off to college, tend to have more impact
than in an average company; as does retirement—the younger generation also then
becomes responsible for supporting the older generation in their old age.
If you hire people that are not related to you, with just the necessary skills to do the work, you have a clear sense of interpersonal boundaries and people are evaluated based on their competence and achievement. Whereas if you begin to bring your family on board, you do so for reasons that often have an emotional component. It can be extremely positive, but it can also be extremely complicated. It depends on an individual's ability to keep clear boundaries on what is work for the workplace and what is relationship stuff that comes from the home.
So, as business problems creep up, do boundaries tend to get blurred? Any stressor that a family experiences effects the automatic ways people in the family relate to each other. Every individual has a range of functioning. When things are smooth and nothing is rocking the boat, most people function at the highest level of their personal range. When there is a lot of stress—hot, new competition in the marketplace, financial problems, or some kind of disaster like what we just went through (the September 11 attacks) all of us tend toward our lowest level, effecting both home and the workplace—how the business is run, what decisions are made, who is in charge, and who is doing the job in an effective way. The boundaries between business and family relationships can get blurry. It follows then, that the level of emotional intelligence of those in key positions will affect a whole range of issues about how the business functions in general.Decisions can be made that are very confusing to outsiders, such as compensation or how responsibility is doled out. It could have nothing to do with the actual competence of the person and everything to do with the family relationships. For an employee, who is not related, it is probably very useful to understand that this is a family and the stuff that families do is just that – stuff that families do. You can judge it all you want. Nothing you do will make a difference in the long run. The most effective strategy is to keep your eye on your own functioning at work.
For Dr. Baker, it is inevitable that family relationship issues will get into the mix. She has seen conflicts, such as ancient sibling rivalry (even for those in their 40s and 50s and very competent), and parent-child issues (the projections onto or expectations from the parent to the child and vice versa) that are, many times, not grounded in the business and come from somewhere else. The other thing she sees is marital "stuff"—where a husband and wife decide it would be great to run a business together, then it comes to light they have different agendas or different skill sets or they have had a big fight at home and get to the workplace already in polarized positions.
For some families, there is a powerful family culture of
obligation, very rigid and very overriding for the younger generations. (For a
fascinating look at this, I recommend Citizen Coors: A Grand Family Saga of Business, Politics, and Beer by Dan Baum.) But then you see a family with a whole lot of flexibility, where it is all optional. Some members may be interested in getting into it, other siblings go onto different things and the equity issues all get worked.
The overall issue is the forces of togetherness vs. individuality. For a family business, where there is greater pressure toward the force of togetherness, there is more pressure toward agreeing (the agree at any cost mentality), but it is the togetherness that keeps the members functioning individually. For a family with higher levels of functioning, the togetherness is essential to the functioning of the company, yet people can bring an individual stance toward a decision.
Togetherness is important component of success in the workplace—figuring out how to come together and make decisions together. And if you can bring to that togetherness a clear sense of self, then the process works both more smoothly and effectively.
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